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Fic: Something Like Claudia Brown 5/?
16 Май, 2012 at 9:51 PM
scwlc_ficTitle: Something Like Claudia Brown 5/?
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Still owning nothing of Primeval.
Rating: PG-13 at the outset, I may change it later.
Summary: Abby's going to get married. Then she goes through an anomaly, comes back out, and finds out just how upsetting the Claudia Brown phenomenon can be.
A/N: I'm not exactly totally happy with this, but I feel like it's the best I can do at the moment with where I'm going.
*******************************
Abby stared at Connor, who had always been the first to leap up and go along with hopes and schemes and optimistic plans. He was the one who, lost in the Cretaceous, had kept faith they'd get home, long after she'd resigned herself to dying in prehistory. It was so different from anything she'd expected out of Connor that she just gaped for a minute. In fact, she gaped for so long that Connor started looking very uncomfortable and said, "Maitland? Are you alright? You're not having a stroke or some such?"
"Absence seizure?" offered Tom.
Abby shook herself. "I just . . . you're really different from my Connor is all."
He raised an eyebrow, offering a sardonic smirk her way. "Was I supposed to leap up and agree to beard the T-rex in his den?"
She'd been so relieved at just seeing him, at seeing aspects of her fiance, she'd failed to notice Connor was dressed in dark military fatigues, as were they all, but Jenny. She hadn't noticed the world-weary look in his eyes or the way that his puppyish eagerness was muted with a sort of weight on his shoulders that looked like Danny when they'd thought Becker was lost to predators or Cutter when Valerie had been killed by her pet smilodon. Something had crushed that joy out of Connor, and she had the terrible feeling that it might have been Cutter.
Abby said none of this. Just felt tears prick her eyes, because one of the things that had made Connor so loveable and such a source of strength for her had been the way he always expected things to come out alright. This one expected nothing, just another body slam of disdain and bad news. "Well," she said, "I should have expected this. If I could be dating Stephen Hart, I suppose Connor Temple could become a pessimist."
That was when her mobile rang. It was Cutter. "Where are you?" he asked. "I was thinking that perhaps you might join us for dinner. Claudia's conspired with Stephen and Sarah to order in some food from some unholy foreign source-"
Stephen's voice in the background, laughingly alive, made her feel the tears again. "Sushi, Nick, is hardly madly exotic. Now, South African bat on the other hand-"
"Shut up you pillock," Cutter growled. "I thought you might want to get to know how things are now, again."
Sarah was saying something that made Stephen laugh again and Cutter clearly pull the phone away from his mouth to be nasty to them both.
Spend an evening with Stephen and Cutter? See them both alive and well and not bloody or dead? See Stephen at all, since there'd been almost nothing left after the predators had been done with him? She couldn't refuse that chance, for all that she was here, faced with Connor and Tom and other dear and familiar faces. Claudia was now on the line, a woman Connor had told her was the last thing Cutter had thought of while dying. "Abby? Are you coming?"
"Yes," she said, a little abruptly. "Yes, I am. I'm just . . . it'll take me a bit to get there. Are you still at Cutter's old house, or somewhere else?" She'd only been there once, but it was at the other end of London from the theatre.
The other three were getting louder, Stephen and Sarah conspiring in some way to harass Cutter. Claudia gave her the address. "Would you three knock it off!" she snapped.
"I know where that is," Abby said, feeling fairly ovewhelmed. "I'll be there in about an hour. It'll take that long from where I am, now." She'd have to take the bus, since she'd been kidnapped her car was still at the back alley.
"See you then," said Claudia, and hung up.
The people who weren't her friends anymore, because these strange copies never had been were staring at her. "Cutter just invited me to dinner. He wants to catch me up with how things are now," she told them.
"So, you're just . . . off?" Tom asked, looking sceptical.
She nodded. "I need to know more, and if I want to try to get the ARC back, to get what I know we can do if we all just work together on this, I need to know them too."
