fredbassett | Fic, Underground, Overground, Claudia/Ryan, 15

Title : Underground, Overground
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Claudia, Lester, Nick, Ryan, Connor, Abby, Stephen
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : Episode 1.2
Summary : Claudia has a job to do and Captain Ryan is helping her to do it.
A/N : 1) This follows All In a Day’s Work, written last year for

lsellersfic’s birthday. I fear this has now spawned a series of Claudia/Ryan episode tags! 2) The dialogue in much of this is taken from the actual episode and I claim no credit for that!

“I can’t close the underground on a wild hunch,” Lester said with a note of finality in his voice.

Claudia’s new boss was giving the impression of barely having listened to the story she and Nick Cutter had just told him of the visit they’d made to the hospital where the injured Underground worker was being treated. But even though this was only her second day of working with Sir James Lester, she knew him better than that. She quickened her steps to keep up with the two men as Lester stalked through the corridors of the Home Office on the way back to his office.

“Something injected a fatal dose of venom into his bloodstream” Nick pointed out.

“There could be a perfectly rational explanation,” Lester countered quickly.

“Oh, now that I’d love to hear.”

Claudia winced inwardly. Nick certainly wasn’t afraid to deploy sarcasm as a weapon.

“And how do you suggest I explain this to the Mayor?” Lester demanded. “‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind terribly throwing the whole bloody Underground into chaos because we think there may be a fare-dodging creepy-crawly on the loose somewhere’?” Lester paused in the door of his office and glared at Nick.

“We’re not talking about shutting down the whole system, just the area where the attack took place,” Claudia interjected hurriedly before the two men could embark on one of the pissing contests that were rapidly becoming part of her working life. “There’s a whole network of disused tunnels down there.”

Lester sat down behind his desk and sighed heavily. “Yes, very well.”

Claudia smiled her thanks and promptly ushered Nick from the room before he could say anything to make Lester change his mind.

* * * * *

The scene around the underground station was already one of barely-controlled chaos by the time Claudia arrived there. Black-clad soldiers were already ushering out confused travellers, angry at the disruption. Ryan’s presence at her side was surprisingly comforting. She’d spent the previous night in the spare room of his house near Hereford. He’d sat next to her, his hand on her shoulder while she’d cried, but he’d made no subsequent reference to her show of weakness and had simply continued to treat her with his usual brand of reserved courtesy.

The station announcer repeated the words, “All passengers please vacate the station.” His voice had now taken on a slightly pleading edge.

Lester had used a suspected terrorist incident as their cover for this operation. Claudia just hoped he’d be as successful at keeping CO19 off their backs as he’d been in organising the partial closure of the Northern Line. The last thing she needed was any testosterone-fuelled confrontation between the Metropolitan Police and Ryan’s men, although from what she’d seen so far, Ryan didn’t look like an easy man to provoke. She watched as he and his men kitted themselves out with night-vision headgear and prepared to go down into the tunnels. With a quick nod in her direction, Tom Ryan led his men underground. She closed her eyes for a moment, hoping that she hadn’t just been responsible for sending any of the men to their deaths. Especially not their captain.

“We should be down there with them,” Nick said, his frustration showing clearly on his face.

“Special Forces go in first.” Claudia had no intention of allowing Nick to overrule her on that. “You didn’t think Lester was going to let you have it all your own way?”

“They don’t even know what they’re looking for.” Nick Cutter was quite clearly a man who wasn’t used to having his decisions questioned.

“Well, there can’t be that many different types of venomous predator under the Aldwych,” commented Stephen in an attempt to lighten the mood.

Claudia raised a smile from somewhere. “You should see the last tube home on a Friday night.”

As the last of Ryan’s men disappeared from sight into the tube station, Claudia switched on the radio the special forces captain had given her on their way to the incident and listed to Ryan giving orders to his men as they moved through the tunnels in search of whatever had attacked the underground worker.

“Clear so far. Keep it really tight lads.” Ryan’s voice sounded calm and in control.

She listened to their progress, adrenaline starting to race through her system, even though she was standing in broad daylight on a London street, with several more armed soldiers making sure that any passers-by remained well behind the perimeter that had been set up.

A sharp intake of breath from Ryan was followed by the command, “Keep it tight.” A moment later he shouted to his men to close in and then yelled the chilling words, “Above! Above!” The radio feed picked up the confused voices of Ryan’s men, several of whom were now shouting at once, then their captain’s voice cut through the noise like a hot knife through butter. “Hold your fire!”

