Straight Through the Next Anomaly, Take a Right at the Future

by elfin



Contains SPOILERS for season 3, episode 3

cap


Through the headset he heard an almighty but somewhat melodic crash, followed by Abby’s voice – “That was such an expensive piano.”

Out in the hall, Nick crouched with his back against the gold-plated railings that surrounded the marble stairwell, rifle pointing towards the ornate ceiling.  “It’s just a piano,” he reassured her, “this is all just stuff.”

In his ear, Lester’s sardonic tone reminded him for at least the hundredth time that afternoon, “It is valuable ‘stuff’, Cutter, with an insurance underwriter just waiting to make a claim against us.  Please try not to break absolutely everything.”

His last words were almost drowned out by another, this time sharper and much, much louder noise.  “Apologies for the 3D TVs.”  Connor’s almost sincere statement came from somewhere several floors below them; a second creature wreaking havoc in London’s most famous department store.

“I hate this multi broadcast system,” Nick muttered, informing his entire team at once by virtue of the microphone half an inch from his lips.

“Why?”  Lester, of course, was a safe distance from the action, but he still had their backs from the safety of the ARC around twenty miles away.

A rough scream like fingernails down chalkboards sent a sliver of cold fear down Nick’s spine.  “Because when I piss myself, everyone’s gonna know about it.”

“Only if you hold the headset next to your-“

Abby’s shout interrupted the comment, “It got passed me, Professor!”  He could hear her running, taking breaths in deep gulps.  “It’s heading towards you!”

If there was a response from Lester, he didn’t hear it.  He turned, squatting with both feet flat on the floor like Stephen had shown him, raising the rifle, pin-pointing a likely exit point from Musical Instruments and Sheet Music, finger resting on the trigger.  He’d have one, maybe two chances if he was lucky before the Cretaceous dinosaur either ripped his head off or vanished again into the expensive furnishings department opposite.  He took a couple of deep breaths.  He could hear it, huge back feet destroying every guitar, violin and by the sounds of it, drum kit, in their way.  It was coming closer.

As it lunged into sight, Nick squeezed off the first shot but it was faster than he’d expected and the shell missed its mark by several feet.  It did, however, get the creature’s attention and instead of heading directly across into Bronze Bedposts and Bathtubs it turned and leapt an impressive three feet up onto the railing, across the stairwell from Nick’s head.  Its balance, for something so ridiculously out of proportion, was better than he could have managed, and with his heart pounding against his ribcage he tried to stop his hands from shaking as he lined up the second – last chance – shot.

Something distracted him; out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a figure standing in the shadow of the elevators.  Then he heard Abby yelling, in both ears, over the headset and from the open doorway where the Carnotaurus had emerged.  It was coming for him; leaping rail to rail, landing hard a foot from him and lashing out with the only real weapon it had while its feet were clawed around the cylindrical bar.  Its head felt like a rock impacting with his skull.  He lost his grip on the rifle and it skidded away from him as he toppled over, raising his arms instinctively in defence, letting out a low shout as razor-sharp teeth tore through the denim of his jacket, the cotton of his shirt and the skin of his arm.  He scrambled backwards, trying to get away but a clawed foot landed hard on his thigh and this time he screamed, rough and pained, before belatedly realising that the creature was actually falling.  It hit the floor with a thud, head striking the wall behind them, and that along with the dart in its neck knocked it out cold.

Nick closed his eyes, pulling in oxygen, willing his heart to slow before it hammered its way free of his chest.  When he looked up he saw Abby staring down at him, tranquiliser gun pointing at the ceiling, thunderous anger on her face.  “It could have killed you!”

“I’m well aware.”  He heard the tremors in his own voice and reached up to rip the headset off, stopping just before he did so.  “Thanks,” he told her, before demanding an update from Connor.

“It’s gone into the food hall,” he sounded slightly uncertain, “and I don’t think it’s coming out.  Becker’s taking a shot by the German sausage counter.”  There really wasn’t anything Nick could say to that.


Miles away from the action, Lester made it to Harrods soon enough when it was all over.  Two sleeping creatures returned to whence they came, public panic once again avoided.  Unfortunately there was already an estimate for damages being bandied about somewhere in the region of a million pounds. 

Nick sat in the back of an ambulance, a young and bemused paramedic was cleaning up the injuries to his arm as he tried not to yelp and flinch like a baby.  It really did hurt now that the adrenaline was seeping out of his bloodstream and Abby and Lester attacking him on both sides wasn’t helping matters.  Lester wanted to know how two creatures and a team of rank amateurs backed up by crack professionals armed to the teeth could cause so much destruction.  Nick decided the answer was in the question and didn’t bother responding.  Abby wanted to know what had gone wrong, why he hadn’t taken the second shot when he’d been staring the creature in the face.  And after she’d repeated the question three times, Lester wanted to know too.

“I saw... something,” was all he could tell them.  He’d been distracted by the figure standing against the elevator doors.  No one else on his team had been up on their floor except for he and Abby and now he came to think back on it, he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. 

“What kind of something?”  He didn’t have to look up at Lester’s face to see the scowl he could hear in the man’s voice.

“I don’t know.”

“Something distracted you from the big dinosaur about to take a bite out of your head?”

For once, Nick couldn’t think of a witty comeback.  “Yes,” was all that came to mind.

“Care to tell me what you saw that would distract you from something like that?”

“I said... I don’t know.  Some... thing.  Some... one.”

“Someone?  Who?”

Stephen.  The name popped into his mind; his brain supplying either a possible answer to a puzzle or a solid fact having reviewed the footage, he wasn’t sure which, but he wasn’t about to tell Lester he was seeing dead people.  “I don’t know.  Probably no one.”

“If we have potential witnesses in the building....”

Nick shrugged.  There wasn’t any way of categorically saying there hadn’t been anyone without admitting he was hallucinating.  Besides, the idea of Lester spending the next four hours searching Harrods for a non-existent bystander amused him.  He caught the roll of Lester’s eyes and looked pointedly at his still bleeding arm.   “Have we finished?  Do you think this nice ambulance could take me to hospital now?  This fucking hurts.”

~

He woke with a start and opened his eyes to the swell of the morning into the open white space of his apartment.

He lay still for a few minutes, tangled in the wreckage of the duvet, until his arm throbbing under the white sterile dressing forced him to turn onto his side and grab the small bottle of prescription painkillers from the floor next to the bed.  He flipped the top off, palmed three and swallowed them with a gulp of lukewarm water.  Then he flopped onto his back again, wriggling the fingers of his injured arm experimentally and staring at the white ceiling.  He’d left the house behind, sold up after Stephen’s death.  He’d moved into the top floor apartment of this converted textile mill and hadn’t bothered to decorate over the plain, bright white wash that the developer had covered the walls and ceiling in.  The floor was wall to wall laminated pine slats and he hadn’t bothered putting a single rug down let alone any carpet.  Hadn’t bothered with much furniture at all; a big bed (low so he wouldn’t fall out of it on those nights when he managed to drink an entire bottle of Glenlivet and make it to the mattress before he lost consciousness) and white leather suite that he’d ordered from the DFS website, made up of two armchairs he’d never sat in and a sofa already bearing the marks of abuse. 

For two months after Stephen’s death he saw his dead friend’s face through the porthole in the closed, locked door every time he shut his eyes.  Whenever he wasn’t busy, whenever he let his mind wonder, he saw Stephen backing away from him, the monsters closing in to tear him to pieces.  So he kept busy, chasing creatures back through anomalies, checking data when there was nothing to chase, working early to late, getting home in the wee hours to drink himself into oblivion.  This wasn’t him, wasn’t who he used to be.  He used to be a nice guy, cheerful, life-loving, hardly ever touched alcohol except for a dram after a good meal with friends.  With Stephen - his lab assistant, his friend, a guy he’d watched get eaten alive.  That did strange things to a man, watching his best friend tear and bleed, unable to do a thing but listen to the screaming as talons and teeth tore flesh from bone, watching the light finally go out, a life ended in horrific violence and unimaginable pain.

He had nightmares he couldn’t describe to anyone that he awoke from sweating with a silent scream on his lips.  He hadn’t slept a full night since that day in the hell of Helen’s making and if he ever saw her again, if their paths ever crossed while he happened to be armed, he was going to shoot her because this was the second time she’d taken Stephen from him and this time there wouldn’t be a chance for apologies and atonement.
   
Yesterday a dinosaur from the Cretaceous period had almost killed him because he’d imagined Stephen standing in front of gold plated elevator doors on the fifth floor of Harrods department store.  If Lester knew that, he’d fire him or at least have him stuck behind a desk before he could voice a protest.  Still the fact remained that his behaviour and state of mind were endangering him and possibly his team.  He needed to pull himself together; he didn’t need an annoying bureaucrat to tell him that, he wasn’t too far gone to see it.

Stephen was dead, nothing was going to bring him back and nothing was ever going to make him forget what he saw.  He needed to push it all into the past and move on.  He just had no idea how.  Abby and Jenny had both suggested therapy but what the hell was there to say?  How could he explain what he was going through to someone who would have him committed the moment the words ‘creatures from the future’ left his mouth?  There was no one he could talk to and he didn’t want to share his nightmares with anyone else. 

The sun wasn’t giving in.  It was too bright.  And to top it off his phone started ringing.  Connor had set it to play ‘Monster Mash’ whenever Lester called and however juvenile that was it always brought the ghost of a smile to his lips.  The problem was he didn’t know where he’d left it (dropped it? hidden it?) the previous night.  Eventually it stopped ringing and half a minute later beeped to tell him Lester had left an answer phone message.  Probably asking him where he was.  He hadn’t got a clue what time it was but judging by the sun streaming mercilessly in through the floor to ceiling glass, it was early.


A shower, a shave and a freshly ground double espresso later, he at least looked human even if he didn’t feel it.

~

“SHIT!  ABBY!  It’s behind you!”  It was beautiful – Cutter couldn’t help but look at it in awe.  It was also twelve feet tall, had teeth like flick knives and was looming directly behind Abby’s head.  “DUCK!”  He lifted the rifle and fired twice in rapid succession.  He hit it.  He definitely hit it.  But it turned and fled rather than dropping to the ground which was what he’d expected and hoped.  Abby was at his side in a heartbeat, gulping air, bent double, breathlessly thanking him.

He grinned at her.  “I think I owed you.  Okay?”  She nodded, and they set off after the Tyrannosaurus Rex together, out into the park and into the sunshine.

“Nick.”  He heard it as he ran from the hole in the side of the dark building; the whisper of his name.  He slid to a stop and turned, blinking in the bright light. 

“Stephen.”  One second he was there, standing leaning against the edge of the hole in the brickwork, where the T-Rex had burst from the newly built office block.  The next, he was gone.  “Stephen!”  He looked around, searching for his old – dead – friend who was nowhere to be seen. 

Abby was frantically calling his name; hopefully far enough away she hadn’t heard his call for their fallen comrade.  “Professor!”  He ran to catch up with her, rifle ready to pump another two rounds into the Jurassic beastie before it crossed the park and got into the city.


Lester stared at the giant and finally unconscious creature.  “It’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex,” Lester pointed out needlessly, apparently shocked by the appearance of arguably the most famous dinosaur that ever roamed the earth.

Connor looked as if all his Christmases had come at once, photographing the animal from every angle before they sent it back, wounded but unconscious because Abby had hit it with enough tranquiliser to take down a herd of buffalo.  “It was bound to appear eventually.”

“Was it?  No one warned me.”  But Lester was mostly talking to himself.  “I always imagined they were... well, imaginary, if you know what I mean, all CGI teeth and claws.  I never imagined I’d actually see one....”

Nick half-listened to the conversation, if that’s what it could be called.  He was looking back at the soon-to-be-condemned-after-only-three-weeks building, at the wall against which he swore he’d seen Stephen leaning.  It was insane; even his sleep-deprived brain realised that standing idly by while a T-Rex was on the rampage wasn’t like Stephen at all.  He would have been right in the dinosaur’s path with a rifle – the one Nick carried - aimed up its snout.  The image brought a smile to Nick’s face even as it threatened to bring tears to his eyes.  He was tired, yes, but he wasn’t beyond admitting that he missed Stephen every single day.  His death had left a hole in Nick’s life so big it felt impossible to ever fill it.  They’d been friends for years and despite everything that had happened Nick had liked and respected, maybe even loved him.  Or maybe this was all because he’d watched him die... he stopped that thought before the movie started over in his head.  He saw enough blood when he tried to sleep, he didn’t need it when he was awake too.

“Professor?”  He turned to Abby and wondered for a moment how she’d taken Stephen’s death; she’d never said.  He’d never asked.  “We’re ready to send it back.” 

~

The team went back to the ARC once the T-Rex was safely returned to its own time, the anomaly closed – Nick hoped – for good.  They were chatting about nothing as they burst into the locker room, Abby grabbing her change of clothes before hitting the showers, Connor giving her a two minute head start before winking at Nick and going after her.  It left Nick alone and as he pulled on a clean white shirt he caught himself staring at the door of Stephen’s locker.  Hesitating, he eventually reached out and turned the key hanging in the lock, letting the door fall open.  No one had cleared it out.  Jeans and a black T-shirt were balled up at the back, a pair of red and white Converse All Stars and a can of deodorant at the front.  There was something poking out from beneath the shoes and Nick eased free two photographs, crumpled and worn, but still recognisable.  One was of Helen, the other of Stephen and Nick, taken years ago, back at the university.  Even in this reality they had met at the Central Metropolitan.  He put the one of Helen back where he’d found it, keeping the one of the two of them, taking it with him to his office and standing it up against the base of his desk lamp.  He didn’t dwell on why Stephen had kept it, or on what it meant that he had it in the first place – Nick didn’t recall a photo ever having been taken of the two of them.  To wonder would only lead to madness.  There would never be an answer.  He stared at the laughing face that stared back at him from the photograph and felt a sudden torrent of grief so overwhelming that it stole the breath from his throat. 

He hadn’t cried.  Not that afternoon, not at the wake, not at the funeral, not afterwards.  Sharper memories brought tears to his eyes but not once had he sat and just cried – for Stephen, for himself, for his young team.  All that suppressed emotion threatened to wash him away right there and then as he sat in his office, security camera just waiting to capture the very moment he broke apart.

“Nick?”  His head snapped up, eyes torn from the snapshot that might not have even been from his life, as Jenny sauntered into his office and leaned on his desk, meeting his eyes.  “You should have gone home,” she told him, “you look like you haven’t slept in a month.”  Longer, he thought, but he kept it to himself.  He shrugged.  “Nick…” and he knew she was about to say something he didn’t want to hear.  “It wasn’t your fault.”

He honestly didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.  “What wasn’t?”

“Stephen’s death.”

His eyes widened and he stared at her.  Is that what everyone thought, that he was blaming himself?  “It was Helen’s fault,” he said it like he hoped it would be the last time anyone said anything that stupid again.  “I just... I should have prevented it.”

“How?”

“I should have been the one to die.”   He pointed that out vehemently.  It had been his right, his choice.  He was angry with Stephen for taking that away from him, that choice to sacrifice himself for a woman he hated and a man he….  “Stephen stopped me.”  The fight went out of him as quickly as it had come.  “I should have stopped him.”  He never could stay angry at Stephen for long.  Even after Helen.  “He was my friend, an old friend, the oldest I had.”  He could feel all that grief too close to the surface now and stopped talking, not wanting her to see it.

He wished she would just leave, but instead she stretched her arms out and pushed back, palms still flat on his desk.  “Do you want to get something to eat?”

Every brain cell, every nerve ending, every molecule in his body said no.  But somehow the word ‘yes’ actually left his mouth.


She took him to a little Italian place half a mile from the ARC.  It was a family-run affair, small and cosy and romantic.  It was the kind of place he and Stephen used to seek out after a late night at the university or a long day in the field and it hadn’t crossed his mind before that those places were romantic: they’d just been quiet, intimate, but not in that way… they were places they could have a private conversation, places that did good food and cold beer and - more often than not - a decent whisky.  This little place was all dark wood and red chequered tablecloths and candles in wax-laden Chianti bottles, with plastic vines woven around the low, dark ceiling beams.  They got a table half way back, next to the wall and the waiter smiled at them when he brought their menus.  Jenny suggested a bottle of wine and a cab, but Nick ordered a beer.   They talked about nothing of any weight or relevance, Nick growing more unwilling by the minute to open up to her.

Just after their food arrived Jenny took a phone call from Lester.  They were the only ones left in the restaurant and she took it at the table, glancing apologetically at Nick who wasn’t hungry anyway.  He excused himself and stepped outside into the cool night to fish a half-empty packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, pop one between his lips and light it with the disposable lighter he’d purchased along with them.  It was the first packet he’d bought in twenty years; he’d bought it two days after Stephen’s death and he could remember exactly when he’d smoked each one of the eight missing from the pack of twenty: one that same afternoon, one before leaving the house for Stephen’s funeral, one when he’d got home, one the night after they’d been through their first anomaly without him, two the day an American Lion had taken a bite out of a teenager at a private school in Oxfordshire (“Stephen wouldn’t have missed...”), one after waking from his first red-tinged nightmare, one after he’d boxed up Stephen’s apartment at the request of the Landlord.  He’d found one of Helen’s shirts under the bed, he’d wanted to smoke the entire packet.

He dropped the glowing butt of the cigarette to the pavement and stamped the heel of his boot on it, glancing out, up the road before he turned back to what should have been welcoming light from the restaurant windows.  He stopped with his hand in mid-air, reaching for the ornate door handle, eyes caught on a reflection in the glass.  Stephen – watching him with a slight smile on his face, standing there in the road behind him.  Nick knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the moment he turned the reflection would vanish and with it that tiny hope each hallucination brought.  So he stood, staring at the image he knew was in his head, with tears once again stinging his eyes and his throat closing.

“Stephen.”  He said it out loud, blinking once, twice.  The mirror image remained.  Very slowly, he turned his head.  There was no one behind him, no one in the road for as far as he could see.  He was alone out there.

Swallowing, letting out the breath he’d been holding, Nick pulled open the door, the warmth seeping passed him as he stepped into the sweet-smelling restaurant.  Jenny sniffed the air as he sat back down, looking at him quizzically, disapprovingly.  He ignored it and asked the question that had been on his mind for months now: “Why did you ask me to go for a drink with you after Stephen’s funeral?”

The disapproval vanished from her face and she smiled a little sadly.  “I thought it was what you needed.  I still think it’s what you need, Nick, but you won’t let me close.  You won’t let anyone.”

He sat back in the wooden chair, put his hands on the table either side of his pizza and didn’t look at her.  “What makes everyone think I can just forget?”

“We’re not asking you to forget.  We’re asking you to talk to us.”

He looked up.  “And say what?  That I remember?  That I remember every time someone mentions his name, every time I close my eyes, every time I try to sleep.  That I can’t ever forget what I saw.”  Stephen staring at him through the glass, holding eye contact, silent as Nick ranted and pleaded, banged his fists against the door until the bones bruised.  Then the blood came, everything turned red and he couldn’t watch, couldn’t stay with him any longer....  He took a deep breath and reached for his beer.  “I can’t talk about it.  This isn’t some... post traumatic stress syndrome, I saw my best friend get eaten alive.”  He felt a bubble of hysteria touch the base of his throat.  “A drink and a... a meal out isn’t going to change that.  Nothing will ever change that.”

“I’m sorry.”  And he knew she meant it.  “We’re all hurting.”

Nick looked at her.  “He was my friend long before you ever met him.”  He realised how much of a child it made him sound.  “I can’t care about everyone else.  I mean... I love Abby and Connor but I know they’re taking care of each other.”

“Who takes care of you?”

He shook his head, swigged the last of his beer and reached into his jacket for his wallet, pulling out two twenties and placing them on the table.  “I’m sorry, I have to go.”


Jenny would finish her food, get a taxi, she could look after herself.  He put the ARC to his back and walked along the well-lit, deserted road.  He couldn’t go on like this, trying to pretend everything was fine, he knew he couldn’t.  But he didn’t know how to stop and now he was seeing Stephen everywhere.  As he walked he let out a sharp, slightly insane laugh, pulled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket and lit the tenth.  The smoke filled his lungs, eased the tension across his chest and in his throat as he pressed his fingers into his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose.  He lifted his head and stopped dead in his tracks.

There was a figure in the distance, further up the road under a dead streetlight, thrown into criss-crossing shadows from the lamps on either side.  It was just standing, leaning with a right shoulder against the lamppost, hands crossed in front of it, watching Nick’s halted approach.  He dropped the lit cigarette, crushed it underfoot, and the idea that he didn’t want a ghost see his filthy habit did at least strike him as completely, utterly mad.  But as he was obviously losing his mind it didn’t seem to matter all that much.  He didn’t move.  It was Stephen, standing there; getting closer meant he would disappear and just for that moment he wanted him to stay, even if it was only in his head, because as frightening as it was, seeing him was becoming strangely comforting.  Nick blinked, and for a second his brain painted a sheen of red over what he was seeing.  He blinked again and it was gone but the figure of his dead friend remained.  “Stephen.”  His voice broke on the single word and his chest tightened again, grief clawing at his throat.  He’d once thought that nothing could ever be as painful as losing Helen, as not knowing what had happened to her, whether she was alive or dead.  He’d been wrong.  Watching Stephen die had been a million times worse because there was no hope, because he’d seen the blood and Stephen was never, never coming back to him while Helen was a constant and unwelcome visitor into his life.

He took a hesitant step forward, then another, watching the figure standing still as if waiting for him.  It hurt, every step tore at his sanity, but he kept going, just wanting, just once, to close the distance between them, to reach out because he hadn’t been able to through a thick metal door and the glass porthole that framed his nightmares.  Three streetlights separated them, he could see Stephen’s face, his smile, almost see his eyes.  A car turned out of a side street, white headlights cutting through the sodium yellow.  Nick glanced at it, just for a moment, but too late he knew it was a moment too long, and when he looked back the figure in the shadows was gone.  “No!”  He felt his face contort with a wave of despair, tears made his eyes wet and he kicked out viciously, pointlessly at the base of the nearest lamppost.  The pain shot up through his foot and his leg, exploding at the base of his spine and he knew immediately that he’d broken his toe.  More tears dropped to his face and he swiped at them with the back of his hand, waiting until the dancing lights had cleared from his vision before he started up the side street, limping to the end, bringing him out onto the main road.

There was a taxi rank a quarter of a mile away and he hobbled all the way, progress slow, lighting his eleventh cigarette as he went.  By the time he dropped into the back of a cab, his face was dry and his whole body was throbbing in pain.


There was no point in going to casualty.  By the time he eventually got seen, which would probably be sometime in the wee small hours of the morning, all they would do was what he’d already done: taped his little toe to the one next to it and give him some painkillers which he already had and swallowed with a tumbler of whiskey.  He stripped off his clothes and crawled naked into bed, briefly wondering if the alcohol and drugs combination had been a good idea.  Half-hoping not.

~

Unfortunately, he woke up too few hours later.


“A dinosaur tread on your foot, Professor?”  Nick smiled grimly.  His whole foot ached despite the addition of two more pills in the small hours and another two after his alarm had roused him.  He’d called a taxi to take him in when he’d remembered that his truck was still in the ARC’s underground car park and by the time he’d made it into his office he was glad he hadn’t tried to drive.

The photo of he and Stephen that he’d put against his lamp the previous evening was still there, Stephen’s happy face smiling back at him.  He didn’t feel like returning the smile right then, not with his foot feeling like a whole pack of Gorgonopsids had stepped on it and with Connor leaning against his doorframe, half in the room, half out of it like he wasn’t sure of his welcome any longer.

“Something I can do for you, Connor?”

“The detector picked up a new anomaly last night, but it was only open for thirty two seconds then it closed again.”

“Is it still closed?”  He nodded enthusiastically, or maybe it was just relief.  Still, there was a reason he was standing in Cutter’s doorway.... “But Lester wants the area checked out anyway?”

He nodded again, looking achingly apologetic even though it wasn’t his fault and Nick bit back his initial response; no point in taking a lack of sleep and the issue of him losing his mind out on his team any more than he had been doing.  The painkillers were finally kicking in anyway, might as well take a field trip than sit in his office wallowing in self-pity.  “We should take a soldier with us, just in case.”

Connor nodded.  “I’ll find one and meet you in the garage.”

“Great.  And tell him he’s driving!”


Guns stowed in the back of the truck, the soldier looked confused when they told him he was designated the driver.  Climbing into the passenger seat, Nick pointed at his foot – “Dinosaur broke my toe.” 

The engine was rumbling before he asked them where they were going.  Connor leaned forward between the front seats to type the postcode into the sat nav then dropped back, grinning proudly at a job well done. 

They were half way to the docks by the time staring out of the window and pretending they weren’t off on another dinosaur hunt got old.  Nick turned into the car, making a huge effort to ask, “What do I call you?”

The soldier glanced at him, as surprised as Connor probably was.  “You mean, when ‘hey, you’ isn’t specific enough?”  There was humour underlying the accusation and Nick nodded.

“Yeah, on those occasions.”

“Rob’ll do, on those occasions.”

“Rob, it’s nice to meet you.  Shame about the circumstances.”

“I doubt we’d meet under any other circumstances, Professor.”  He took the next left turn on the command of the sat nav’s female voice and Nick wondered if it these were the only times men willingly accepted directions from a woman.  He thought about asking but it sounded too frivolous even in his own head.

Instead, he asked, “You don’t find it all slightly bizarre?”

‘Rob’ snorted.  “Chasing dinosaurs?  Hunting creatures from the future?”  He shook his head with an exaggerated movement.  “Not at all.  All in a day’s work for any soldier.”  He glanced at Nick with a wry smile on his face and Nick actually smiled back.  “All in a day’s work for a Professor?”

“Touché.”


The warehouse looked abandoned.  And quiet.  “The detector showed the anomaly appeared in the centre of the building,” Connor explained, leading their little band to the narrow entrance to the left of the large, rusted roller.  Worryingly, the door swung open when Connor pushed on it.  They looked at one another as Rob thumbed the safety off his gun.  The action brought a vivid memory to the fore – Stephen, a pterodactyl, a golf course....

“Think something got out?”

Connor waited for Nick, Nick looked at Connor.  “There haven’t been any reports,” Connor confirmed, without much confidence.  “Let’s assume it’s still inside.”  Still he looked to Nick for confirmation, for approval, and Nick nodded.  The warehouse was easy to search, the entire East London area definitely wasn’t.

Rob took the lead, Nick following with Stephen’s rifle, Connor bringing up the rear with the tranquiliser gun.  Dirty glass let some of the morning sunshine in from around the top of the open, empty space.  Apart from a knocked-over chair and a large wooden crate with its lid missing, there was nothing in the place.  Metal stairs went up to a high gantry that ran around the inside perimeter of the building and with a glance back, Rob started up them, keeping his footsteps quiet.  Nick and Connor followed but all he could think was that there was nowhere to hide.  There was nothing in here, there couldn’t be.  The gantry afforded them a full view of the floor below – the crate was definitely empty, the chair could have been lying on its side for months, even years.  There were no prints in the dust and dirt on the floor to suggest anyone had been here since the owners had left.

They walked along the gantry to the first corner before Nick stopped, looking out again over the ground floor.  Several feet away, Rob was doing the same.  “There’s nothing here,” he called back and Nick couldn’t help but agree with him.  “Do you think it got out?”

“If there was ever anything here in the first place.  There’s no evidence of it.”  He lowered the rifle, re-engaging the safety.  Stephen had taught him how to use one, starting almost accidentally on a fairground rifle range, then at a public gun range.  After Stephen’s death, he’d found his rifle.  In a way it was all he had left. 

“What’s that?”  He glanced at Connor.  Now that they’d stopped moving he could hear something.  “Can you hear that?”  There was a tapping, like stones on glass. 

Slowly, Nick looked up.  “Oh, God....”  There was a creature, looking like a cross between a raptor and a pteradon, hanging by its front claws from the mesh covering one of the dirty windows, pecking – tapping – against the glass with a beak that even with the distance between them Nick could see was full of very sharp teeth.  “Oh, shit.”  He moved slowly, raising the rifle, deliberately taking off the safety, hearing Rob do the same, the two sounds so loud in the sudden silence of the warehouse – sudden, like all the noise had been sucked out.  The tapping had stopped and two dark, beady eyes were watching them.

Nick got the creature in the cross-hairs of the rifle’s sight, finger settling on the trigger.  He took a deep breath and slowly let it out, finger tightening.  The creature moved one pounding heartbeat before the shell pierced the glass in the window the thing had been trying to break.  It leapt, with incredible speed, from the mesh to the rail of the gantry.  Rob got off a second shot but it was too late, the thing was on him, claws first, teeth sinking into his shoulder and throat, blood exploding from the wound as the soldier screamed and his rifle clattered the metal floor.

Nick’s vision filled with red and blanked, and in his mind’s eye he saw Stephen, one of the future creatures with its teeth in his throat as a sabre tooth clamped viciously onto his arm and a raptor tore flesh from his leg.  Nick yelled his name, and this time there was no door between them.  He aimed and fired, murder his only thought in that second before his sight came back and he saw the grotesque tumble to the gantry; Rob fighting the wounded creature that was still clinging to him with its teeth and claws.  Nick fired again, putting a shot directly into the thing’s head and this time it let go so that Rob was able to throw it off himself.  It landed with a sickening thud a couple of feet from Nick’s shoes and he fired another shell into its face, just to be fucking sure it was dead. 

All he could hear was his own heart pounding.  But he could see Rob, lying on the gantry floor, clutching both hands to the wounds in his shoulder and neck, blood dripping through his fingers, eyes wide, begging, pleading.  Nick knew there was nothing he could do.  Glancing behind him he saw Connor already calling for medical help but it was too late.  He walked to the soldier slowly, placing the rifle carefully on the metal slatted floor and crouching down, covering Rob’s hands with his own.  There was too much blood, no way to stop it, the creature had hit an artery and Rob was going to die.  The same way Ryan had died.

He shook his head, murmuring, “I’m sorry,” as Rob pressed his sticky, slippery fingers between Nick’s own.  Nick held on, watched until Rob’s eyes finally closed, until his heart finally stopped.  Then he kept on watching, hands covered in blood and held by a dead man, he just stayed crouched there, with Stephen’s death playing over and over in his head.  He’d been helpless then too, unable to do anything to stop it once that door had closed.  It was the closing of the door he might have been able to prevent, and never had that been so clear in his mind as it was then.

~

His foot hurt like hell by the time he was dropped off at home but at least it was distracting him from the pounding headache and the almost overwhelming need just to come apart at the seams. 

He’d thrown his keys into a side pocket of the rucksack into which he’d bunched his bloodstained clothes when he’d eventually made it back to the ARC.  He, Connor and Rob had set out around ten that morning, now it was over fourteen hours later, gone midnight, the day after Sergeant Robert Oliver lost his life to a creature they hadn’t even been able to identify yet.  Nick remembered the day after Stephen died, how he’d spent it in some sort of comatose state, wondering aimlessly around first his home then the ARC in a total daze, unwilling or just unable to talk to anyone, never sitting still for long because it would let the memories in.

The street light in front of the entrance door to the renovated mill was out so he had to root around in the pack until his fingers touched cool metal and he yanked out his keys.  In the red brick entrance hall he just let the door swing slowly closed behind him without looking back and instead of dragging himself up the open staircase to the fifth floor as he usually would, he made a speedier climb in the large, wide elevator.  Stepping out into the open plan corridor, he sorted through his keys until he found the one for the front door and slid it into the lock.  Movement at the end of the corridor caught his eye and he turned his head slowly to watch a figure detach itself from the wall and start towards him.  He held his ground, and the ghost of Stephen Hart stopped two feet in front of him.  He was tired, too tired to argue with his own consciousness, so he pushed open the door to his apartment and the apparition followed him inside.

Dropping his rucksack and coat to the floor, he headed for the bathroom, swallowing four painkillers with a glass of water before taking a bottle of whisky from the kitchen cupboard and picking up two glasses from the draining board.  His hallucination appeared next to him on the sofa.  It seemed only polite to offer a drink but as he expected, it shook its head and watched him pour a generous measure, drown it in one gulp and pour a refill. 

“I watched a man get killed by a creature today,” he told the empty apartment, not looking at the silent ghost of his best friend sitting next to him.  “I can’t do this anymore.  There’s too much pain, too much death.  We can’t win.  We can’t control it.  We’re barely keeping up with it.”  He swirled the amber whisky around the glass, watching the sine wave of it against the edges before taking a swig.  “We’re going to lose everyone and I can’t....”  He shook his head, aware he was talking to himself and an illusion created by grief.  He just couldn’t bring himself to care any longer that he was going clinically insane.  “I keep seeing you, Stephen, not just when I close my eyes, not just dying but alive, in the dark and at anomaly sites.  Sitting... there, for God’s sake.  I know I’m losing it but maybe a padded cell isn’t a bad place to wait out the end of the world.”  He swallowed the second glass and poured a third, feeling the pills kicking in and the alcohol settling in his churning, empty stomach.  He wished his emotions didn’t feel quite so raw.  “I lost you.  I lost you in the most horrific way and I keep seeing it, over and over again.”  His voice cracked and broke.  “I don’t want to see it again.”  It was a plea, even though there was no one to hear him.  Drugs and drink and a hell of a day finally shattered the defences he’d thrown up and his tears started to fall.  He looked away from the hallucination, tried to swallow his grief, tried to stop the overload.

Then he felt a touch, a hand on his shoulder, and he couldn’t do anything but turn into the comfort as Stephen’s ghost wrapped his arms around Nick’s shoulders and held him while he cried.

~

His foot hurt.  And when he tried to lift his head someone thrust an axe into his brain and tried to break his neck.  He relaxed, stilled; worried that moving might actually induce vomiting.  He could see the bright sunshine from behind his glued eyelids and wished he’d got around to buying some blinds.  Slowly, Nick let the splintered memories of the previous night filter back bit by painful bit into his brain.  He didn’t remember much after sobbing his heart out in the imaginary arms of his dead best friend, but apparently he’d fallen asleep on the sofa, his mind finally letting go of its hallucination and everything else because for the first time in a long time, he didn’t remember dreaming.

He took a deep breath and gingerly tried again to sit up.  He needed a piss, he needed to spit the dead budgie out of his mouth and he needed water.  His stomach threatened a revolt but as he hadn’t eaten at all yesterday there was only acid and whisky to throw up and he concentrated very hard on not doing that.  He rubbed his eyes with his thumbs to un-stick them and forced them open.  Opposite him, his hallucination was uncurling itself from the white leather armchair, mouth opening, saying his name; “Nick?”

He groaned, putting his hands over his face and pressing his palms into his eyes, counting to ten, suddenly feeling dizzy and very ill.  When he reached seven he heard leather crack and rubber on wood and a hand touched his knee.  “Nick.” 

“God....”  He lowered his hands.  “Oh, God....”  Stephen was crouched in front of him, dressed in a black top and black jeans, just like last night; looking as exhausted as Nick felt but looking real.  Hesitantly, he reached out and poked the hand on his knee, reached up and put his hand on a solid, warm shoulder. 

Stephen smiled.  “It’s okay, Nick.  It’s me.”

“No,” he shook his head, “it can’t be....”

“It is.”  A warm hand moved up to cover Nick’s.

“I saw you die.”  Something akin to hysteria touched the hurting edges of his brain.  “You can’t deny me that.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.”  Nick watched with naked suspicion as Stephen rose up on his knees, let go of his hand and moved up to rub his arms gently.  “I’m so sorry.”  The touch felt so real, so alive.  Those oh-so-familiar bright blue eyes were shining with unshed tears and he felt a little like crying again himself.  “But it is me.  I had to see you.  She told me you were fine and I knew she was lying but I... I didn’t know you were tearing yourself apart over me.”

“She?”  It gave him something to concentrate on, but of all the emotions to choose, Nick felt a crazy jealousy squeeze like a fist around his heart.  “Helen.”  Not a question.  He took a deep breath as Stephen sat back on his folded legs and nodded.

“Helen.”

“You’re still lying in the ground....”

“Yes.  But you have to think of me as a second chance.”

“No....”  He wanted nothing more than to shrink away from this, this travesty of hope.  “You’re a fucking clone.”  The clinically insane Mr and Mrs Cutter; Helen was just as far gone as he was. 

“No,” Stephen was shaking his head, emphatically denying it, “no.  I’m real.”

“You’re not Stephen.”

“I am.  I swear, Nick.”

“You’re fucking programmed!”  Anger, grief, he didn’t know what else poured into him.  A glimmer of impossible hope had been so quickly dangled in front of him then torn away.  He didn’t know how to deal with it; his head was pounding and he’d never felt so sick in his whole life.

“No!”  Stephen was suddenly back up on his knees, inches from Nick’s face, hands on his shoulders so that for a second he thought Stephen was going to kiss him and it blew away every other thought and feeling.  “I’m real.  I was Helen’s grad student, I was your lab assistant.”  He gripped Nick’s arms.  “I know Claudia Brown.”

Nick could almost feel the blood draining from the non-essential parts of his body.  In that split second after the words sank in he didn’t know whether to punch Stephen or hug him.  What he did do was to use him as leverage to get off the sofa and propel himself towards the bathroom, stumbling but making it just in time for his brain to crash against the inside of his skull and his stomach to try purging its meagre contents out up through his throat.  He retched and spat, until he was able to turn to the sink and with shaking hands fill a glass and swallow the water quickly.  Then he sank to his knees against the door of the shower, reaching out to flush the toilet when Stephen’s shape moved into the doorway.

“I’ll put some coffee on,” he murmured.  It was such a ridiculously normal thing to say, Nick couldn’t help but laugh.  If he’d thought yesterday that he was losing his marbles, this morning had removed any doubt. 

But he moved his head.  “God, no.  I need pills and a shower.”

“You can’t take painkillers on an empty stomach.”  And, oh God, if that didn’t sound like Stephen – his fucking Stephen – from back when his life was made up of classes and papers, idiot undergrads and doting graduates.  “Take a shower, I’ll make you some plain toast.” 

It was so normal, so stupidly domestic, he just couldn’t help but say, “Okay,” with just a minor note of hysteria and used the edge of the toilet bowl to push himself carefully to his feet. 

He turned the dial up until the water was just the safe side of scorching and let it rain down on him like burning needle points.  Every couple of minutes he slid open the door and leaned out to listen, soaking the bathroom floor, for evidence that his hallucination made flesh was still actually moving around in his apartment.  Making toast, grinding coffee.  It was crazy, but what the hell did crazy mean in the context of his life over the last eleven years? 


Grabbing clean clothes, Nick buttoned up a light blue shirt over an old, worn pair of jeans and padded barefoot over to where Stephen was being domestic in the open plan kitchen, rubbing his hair dry as he went, stopping to chuck the damp towel into the bath.  “Finding your way around?”  When Stephen turned, Nick thought he caught something in his expression, a flash of something unfamiliar in his eyes, then it was gone and he was taking the piss out of his hair.

“Was being around Connor making you feel old?”

Nick rolled his eyes.  It was so easy just to fall back into the easy banter.  “Chasing around after my dead wife and creatures from millennia ago is making me feel old.”  His foot was starting to ache more than his head and sitting up on a high stool at the breakfast bar he picked at the makeshift dressing until it came away slightly and he could see the black bruising along the length of his little toe. 

“Dinosaur tread on your foot?”

Nick glanced up, smiling as Stephen unknowingly parroted Connor.  “Actually... I kicked a lamppost.” 

“You kicked a lamppost?”  He approached, crouched down and gently took Nick’s foot into his hand.  “How hard?”

Nick ignored the presumably rhetorical question.  “Stephen... have you been following me?”

He glanced up.  “I saw you outside an Italian place the other night.  I didn’t think you’d seen me and I didn’t think it was the time.  Have you had this x-rayed?”

“If you really are my Stephen, you’d already know the answer to that.”

A smile touched those lips.  “Your Stephen?”

Nick closed his eyes for a moment.  “Sorry.”

“What for?”  He stood.  “You should get it x-rayed.”  He finished making the coffee, putting a mug of black, strong caffeine in front of Nick, dropping two slices of plain, hot toast on a plate and pushed them alongside the mug.  Then he sat down on a stool across from him and asked, “What happened?”

Nick knew he wasn’t talking about his toe.  He shook his head.  “You go first.”

Stephen nodded, wrapped his hands around his own mug and took a deep breath.  “You went through the anomaly with Helen that morning and you never came back.  We waited, all day, all night.  Lester left, obviously; I think he wrote you off as dead after an hour, but I went through that afternoon with some of Ryan’s team and we found the graves.  There was no sign of you, no sign of Helen.  We didn’t know if you were alive or dead.  Claudia kicked up a riot at the Home Office and Lester agreed to leave a round-the-clock watch in place until the anomaly closed three weeks later.  Claudia and I went back every day, long after it closed, but eventually Lester pulled her off onto something else and I haven’t seen her in over a year.

“The university reported you missing.  I couldn’t tell them the truth.  After three months they seconded a professor into your job and he’s still there.  Connor and I worked on a way of using radio waves to pinpoint anomalies – it cost money but Lester came up with the funding after a pack of raptors terrorised a school in Sussex.  He put together a team – took Connor and I on, and Abby, a historian from the British museum and an anthropologist from Oxford.  On top of that we have a military entourage each time we go out to a site.  We spend the majority of our time trying to find patterns, trying to predict the anomalies.  Connor refers to us as Cutter’s Crew.”  Stephen smiled and Nick mirrored it.  “Four days ago Helen just appeared.  She looked as surprised to see me as I was to see her.  She told me you were dead but I didn’t believe her.  I followed her back through the anomaly and found myself... here, in this... universe.  I followed her to this big building –“

“The ARC.”

“ARC...?  Anomaly Resource....”

“Research Centre.  Believe me, it was as much a shock to me as it is to you.”

Stephen lifted his mug and sipped his coffee.  “Helen spotted me.  She finally told me what happened, two years ago, when you and she went back through what you thought was the same anomaly you’d come from.”

“I thought we’d changed the present by missing around in the past.”  Nick looked up.  “You’re telling me Claudia Brown’s still alive?”  Watching Stephen nod, something inside him finally started to thaw.  “Can we go back?”

“Sorry.  The anomaly closed behind me.”

Through instant disappointment he realised something.  “You’re trapped here?”

He nodded.  “Helen told me that the Stephen here... he’s dead?”

Nick sat back slightly; he’d been starting to feel marginally more human before Stephen had asked that.  “Yeah.”  He looked at the face opposite, warm eyes – the same eyes that stared back at him from the photo on his desk – looking back at him now with so much affection.  He didn’t know how he should be feeling.  Relief, definitely, but at the same time that reaction seemed so utterly selfish.

“What happened?” Stephen asked quietly.

He hesitated.  The old anger had long since got old, been replaced by grief but it was where the story started.  “You slept with Helen.”  There was no longer any venom in the words, it was just a fact.

“She told you.”  He nodded.  “She couldn’t help herself, could she?  After eight years she was still a conniving bitch.”

“Still is, after ten years.  But... it’s okay, really.  It’s over, in the past.  Long, long in the past.”  He smiled, made sure this time Stephen believed him.  “After we got here... she kept turning up, turned you – him - against me.  And I didn’t help, of course.  I was jealous; of him, of her....  I pushed him away.”

“How did he die?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Tell me anyway.  Or I’ll ask Connor and he’ll tell me.”

Nick snorted at the idea of Connor blurting out the detail in glorious Technicolor after deliberately not talking about it in front of Nick for three months.  He took a deep breath, not actually sure if he could do this.  “Helen... set up a facility.  She trapped various creatures – dinosaurs and the future predators – and was keeping them in cages in a warehouse.  I think she wanted to feed us to them.  Naturally everything went wrong, the animals got free....”  He left out the heart-stopping terror of being stalked, the fear, the despair.  “We tried to contain them but the door jammed, could only be closed from the inside, so I told Stephen and Helen to get out of there, that I’d do it.”  It was difficult to say, even with Stephen sitting in front of him, remembering still hurt like an open knife wound and he didn’t think he could go on.

“He went in your place.”  Stephen said it quietly for him, didn’t ask. 

Nick spread his fingers out on the granite surface and nodded.  “Punched me... and got the door closed before I could stop him.  I shouted, screamed at him but he just back away and the creatures... they tore him to pieces.”

“You watched.”

Nick looked away for a second, composed himself.  “As long as he kept eye contract.  Then I couldn’t.  Such a fucking coward.”  His voice cracked and broke, and he covered his face with his hand.  A moment later, Stephen’s fingers were wrapped around his own, drawing them away.

“Whatever problems you two had,” he said with utter conviction, “I would bet he still loved you.”  Nick could feel tears blossom just hearing the words.  “Just as much as I do.”

He knew he’d mouthed the word, ‘what’ but he never gave it voice as Stephen pulled his hand to his own mouth and kissed his open palm.  “I thought you were dead and that tore me apart.  I spent hours – days at a time – in our office, going through your papers, your photographs – yours and Helen’s – never throwing anything away, re-reading everything you’d ever written, over and over again, playing tapes you’d dictated just to hear your voice.  I was never in love with Helen.  In awe, and maybe as a student I worshipped her, but not in love.  When I lost you I knew I’d left it too late to come clean about Helen, to admit how I felt about you.  I used to swear to everyone I got drunk with that if I ever found you I’d tell you – that I wouldn’t waste a second chance.  So now I’ve told you, and I’m trapped here so whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly, get it over with because I need to find somewhere to live and I want to ask Lester for my old job back.”

Nick was at least a paragraph behind – still staring at his hand held by Stephen’s calloused fingers, still processing what he’d said about loving him.

Finally he shook his head, as much to clear his cluttered mind as to give the impression he didn’t have a clue what to do.  “Right now the only thing I know for certain is that if the anomaly you came through was still open I’d be back through it with you before you could blink.”

Stephen’s thumb brushed his palm.  “There’s really nothing here for you?”

“No.”

“So you’d go back for Claudia?”

He looked up with a gentle smile.  “Want to hear something strange?  I told Helen I might be love with Claudia, but when she disappeared... I just... got on with it, pretended I knew what was going on because I thought otherwise Lester would eventually have me committed; they all thought I was cracking up anyway.  But after Stephen died... I just kept seeing it over and over; couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe sometimes.  And nothing made it better.  So yes, I would go back with you.  And I’d go for me.”

Stephen finally let go of his hand.  “I’m not leaving, Nick.”

Part of him wanted to jump for joy.  “I’m... I’m really pleased about that.  But I can’t let it take away from what I saw, what I remember.  I’m never going to forget and... I owe it to him not to.  He saved my life, saved a lot of people’s lives.”

“I’m not saying you should.  I’m saying... I’m here, so let me help.  You’ve been torturing yourself.  If he was anything like me, he wouldn’t want that.”

With a soft sigh, Nick reached for a piece of now cold toast and nibbled at the corner.  “You know...” he started slowly, carefully, “I’ve really missed you.  Having you back, having you around, is going to be very... tempting.”  It put a smile on Stephen’s face even though he hadn’t it meant to.  Still, he couldn’t help but mirror it.  “I didn’t mean it in that way.”

“Sure?”

He was going to say ‘sure’ but something stopped him, something in the loneliness, something in the way he’d been living, and his hesitation showed on Stephen’s face.  “He was different.  I wanted to believe he was the same as you but he wasn’t.  Nothing’s the same here, not really.  Except for Connor, I think Connor would be the same anywhere.”  He met Stephen’s gaze.  “But I still... I loved you, so I loved him.  And watching him die changed me....  I’m not the person you knew two years ago.  I’ve been... carrying around his rifle, shooting anything that comes through the anomalies because some part of me blames them all for his death.  I’ve gone from pacifist to brutal killer in the space of three months.”

The expression on Stephen’s face made his heart ache.  “You’re not a killer.  You’re just doing what you need to do.”  Nick watched him finish off his coffee.  “And I’ll admit that the idea of you with a rifle....”

“Stop that!”  But Stephen was being carefully playful, and it was nice just to be playful – the weight was starting to lift from him.  He hadn’t laughed in a long time.

A smiled played over Stephen’s lips.  “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”  He dropped the half-eaten slice of toast and sniffed at the coffee to see how his stomach might react to it.  When he didn’t immediately feel like throwing up again, he drank half of the lukewarm liquid.  Then he put the mug down and looked at his friend, letting his eyes play over the familiar face.  Stephen relaxed into the scrutiny; confident, secure.  Nick had always envied him that.  “Can I... touch you?”

He nodded.  “Yes.”

Rising from his stool, Nick walked around the bar to where he was sitting, where he’d shifted round to face him.  Otherwise he didn’t move as Nick’s hand rested on his shoulder, slipped down his arm to his elbow and back up.  He hesitated but carried on up, cupping his palm around the side of Stephen’s neck, touching bare, smooth skin, fingertips tickled by the short hairs at his nape.  Stephen’s hands came up too, rested at Nick’s hips and he glanced at them as if making sure they were real.  “I’ve never thought about you this way,” he murmured softly, “I don’t know if this is what I want or if this is just... relief, such incredible, indescribable relief.”  He didn’t move, didn’t really know how to or where to go, what to do next.

“Do you want to give it a try?”  Stephen asked so quietly, Nick might not have heard it if he hadn’t seen lips move.

He nodded once.  “Yeah.  Why not?”

Stephen chuckled, and it broke some of the tension.  One hand went from Nick’s right hip to curve around the back of his neck and he drew him down a couple of inches as he stretched up, bringing their mouths together, resting there. 

It was weird, he’d always felt like he’d known Stephen forever and kissing him just felt... weird.  But then Stephen ran the tip of his tongue over Nick’s slightly parted lips, and Nick instinctively met him half-way before pulling back as far as the hand on his neck would allow.  Stephen tapped his nose against Nick’s, touched a tiny kiss to the edge of his mouth and murmured, “I know you can do better than that, I’ve watched you.”

It spurred something inside him and he kissed Stephen, this time like he meant it; mouth open, tongue sliding over welcoming tongue tasting coffee and toast, fingers carding up through dark hair.  He could feel a grip on his shoulder, a hand spread against the small of his back and he felt something else too – his dick taking an interest when it just hadn’t for the last few months.

This time it was Stephen who pulled back.  “Whoa....”

Nick stepped away, letting go immediately.  “Sorry, God, I’m sorry....”

“No....”  Stephen shook his head and reached for him, bringing him back into the circle of his arms, looking at him with wonder.  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.  That was definitely better.  I just don’t want you to regret this.  As much as I would love to throw you down on that great looking bed of yours and suck you until you explode-“ Nick groaned softly and closed his eyes, “-I don’t want any recriminations afterwards, I don’t want...”

Nick held up a hand, head and toe taking joint second place now to the aching throb of his erection.  “No recriminations, I swear.  You’ve got my word.  Please... let’s do what you just suggested.  Can we?”

~

“Now... this is going to be a bit of a shock....”

Nick pushed open the door of his office and let Abby and Connor stare at Stephen, sitting at his desk, the photo that he’d take from the other Stephen’s locker in his hands.  There were hugs, a big one from Abby, an even bigger one from Connor, during which time he didn’t let go of the photograph.

Abby was the one to ask, “How...?”

And Nick explained, “An anomaly, between this world and the one I came from.”

“I know Claudia Brown,” Stephen repeated, and Connor’s eyes went wide.

“The Claudia Brown?”

“Nick’s Claudia.”

“So... he wasn’t going mental? He really was in the wrong... universe?”

Stephen nodded.  “The anomaly’s closed again, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for a while, maybe for a long while.”  Nick caught his glance and grinned.  Then he turned to the other two;

“This doesn’t take away from what Stephen – the other Stephen – did.  We’ll never forget him, this Stephen isn’t here to replace him, not in that way.”

To his surprise, Connor stepped forward and lay a hand on his arm.  “But maybe now you can forgive yourself, Professor?”

And Abby nodded, “It’s good to see you smiling again.”

Connor’s eyes lit up.  “Have you told Lester?”


Just before they left the office, Stephen handed Nick the photograph.  “This isn’t me.”

“I know.”

“I have one like it, though, on my fridge at home.”

Nick dropped it to the desk, face up as Stephen’s arm snaked around his waist and a dry kiss was pressed to his temple.  He turned, momentarily speechless, warm hand settling on his back.  “Can we really have this?”

Stephen laughed.  “Of course we can.  What’s stopping us?”

“Helen.”

“Not a chance.”

“Lester?”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what Lester thinks.”  His other hand came up to Nick’s cheek.  “If we both want it, we can have it.”  And leaned in, kissing Nick so deeply he thought he could drown in it.

“Come on, what’s keeping you two?”  The door swung open, “I want to see the look on Lester’s....”

Nick took a half-step back, licking his lips and trying unsuccessfully to hide a grin.  “It’s the look on your face that’s priceless right now, Connor.”  Untangling himself from Stephen, Nick hoped he looked completely unapologetic as he strolled out passed his ex-student into the corridor, with Stephen Hart – ex-lab assistant, ex-rival for his wife’s affections, lover – close behind him, laughing.

But in the corridor, he paused, hand on Stephen’s elbow.  “There is still one question.  If I stepped into their Nick’s life, where did he end up?”

Stephen raised his eyebrows.  “Even more worrying, does that mean there are two Helens?”
####~~~~#####


Epilogue


Hurting, bleeding, Nick stood in the middle of the burning ARC, shaking his head as Helen raised the gun and pointed it directly at the centre of his chest.  “Don’t do this.”

Her voice at least was shaking when she answered, “I have to, Nick.”

Everything around them was on fire and still she wouldn't budge.  “Please, Helen....”

“I have no choice.”

“You’re wrong!  The future isn’t set in stone, it’s not pre-written!  If we’ve done something wrong, you and I can change that!”

“No.”  She shook her head, “it’s too late.”

He heard the shot, the sound louder than the screaming of overheated metal, the cry of shattering glass or the protest of cooking electronics. The bullet sliced through the air faster than Nick could see it but he watched it hit its target: Helen, right between the eyes.

From behind his left shoulder, Stephen took a step forward as she dropped, life gone from her in an instant of violence. And Nick turned to him, “Thank you,” he managed, and made it sincere even as he was coughing smoke from his lungs.

“I couldn’t let her kill you.” Stephen said it as if expecting Nick to hold this against him.

“Hey, you won’t hear any argument from me.” He slapped an ash-covered hand to Stephen’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “Come on, we should get outta here.”

“Yeah.” Flames licked at them as they ran, cutting a path through the burning, twisted wreckage. In the distance they could hear the sirens of the fire brigade but Nick reckoned they didn’t have the time to wait to be rescued.

“The whole place is made of metal and glass,” Stephen pointed out as they a leapt a fallen gantry post, “what’s burning?”

He had a point. Obviously chemicals, obviously paper, obviously furnishings. But it made Nick chuckle between deep, lung-bruising coughs. Every muscle in his body was starting to hurt, blood dripping into his eye from the wound on his forehead. Finally he could see sunshine through the fog of smoke. They’d reached the exit!

“Nick!” he heard Stephen’s call, thought it he just pointing out what he’d already seen, until an almighty crash from above – he glanced up and saw a shower of glass falling; ceiling panels, windows, most of the fucking building was glass and he was standing in the direct path of its defeat. He ran, muscles screaming, lungs burning, feeling the first shards rain down on his head and back. Suddenly Stephen’s weight barrelled into him, he fought to stay standing, the momentum taking them out of the building – just – where they tumbled to the concrete steps, Nick instinctively twisting his booted foot to stop himself and Stephen from rolling down them and cracking their skulls.

He pulled in a deep breath and coughed, choked, couldn’t breathe....

“It’s okay.” Stephen’s arm was around his shoulders and an oxygen mask was being held to his face. “It’s okay, we’re out.”

Taking the mask from Stephen, holding it in place himself, he turned his head and smiled through the plastic. “Thanks.”

Tightening his arm, hugging Nick briefly, Stephen pressed a kiss to his ash and debris-laden hair. “Don’t worry, if there are two Helen’s out there, I’m sure the second one will turn up.”

Nick pulled the mask away from his face. “Yeah, because I was about to say how much I was going to miss her.”

Stephen laughed softly and Nick felt him come closer, press his body into his side and lie his head on Nick’s shoulder.  A second later they were surrounded; relief and questions coming from every angle.  Nick ignored it all, feeling Stephen next to him and thanking a God he wasn’t sure he believed in for his friend – his lover’s – presence.  “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you,” he murmured, just for Stephen to hear, and in return he got an equally private response.

“In another universe, but not this one.”

In this one, he was very fucking lucky.