"There's more to it than that," Danny spoke from behind her, having moved without her noticing, now startling the hell out of her. "You're all soppy about it." The nasty spark in his eyes that had previously only been reserved for people like Helen and Christine Johnson was in his eyes, reminding her of the suspicious detective she, Jenny and Connor had met at the old house. "Is it Stephen?"
Her emotions had already been on a whirlwind up and down several times in only the last few minutes. Affection, amusement, sadness, grief, loneliness, anger, confusion, so many feelings all swirled inside her and made her take it out on him. "Yes, it's Stephen. It's the man who walked into a room with a dozen alpha predators from as many different periods in history and let them tear him apart to save everyone from being mauled to death. It's Cutter, who was murdered by fucking Helen, because she's a psychotic bitch, and it's Sarah, who died to rescue me and Connor when she shouldn't have been out there, and Claudia, who I never knew, but was the last thing on Cutter's mind when he died in Connor's arms. So you can take your damned attitude and shove it up your arse, Danny! If you had a chance to see Patrick the way he was, not as Ethan fucking Dobrowski, you'd take it, wouldn't you?"
She turned on her heel, storming past them all towards the exit. She paused on the way out and shouted back, "And Connor? The theatre Emily, Charlotte and Ethan came out in along with the arboreal raptors? Not subtle at all."
She left to the sound of Connor saying, "Arboreal raptors? Wait a second, Emily, why didn't you tell me there are arboreal raptors? I could have a whole new entry into my database." Then, "Maitland, you tease!"
It was on the bus, heading back to the other side of town that Abby felt herself starting to cry again. For a moment she'd thought she could get everything and everyone back. But she'd finally registered Connor wasn't calling Abby, he was calling her by her last name. He'd never called her Maitland. Not once. Not even during their worst fights when he'd just blackmailed his way into her flat. That mistrustful look on Danny's face hadn't been aimed at her since he'd found out how and why Patrick had vanished. Becker had never looked at her that way, the way he'd looked at Christine Johnson, all polite interest and perfect military bearing without a smidgen of compassion, and Jenny was . . . it was like the worst of all the bad times with Jenny. That supercilious smugness from the early days, that beaten down exhaustion from after Cutter's death, all of them so alike and so different, and Abby suddenly wanted to be back at her flat with Rex again, because at least Rex wasn't different.
"You alright, Ma'am?" asked the kid sitting in front of her while she stood there, trying to surreptitiously wipe away her tears one-handed, gripping the steel pole for balance in the stop and go of London traffic. When had she become a ma'am? Not that it didn't feel appropriate, she felt so old suddenly, like someone who'd seen the world change into unrecognisability over the course of a lifetime.
Abby cleared her throat, "Yes, I'm okay. Just got some bad news is all."
He gave her a sympathetic smile, and she forced herself to think about the evening ahead, and her other three friends, just as different, but at least alive and well.
The ride was a long one, and eventually the kid left and Abby was able to take his seat, fingering the matchbook Connor had given her when he'd found out where Danny was taking him to start off the stag night. Connor had gotten it to her, making sure she'd know where to start looking for him if she needed to. He'd made a joke about Danny being Chewbacca, given the state the man's hair had been in when he'd finally made it safely back to the 21st century, and had scribbled a note into the matchbook.
Chewie and me are starting here. Should I keep the walking rug out of your way?
She'd carefully laid aside the tinsel from her and Connor's last trip through the anomaly, wanting to preserve what few memories she had of him, but the matchbook was the last note he'd written her, and she wasn't able to let it go yet, any more than she'd take off the engagement ring he'd got her with a little tiny green-studded lizard for the band. Her stop came and went, and she was startled into movement at that, getting off at the next one and having to walk back to get her connection. The tube might have been faster, but the bus routes meant only the one connection, not two, and in her state of mind, simpler was better.
Eventually she made it to Cutter's, pausing at the door to pull herself together before knocking. She was greeted by a warmly smiling Claudia, who said, "Lovely to see you, Abby. Nick, Stephen and Sarah are competing to see who has better tall tales about digging expeditions, so I'm grateful that you're here, since you hopefully can make them all stop."
Dinner was pleasant, if a little awkward. Abby found herself with an elephant in the room that only she could see, which was of Connor and the others on his 'crew'. For every story Cutter, Stephen and Sarah told her, Abby could recall that event, but with Connor there, with Danny or Jenny, with Becker or Matt or Emily. They loomed large, and she didn't know how to deal with the impression the others had that somehow Abby must have been less experienced than they were, seen fewer anomalies or any number of other things.
The stories filled in the blanks left by the official reports, but they also compounded proof of the reason for Connor's bitterness and pessimism on the idea of being accepted by Cutter and the rest. In the minds of Cutter and Stephen, Connor was forever frozen in that moment of gormless, cheerfully overenthusiastic silliness when he'd sent his housekey into the anomaly in the Forest of Dean.
Even as Stephen told her a story in disapproving tones of Duncan, putting himself in the way of an angry indricotherium to save two small children, dying in the process, she wanted to shake them. The Home Office team had been late to the scene and Duncan and the others had been doing their best with the lack of supplies available to people with no access to the government resources that made life easier for the official team. It was a blind spot, and Abby had to admit it was the same one she'd suffered from when they first started.
But she remembered that angry mammalian version of a sauropod, remembered seeing Connor and Stephen tag-team against it together, whilst she and Cutter tried desperately to reload the tranquilisers. The adventurer and the geek had made a perfect team, Connor's perfect knowledge of the anatomy of the animal meant he'd known how close he could get to distract it and keep it away from potential victims, and Stephen's sheer skill could do the other side, and between them they'd got it back through the temporal gate without even needed to resort to shooting. Stephen had bought Connor a pint at the pub that night, and Connor had relaxed enough to tell them about the string of practical jokes he, Tom and Duncan had done at the university. He'd won a place on the team before that, but that evening he won himself a place as an equal with the others.
It hadn't happened here.
The story of how Sarah joined the team was nearly the same, but no one had found out that you could lock an anomaly, no one had figured out that the sun cage was a magnetic holder, trapping an anomaly inside it.
She wound up alone with Claudia, hiding and helping in the kitchen, because she didn't know the woman, and while the resemblance to Jenny was confusing, at least there wasn't that same awful expectation that she'd be one way, then react another. "You know, it's sort of odd," she commented to her, "For the longest time, you were sort of an abstract to me."
Claudia seemed to smile in amusement and frown in confusion at the same time. "What do you mean?"
"Well, when Cutter came out of the second Permian anomaly, everything had changed for him. So, while he knew you, had still been working out of the Home Office and everything, none of us had. As far as we knew, Oliver Leek-"
"That creepy, slimy, weaselly, vile, scheming, horrible little man?" Claudia asked, horrified. "I know Oliver Leek. He shouldn't be anywhere near the anomaly project, he'd botch it and turn it into some dreadful self-serving three ring circus."
"He did at that," Abby admitted. "But it took Helen interfering for things to get really bad."
Claudia shuddered. "Let's not talk about him. You were saying, about Nick coming out of a second Permian anomaly?"
"Yes. Well, you didn't exist, you see. So, he comes out, expecting to see you, and we just think he's raving. Just gone completely mad over there," Abby explained. "Eventually we believed him, but it was sort of like believing in God or something. We just had to trust Cutter hadn't lost his mind, especially when Lester hired Jenny and he kept on calling her Claudia."
"Ah, the perils of being a twin," Claudia said, sounding wryly remeniscent.
Abby nodded, shifting a few more dishes to the sink. "So, eventually, 'Claudia Brown' became a shorthand for, 'massive change in the past creating a different present you only discover when you get back.'"
"Which is why you said that it's just like Claudia Brown when you were trying to explain things to Nick," Claudia nodded in some satisfaction at the explanation. "I suppose it must be even more disconcerting for you, given that you're not dealing with one person who could be treated as an amnesiac, in some ways, but everyone you know."
Sighing, Abby could only agree. "It's confusing. I mean, Stephen and I never dated at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he spent a lot of time lying to me in order to keep me at arm's length because he was still so hung up on Helen."
"I'm rather amazed, actually," Claudia said. "The moment Helen came back, he latched onto you rather quickly. It almost seemed like he was trying to stake some sort of ground out to make clear to her that he wasn't going to have anything to do with her anymore." She shrugged. "We haven't seen much of anything of her for quite some time."
No Helen? Stephen and Cutter and Ryan alive? Sarah alive? Maybe it was all for the better that Connor had never joined, not for the progress of the ARC, but for the lives that had been saved.
But lives weren't saved, murmured a voice in the back of her head. Ben had been killed by the gorgonopsid and half a dozen zookeepers from Wellington Zoo had gone thanks to the the future predators, if the post-incident report was accurate. He brother was gone through the anomaly at the racetrack and the G-Rex had got a planeload of people before they'd brought it down. The little girl that had fed the chameleon monster had been torn to shreds in her brave quest to protect the neighbourhood pets, and Taylor "ain't baggage" from the Silurian was never seen again.
The people from the ARC were here, but the lives they had saved in Abby's timeline were gone. Killed because the anomaly project wasn't good enough, didn't have Danny to take mad risks and Becker to stand stalwart in the face of danger. They were here because they hadn't been there to put their lives on the line.
But no one of the home office team knew this. They'd been there as much as they could, as often as they knew to be there, and Stephen was still the man who would take on a prehistoric monster unarmed to protect a boy and his teacher, and Sarah was still brilliant and fearless, Cutter still headstrong and stubbornly determined to do what he thought was right.
She just had to make them all see that bringing Connor and everyone else in was the best thing to do. She just wished she knew how to do it.
Fic: Something Like Claudia Brown 5/?
16 Май, 2012 at 9:51 PM
scwlc_ficTitle: Something Like Claudia Brown 5/?
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Still owning nothing of Primeval.
Rating: PG-13 at the outset, I may change it later.
Summary: Abby's going to get married. Then she goes through an anomaly, comes back out, and finds out just how upsetting the Claudia Brown phenomenon can be.
A/N: I'm not exactly totally happy with this, but I feel like it's the best I can do at the moment with where I'm going.
*******************************
Abby stared at Connor, who had always been the first to leap up and go along with hopes and schemes and optimistic plans. He was the one who, lost in the Cretaceous, had kept faith they'd get home, long after she'd resigned herself to dying in prehistory. It was so different from anything she'd expected out of Connor that she just gaped for a minute. In fact, she gaped for so long that Connor started looking very uncomfortable and said, "Maitland? Are you alright? You're not having a stroke or some such?"
"Absence seizure?" offered Tom.
Abby shook herself. "I just . . . you're really different from my Connor is all."
He raised an eyebrow, offering a sardonic smirk her way. "Was I supposed to leap up and agree to beard the T-rex in his den?"
She'd been so relieved at just seeing him, at seeing aspects of her fiance, she'd failed to notice Connor was dressed in dark military fatigues, as were they all, but Jenny. She hadn't noticed the world-weary look in his eyes or the way that his puppyish eagerness was muted with a sort of weight on his shoulders that looked like Danny when they'd thought Becker was lost to predators or Cutter when Valerie had been killed by her pet smilodon. Something had crushed that joy out of Connor, and she had the terrible feeling that it might have been Cutter.
Abby said none of this. Just felt tears prick her eyes, because one of the things that had made Connor so loveable and such a source of strength for her had been the way he always expected things to come out alright. This one expected nothing, just another body slam of disdain and bad news. "Well," she said, "I should have expected this. If I could be dating Stephen Hart, I suppose Connor Temple could become a pessimist."
That was when her mobile rang. It was Cutter. "Where are you?" he asked. "I was thinking that perhaps you might join us for dinner. Claudia's conspired with Stephen and Sarah to order in some food from some unholy foreign source-"
Stephen's voice in the background, laughingly alive, made her feel the tears again. "Sushi, Nick, is hardly madly exotic. Now, South African bat on the other hand-"
"Shut up you pillock," Cutter growled. "I thought you might want to get to know how things are now, again."
Sarah was saying something that made Stephen laugh again and Cutter clearly pull the phone away from his mouth to be nasty to them both.
Spend an evening with Stephen and Cutter? See them both alive and well and not bloody or dead? See Stephen at all, since there'd been almost nothing left after the predators had been done with him? She couldn't refuse that chance, for all that she was here, faced with Connor and Tom and other dear and familiar faces. Claudia was now on the line, a woman Connor had told her was the last thing Cutter had thought of while dying. "Abby? Are you coming?"
"Yes," she said, a little abruptly. "Yes, I am. I'm just . . . it'll take me a bit to get there. Are you still at Cutter's old house, or somewhere else?" She'd only been there once, but it was at the other end of London from the theatre.
The other three were getting louder, Stephen and Sarah conspiring in some way to harass Cutter. Claudia gave her the address. "Would you three knock it off!" she snapped.
"I know where that is," Abby said, feeling fairly ovewhelmed. "I'll be there in about an hour. It'll take that long from where I am, now." She'd have to take the bus, since she'd been kidnapped her car was still at the back alley.
"See you then," said Claudia, and hung up.
The people who weren't her friends anymore, because these strange copies never had been were staring at her. "Cutter just invited me to dinner. He wants to catch me up with how things are now," she told them.
"So, you're just . . . off?" Tom asked, looking sceptical.
She nodded. "I need to know more, and if I want to try to get the ARC back, to get what I know we can do if we all just work together on this, I need to know them too."
"There's more to it than that," Danny spoke from behind her, having moved without her noticing, now startling the hell out of her. "You're all soppy about it." The nasty spark in his eyes that had previously only been reserved for people like Helen and Christine Johnson was in his eyes, reminding her of the suspicious detective she, Jenny and Connor had met at the old house. "Is it Stephen?"
Her emotions had already been on a whirlwind up and down several times in only the last few minutes. Affection, amusement, sadness, grief, loneliness, anger, confusion, so many feelings all swirled inside her and made her take it out on him. "Yes, it's Stephen. It's the man who walked into a room with a dozen alpha predators from as many different periods in history and let them tear him apart to save everyone from being mauled to death. It's Cutter, who was murdered by fucking Helen, because she's a psychotic bitch, and it's Sarah, who died to rescue me and Connor when she shouldn't have been out there, and Claudia, who I never knew, but was the last thing on Cutter's mind when he died in Connor's arms. So you can take your damned attitude and shove it up your arse, Danny! If you had a chance to see Patrick the way he was, not as Ethan fucking Dobrowski, you'd take it, wouldn't you?"
She turned on her heel, storming past them all towards the exit. She paused on the way out and shouted back, "And Connor? The theatre Emily, Charlotte and Ethan came out in along with the arboreal raptors? Not subtle at all."
She left to the sound of Connor saying, "Arboreal raptors? Wait a second, Emily, why didn't you tell me there are arboreal raptors? I could have a whole new entry into my database." Then, "Maitland, you tease!"
It was on the bus, heading back to the other side of town that Abby felt herself starting to cry again. For a moment she'd thought she could get everything and everyone back. But she'd finally registered Connor wasn't calling Abby, he was calling her by her last name. He'd never called her Maitland. Not once. Not even during their worst fights when he'd just blackmailed his way into her flat. That mistrustful look on Danny's face hadn't been aimed at her since he'd found out how and why Patrick had vanished. Becker had never looked at her that way, the way he'd looked at Christine Johnson, all polite interest and perfect military bearing without a smidgen of compassion, and Jenny was . . . it was like the worst of all the bad times with Jenny. That supercilious smugness from the early days, that beaten down exhaustion from after Cutter's death, all of them so alike and so different, and Abby suddenly wanted to be back at her flat with Rex again, because at least Rex wasn't different.
"You alright, Ma'am?" asked the kid sitting in front of her while she stood there, trying to surreptitiously wipe away her tears one-handed, gripping the steel pole for balance in the stop and go of London traffic. When had she become a ma'am? Not that it didn't feel appropriate, she felt so old suddenly, like someone who'd seen the world change into unrecognisability over the course of a lifetime.
Abby cleared her throat, "Yes, I'm okay. Just got some bad news is all."
He gave her a sympathetic smile, and she forced herself to think about the evening ahead, and her other three friends, just as different, but at least alive and well.
The ride was a long one, and eventually the kid left and Abby was able to take his seat, fingering the matchbook Connor had given her when he'd found out where Danny was taking him to start off the stag night. Connor had gotten it to her, making sure she'd know where to start looking for him if she needed to. He'd made a joke about Danny being Chewbacca, given the state the man's hair had been in when he'd finally made it safely back to the 21st century, and had scribbled a note into the matchbook.
Chewie and me are starting here. Should I keep the walking rug out of your way?
She'd carefully laid aside the tinsel from her and Connor's last trip through the anomaly, wanting to preserve what few memories she had of him, but the matchbook was the last note he'd written her, and she wasn't able to let it go yet, any more than she'd take off the engagement ring he'd got her with a little tiny green-studded lizard for the band. Her stop came and went, and she was startled into movement at that, getting off at the next one and having to walk back to get her connection. The tube might have been faster, but the bus routes meant only the one connection, not two, and in her state of mind, simpler was better.
Eventually she made it to Cutter's, pausing at the door to pull herself together before knocking. She was greeted by a warmly smiling Claudia, who said, "Lovely to see you, Abby. Nick, Stephen and Sarah are competing to see who has better tall tales about digging expeditions, so I'm grateful that you're here, since you hopefully can make them all stop."
Dinner was pleasant, if a little awkward. Abby found herself with an elephant in the room that only she could see, which was of Connor and the others on his 'crew'. For every story Cutter, Stephen and Sarah told her, Abby could recall that event, but with Connor there, with Danny or Jenny, with Becker or Matt or Emily. They loomed large, and she didn't know how to deal with the impression the others had that somehow Abby must have been less experienced than they were, seen fewer anomalies or any number of other things.
The stories filled in the blanks left by the official reports, but they also compounded proof of the reason for Connor's bitterness and pessimism on the idea of being accepted by Cutter and the rest. In the minds of Cutter and Stephen, Connor was forever frozen in that moment of gormless, cheerfully overenthusiastic silliness when he'd sent his housekey into the anomaly in the Forest of Dean.
Even as Stephen told her a story in disapproving tones of Duncan, putting himself in the way of an angry indricotherium to save two small children, dying in the process, she wanted to shake them. The Home Office team had been late to the scene and Duncan and the others had been doing their best with the lack of supplies available to people with no access to the government resources that made life easier for the official team. It was a blind spot, and Abby had to admit it was the same one she'd suffered from when they first started.
But she remembered that angry mammalian version of a sauropod, remembered seeing Connor and Stephen tag-team against it together, whilst she and Cutter tried desperately to reload the tranquilisers. The adventurer and the geek had made a perfect team, Connor's perfect knowledge of the anatomy of the animal meant he'd known how close he could get to distract it and keep it away from potential victims, and Stephen's sheer skill could do the other side, and between them they'd got it back through the temporal gate without even needed to resort to shooting. Stephen had bought Connor a pint at the pub that night, and Connor had relaxed enough to tell them about the string of practical jokes he, Tom and Duncan had done at the university. He'd won a place on the team before that, but that evening he won himself a place as an equal with the others.
It hadn't happened here.
The story of how Sarah joined the team was nearly the same, but no one had found out that you could lock an anomaly, no one had figured out that the sun cage was a magnetic holder, trapping an anomaly inside it.
She wound up alone with Claudia, hiding and helping in the kitchen, because she didn't know the woman, and while the resemblance to Jenny was confusing, at least there wasn't that same awful expectation that she'd be one way, then react another. "You know, it's sort of odd," she commented to her, "For the longest time, you were sort of an abstract to me."
Claudia seemed to smile in amusement and frown in confusion at the same time. "What do you mean?"
"Well, when Cutter came out of the second Permian anomaly, everything had changed for him. So, while he knew you, had still been working out of the Home Office and everything, none of us had. As far as we knew, Oliver Leek-"
"That creepy, slimy, weaselly, vile, scheming, horrible little man?" Claudia asked, horrified. "I know Oliver Leek. He shouldn't be anywhere near the anomaly project, he'd botch it and turn it into some dreadful self-serving three ring circus."
"He did at that," Abby admitted. "But it took Helen interfering for things to get really bad."
Claudia shuddered. "Let's not talk about him. You were saying, about Nick coming out of a second Permian anomaly?"
"Yes. Well, you didn't exist, you see. So, he comes out, expecting to see you, and we just think he's raving. Just gone completely mad over there," Abby explained. "Eventually we believed him, but it was sort of like believing in God or something. We just had to trust Cutter hadn't lost his mind, especially when Lester hired Jenny and he kept on calling her Claudia."
"Ah, the perils of being a twin," Claudia said, sounding wryly remeniscent.
Abby nodded, shifting a few more dishes to the sink. "So, eventually, 'Claudia Brown' became a shorthand for, 'massive change in the past creating a different present you only discover when you get back.'"
"Which is why you said that it's just like Claudia Brown when you were trying to explain things to Nick," Claudia nodded in some satisfaction at the explanation. "I suppose it must be even more disconcerting for you, given that you're not dealing with one person who could be treated as an amnesiac, in some ways, but everyone you know."
Sighing, Abby could only agree. "It's confusing. I mean, Stephen and I never dated at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he spent a lot of time lying to me in order to keep me at arm's length because he was still so hung up on Helen."
"I'm rather amazed, actually," Claudia said. "The moment Helen came back, he latched onto you rather quickly. It almost seemed like he was trying to stake some sort of ground out to make clear to her that he wasn't going to have anything to do with her anymore." She shrugged. "We haven't seen much of anything of her for quite some time."
No Helen? Stephen and Cutter and Ryan alive? Sarah alive? Maybe it was all for the better that Connor had never joined, not for the progress of the ARC, but for the lives that had been saved.
But lives weren't saved, murmured a voice in the back of her head. Ben had been killed by the gorgonopsid and half a dozen zookeepers from Wellington Zoo had gone thanks to the the future predators, if the post-incident report was accurate. He brother was gone through the anomaly at the racetrack and the G-Rex had got a planeload of people before they'd brought it down. The little girl that had fed the chameleon monster had been torn to shreds in her brave quest to protect the neighbourhood pets, and Taylor "ain't baggage" from the Silurian was never seen again.
The people from the ARC were here, but the lives they had saved in Abby's timeline were gone. Killed because the anomaly project wasn't good enough, didn't have Danny to take mad risks and Becker to stand stalwart in the face of danger. They were here because they hadn't been there to put their lives on the line.
But no one of the home office team knew this. They'd been there as much as they could, as often as they knew to be there, and Stephen was still the man who would take on a prehistoric monster unarmed to protect a boy and his teacher, and Sarah was still brilliant and fearless, Cutter still headstrong and stubbornly determined to do what he thought was right.
She just had to make them all see that bringing Connor and everyone else in was the best thing to do. She just wished she knew how to do it.