The sharp, staccato sound of gunfire burst in her ear and as she heard an agonised scream, Claudia’s heart rate spiked uncomfortably in her chest.

* * * * *

Captain Ryan was the last man out of the tunnels, bringing up the rear as his men carried an obviously injured soldier out of the tube station. A medic hurried to his side, closely followed by Claudia, Nick and Stephen. A puncture wound on the man’s neck told them that he had been bitten. The marks were identical to the ones she’d seen on the man in the hospital earlier in the day.
Ryan sounded breathless and almost confused as he tried to explain what had happened. “They were like spiders, but with pincers, not fangs. Some of them over a metre long. Horrible little…”

“Look, tell me how you feel,” Nick interrupted, clearly as concerned as she was by the soldier’s reactions. This wasn’t the calm, collected man they had already become used to.

“Sick. My ears are ringing…”

“Any blurred vision?”

Ryan shook his head. “No. But there’s something else. The gunshots were too bright, like fireworks.”

“That’s classic signs of excess oxygen in the atmosphere,” Stephen said quickly.

Ryan pulled himself together and followed the paramedics carrying the injured soldier on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance, talking quietly to his own unit medic, both of them obviously concerned.

“A richer, more heavily oxygenated air must be seeping through from another anomaly,” Nick said quickly, seizing on Stephen’s observation and elaborating on it. He sounded both awed and excited. “We’re not talking about the Permian era any longer. This is much, much earlier.”

“How much earlier?” Claudia demanded.

“Maybe the Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. We really need to see exactly what these creatures look like. I need to see this for myself.”

Claudia could see the determination in his eyes and knew there was no way she was going to be able to argue him out of going down into the tunnels. “Okay, go.”

Nick grinned at her and nodded to Stephen. “Let’s get some gear.”

* * * * *

“Cutter, what’s going on?” She’d known letting the civilian members of the team go into the tunnels without military back-up while Ryan and his men were still suffering disorientation and nausea from their exposure to the oxygen-saturated atmosphere in the tunnels was dangerous, she’d had little choice but to acquiesce.

“There’s another creature down here.”

She stifled a groan. Nothing about this job was easy. She didn’t know enough about what they were facing, and the people who did seemed to have a careless disregard for their own lives that left her speechless at times.

But not speechless enough to stop her ripping Stephen Hart the metaphorical equivalent of a new arsehole, not 15 minutes later when he disobeyed her direct order to remain on the surface and dashed back down to rescue his friend and mentor after helping Abby back to the surface.

She grabbed the radio from Abby and demanded, “What’s he done?” Abby’s guilty look told her all she needed to know. “Stephen, where the hell are you?” she bellowed into the handset, furious with yet another complication in an already difficult situation.

“He was trying to help.”

“Well, he’s done a really great job, hasn’t he?” Abby’s defence cut no ice with her. “Stephen, come in. Stephen?” She turned to the younger woman, still furious. “That’s the problem with heroic gestures. Succeed and you look wonderful. Fail, and all you do is leave everybody else with a bloody mess to clear up. Well done.” Claudia stared around her. She had no idea if Ryan or his men were fit enough to go back underground, but Stephen’s actions had left her precious little choice. “Get down there,” she ordered.

Without question or complaint, Ryan and the other soldiers readied themselves to go back into the tunnels. When they finally returned, this time it was Stephen Hart they brought out on a stretcher, another victim of what the newly-arrived Connor Temple, sacked earlier in the day by Nick for speaking out of turn to his university friends, had described as some sort of centipede on steroids. As they carried Stephen off to the ambulance, Claudia noticed how Nick promptly covered up his friend’s mention of Helen Cutter, Nick’s dead wife, by claiming Stephen was hallucinating. Claudia didn’t have the time to quiz either of them any further, but the incident left her wondering quite how frank Nick had been on some things.

While Ryan and his men were doing their best to herd the creatures in the tunnels back through the anomaly, Claudia remained on the surface with Nick, Abby and Connor, anxiously awaiting news from the hospital. When it came, it wasn’t good. Without a sample of the venom, Stephen’s survival rate was being given as nil: with one, that might rise to 50%. But as the doctor had stressed, anti-venoms were a last resort, and risky in themselves.

She wasn’t surprised when Nick Cutter came up with a plan. She wasn’t even particularly surprised when it worked, even though it did involve him acting as human bait for quite the grossest creature she’d ever had the misfortune to clap eyes on. She hated even the tiny centipedes she found in her window boxes, so one nearly two metres long was the stuff of nightmares. But what mattered was that they’d got the venom and several hours later, the doctors finally confirmed that Stephen was out of danger.

When Claudia was able to get into the hospital to see him, Stephen was sitting up in bed, reading a book. He evaded her questions about Helen with a casualness that didn’t deceive her in the slightest, but Claudia knew that any attempt to interrogate him any further would only result in her being summarily evicted by the attentive nurses, so she filed the information away for future use and made her way back outside, leaving Stephen with Abby. She’d have plenty of time to read him the Riot Act about his reckless behaviour after he was discharged.

* * * * *

“May I buy you a drink, ma’am?” Ryan’s voice broke into her reverie as she walked down the steps at the front of the hospital.

The soldier, dressed casually in jeans and a loose-fitting blue shirt, was perched on a wall, obviously waiting for her.

She stared at him for a moment and then smiled. “Thank you, Captain… Tom. That would be lovely. I have just exercised quite remarkable restraint by not ripping Stephen Hart’s head off and playing football with it in a hospital ward. At least that was what I wanted to do, but I suspected it wouldn’t have gone down very well after everyone’s efforts to keep him alive. So yes, I think a drink would be most welcome.”

Ryan grinned. “I imagine the professor would prefer to keep him in one piece.”

Claudia returned his grin. So she wasn’t the only one who had noticed the rather close relationship between Nick Cutter and his attractive, but undeniably reckless, assistant.

Ryan led the way to a wine bar around the corner from the hospital. It was a warm evening and they were able to sit outside, enjoying what was left of the sunshine, sharing a bottle of very pleasant Chardonnay.

“How are you feeling?” She was conscious of the fact that Ryan had lost one of his men earlier that day. She wanted to say how sorry she was, but words seemed wholly inadequate to convey her feelings about having sent a soldier to his death in those tunnels in exactly the outcome that she had dreaded when she’d first sent Ryan and his men underground. She was even more conscious of the fact that before he’d been taken to hospital, she hadn’t even known his name.

“I’m fine now, ma’am.” She shot him a meaningful glance. “Claudia,” he amended apologetically.

Claudia sipped her wine and resolved that by 9am the following morning, she would know the names of every man in the Special Forces squad assigned to what was now being referred to as the Anomaly Project.

“His name was Graham Mitchell,” Ryan said quietly. “His parents died a few years ago in a car crash. His girlfriend dumped him two months ago for an estate agent with a flash car, and his brother’s a stockbroker.” Ryan drained his glass and poured another. “I went to see Brian Mitchell before coming here. They were chalk and bloody cheese, but he was fucking gutted. Went white as a sheet and I thought he was going to pass out.”

The fact that Ryan had sworn and not apologised for his language the way he’d done a couple of time during what had turned out to be one of the longest, hardest days of Claudia’s life was some indication of how hard he had taken the death of one of his men. He looked tired. No, scrub that, he looked exhausted, but he’d still waited for her outside the hospital, even fresh from breaking the news of a brother’s death to a man he’d probably barely known.

Claudia wondered if she’d ever end up having to be the bearer of bad news like that. It certainly wasn’t something she’d have envisaged two days ago as being part of her job description, but now it was all too real a prospect.

“I don’t suppose breaking that sort of news ever gets easier does it?” she said quietly.

Tom Ryan shook his head and refilled her glass. “No, it doesn’t.” He was silent for a moment and then said, “I don’t suppose they warned you about anything like this in the interviews, did they?”

“The fact that I’d end up dealing with dinosaurs? No, strangely, no one bothered to mention that.”

Ryan’s grey-blue eyes held an attractive mix of sympathy and humour. “According to Temple, we haven’t actually had to deal with a dinosaur yet, but he’s still living in hope.”

Claudia groaned. “He would be. According to Nick, Connor has always wanted to be in a cool crime-busting gang and it looks like we’re as good as it’s likely to get. The prospect of dinosaurs is clearly a bonus.”

Ryan caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for another bottle of wine. “I bloody hate spiders,” he confided.

“I can’t stand centipedes,” Claudia admitted, accepting Ryan’s attempt to lighten the mood.

Ryan held his glass out and she clinked hers against it.

With Ryan’s back-up, Claudia had survived her second day of madness. Yes, two people had died: a maintenance worker and a soldier. But it was her job to keep casualties to a minimum and Ryan had helped her do that. She just hoped that she would never be in a position of having to deliver the news of his death to anyone close to him.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thelibraniniquity

I really enjoyed this! Lovely characterisations of both Claudia and Ryan.

From:

Fic, Underground, Overground, Claudia/Ryan, 15

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags