Fic, Grapes and Gripes, Blade/Lorraine, 15

[fredbassett]

Title : Grapes and Gripes
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Blade/Lorraine, Ditzy
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Blade is injured, Lorraine is concerned, Ditzy is amused. Written for rain_sleet_snow as her prize for the primeval_denial September Team Fest.
A/N : This takes place in my Stephen/Ryan ‘verse immediately after the events of Crow on the Cradle but can be read as a standalone. With thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.

Lorraine Wickes pulled her car into what seemed like the last parking space in the hospital car park. She’d been driving around looking for somewhere to leave the car for nearly 15 minutes, her temper getting steadily worse all the time.

She’d received the news two hours ago that her boyfriend had been injured on the other side of an anomaly and had been taken to hospital. Ditzy had been at pains to reassure her that Blade’s life wasn’t in danger but that news had done nothing to suppress the activities of the troupe of clog-dancing butterflies that had taken up residence in her stomach the moment she’d seen the medic’s name identified on her phone.

During the time it had taken her to ensure that they still had sufficient operational capability to respond to any more anomaly alerts, despite their sudden haemorrhaging of soldiers in the direction of Farnley Hall, she had successfully managed to clamp down hard on her emotions. The news from her boss that the Home Secretary’s husband had been up to his neck in Ed Mason’s activities had come as something of a surprise, but if it served to get the wretched woman off their backs for good, then Lorraine would be very pleased. She didn’t have much time for politicians as a breed anyway, and Lester was right, Gillian Clements was probably the worst Home Secretary in living memory, and that was saying something.

She was rubbed cleansing foam on her hands from the dispenser outside the main doors and fulminated at the number of people who just walked straight past it, ignoring the request for all visitors to make use of it before entering. No doubt the same people would be the first to complain about the spread of infections in hospital. A wall chart provided the location of Medway Ward and Lorraine started to make her way down endless corridors, trying to blank her mind to the smell and the feel of the place.

A nurse sitting behind a desk at the entry to the ward looked up and gave her a tired smile. “I’m sorry, visiting hours have just ended.”

Lorraine fished her identity card out of her handbag. “Lorraine Wickes, Home Office. You’re looking after one of the soldiers attached to a project I’m working on. I need to speak to him on a matter of some importance. His name’s Niall Richards.”

“The one who doesn’t like hospitals?” the woman said, her smile brightening slightly. The badge on her uniform announced her name as Janette. “The other lady with your project said someone else would be along later. I presume that’s you.”

She nodded. It looked like Claudia had already paved the way for her visit, for which Lorraine was grateful. She didn’t feel up to an argument with the hospital staff. “That sounds like him,” Lorraine acknowledged. “Is he being a pain in the arse?”

“No, but he does a good line in narrow-eyed glares. You’ll find him in the side room at the end of the ward”

Lorraine made her way through the ward, doing her best not to infringe the privacy of the patients in the beds on either side. She hated the way hospitals made her feel like a voyeur of other people’s misery if she so much as made accidental eye contact with anyone. They seemed to strip human beings bare of all privacy at the time they most needed it and she loathed contributing to that in any way, shape or form.

She announced her presence with a double knock on the door and a barely-heard grunt that only someone with a master’s degree in interpreting bad-tempered soldiers would have taken for an invitation to enter.

One of the narrow-eyed glares that had clearly made an impression on the nurses was trained on the door but Blade’s expression lightened the instant he saw her, one of his rare smiles wiping away his dislike of confinement and instantly making him look younger and less ferocious.

His right arm was held across his chest at a 90 degree angle in a sling and a large, already-purpling bruise had spread across one side of his forehead from a laceration at his hairline, now held together by a series of butterfly strips. Blade was propped up on pillows and Lorraine didn’t miss his wince as he tried to sit up straighter in the bed. Ditzy had told her he had concussion, a bad whiplash injury and all the pain that followed a dislocated shoulder.

She hurried to his side, trying – and probably failing – to keep the anxiety off her face. “Stay where you are, you idiot!”

He smiled at her. “You forgot to bring me some grapes.”

With a triumphant look, Lorraine opened her capacious handbag and removed a bunch of green, seedless grapes with a flourish. “Would I forget your grapes?”

“I should have known better than to underestimate your bloody handbag,” he said, smiling at her. “What else is in there?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” she retorted, closing the bag and whisking it away from him. “A lady has to be allowed some secrets.” She bent over the bed and pressed a light kiss to his lips. “Hello, Niall.”

He reached up with his good hand and stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “Hello, Lorraine. Thanks for coming.”

The slight knot of tension that settled on her stomach and had obstinately refused to budge started to dissipate. She knew he hated hospitals – the legacy of his stay in one after his parents’ death in a car crash when he’d been a young boy – and a small treacherous part of her had wondered whether he would actually want her to visit at all. But the way his mouth had opened instantly under hers had been all the answer she needed.

She deepened the kiss, feeling his tongue slide against hers as some of the tension started to leave his body. She groped for his hand and squeezed his fingers. When she finally drew back, they were both smiling and he no longer looked like he wanted to pin someone to the wall with one of his knives.

Speaking of which…

“There’s one under the pillow,” he told her with a grin. “Ditzy knows I can’t sleep without a teddy bear.”

She rolled her eyes. Knowing him, that wouldn’t be the only one within reach, but she knew better than to enquire too closely. Parting Blade from his knives was like trying to prise a limpet off a rock with the aid of nothing more than a Jelly Baby. She pulled a chair up to the side of the bed, still holding his left hand, and sat down.

“If I asked you how you were feeling, would you tell me the truth?”

“Try me.”

“How are you feeling, Niall?”

“Like crap,” he admitted, much to her surprise. “I’ve got some inconsiderate bastard using a rock-drill on the inside of my skull, my neck aches like buggery and my shoulder feels like it’s been ripped out of its socket and then kicked back in again by some fucker wearing a pair of hobnailed boots who then decided to stamp on it for good measure.” He thought for a moment and then added, “And I need a piss.”

The look of disgust on his face when he delivered the final remark triggered a laugh that Lorraine hadn’t expected to be able to raise in such surroundings. Blade grinned at her rather sheepishly.

“Can I fetch you a… bottle or something?” she asked.

His green eyes flickered to what looked like a cardboard bottle on the high table next to the bed and he declared, “I am not pissing in something that looks like it’s been made from recycled egg boxes.”

“I don’t imagine they’d use them if they weren’t fit for purpose,” she pointed out, stifling a giggle. She knew she shouldn’t laugh, but she had more than a sneaking suspicion that he’d only brought the subject up to defuse any remaining tension, and she had to admit that he’d succeeded. The sight of her highly-trained Special Forces boyfriend staring mordantly at something that did indeed look like it had been made from recycled egg boxes was an awful lot funnier than it should have been.

“That’s not the point. I have a large bladder, it’s very full and that thing isn’t very big.”

“There are two of them,” she pointed out helpfully.

The glare she got in response to that remark just made her laugh even harder.

“You’re taking advantage of my infirmity.”

“You’re pouting.”

He reached out and stroked her cheek again. “And you’ve lost that pinched looked around your eyes, so it worked, didn’t it? But I do still need a piss and those sodding nurses told me not to get out of bed. Do me a favour and keep watch while I flagrantly disobey orders…”

She was about to argue with him when the sound of approaching footsteps put an end to the debate – at least for the moment. Someone gave a sharp rap on the door.

“Fuck off,” Blade muttered.

“I heard that,” Ditzy said cheerfully. “If you don’t behave yourself I’ll borrow a well-sharpened rectal thermometer and insist on taking your temperature.” The medic smiled at Lorraine. “Is he behaving himself?”

“Well, he hasn’t disembowelled anyone, so I suppose the answer to that ought to be yes.”

“Does he want anything?”

“He wants to get out of here,” Blade growled.

Ditzy waved an airy hand at him. “Not talking to you, mate. Well-known fact that you don’t talk to cripples, you only talk to their minders.” He grinned at Lorraine and held out a plastic up full of what looked like coffee. “Does he take sugar?”

She grinned back, entering into the spirit of the decidedly un-politically correct exchange. “Yes, two. And he says he wants a piss.”

“Well, I’m not holding his bloody dick.”

The soldiers had long since stopped pussy-footing around her and minding their language. The fact that she could out-swear even Joel Stringer if she set her mind to it and had held her own against Finn and the other lads on numerous occasions on the indoor range had gone a long way to earning their acceptance, even before she’d starting going out with Blade.

Ditzy set the coffee down on the table next the bed and stared down at his friend. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“None.”

“What’s the name of the current Home Secretary?”

Malice glittered in Blade’s green eyes. “Not Gillian fucking Clements, I hope.”

“Correct. She handed in her resignation a few hours ago.”

Blade shifted slightly on the pillows, failing to stifle a grimace. “Her husband was handy enough in a tight spot, though. How are the rest of them?”

“Anne Churchill is still in intensive care. They’ve had to remove her spleen but they think she’ll pull through. Charlie Marsh’s leg was broken in four places, but he’s been pinned and plated. Ricky Carey has got six broken ribs and is already chatting up the nurses.”

Ditzy didn’t give the roll-call of the dead members of Ed Mason’s ill-fated hunting trip to the Cretaceous, including Mason himself, but she presumed Blade already knew who hadn’t survived.

“What’s going to happen to Carey and the others?”

“Cutter’s planning a debrief that’ll make the buggers think they’ve just been through SERE, but apart from that the bosses say they won’t have anything to worry about.”

Lorraine smiled. Ditzy wasn’t far wrong when he likened Nick Cutter’s demands for information to the notoriously brutal interrogation that soldiers were subjected to as part of their Survive, Evade, Resist, Extract training. The academic was going to be in his element with what appeared to be a long-term anomaly at his disposal and she was already wondering how the hell they were going to find the funds for the inevitable research programme, but that was a worry for another day. For now, they had more… pressing matters at hand.

She glanced meaningfully at the door to the small en-suite bathroom.

“Spoilsport,” Ditzy complained. “OK, Mr Grouchy, I shall personally supervise the emptying of your bladder – on a strictly ‘look, no hands’ basis – and then I’ll leave you two love-birds to coo at each other for a while longer. We’ve got rooms organised at Farnley Hall, Lorraine. I’ll run you back there later, if you like. I’ve already arranged overnight parking. You won’t get clamped. No one in their right minds will keep this bastard here a minute longer than necessary, so they’ll be paying us to take him away by tomorrow.”

The mention of an early discharge was enough to make Blade overlook any mention of cooing and love-birds. His face lightened immediately as he dragged the sheets back to display strong, tanned thighs. He’d clearly refused a hospital gown and had insisted on keeping his boxer shorts on.

It was fortunate that Lorraine had stopped off en-route to buy fresh underwear and a toothbrush for him, as well as the grapes. She was a great believer in making sure that the basic necessities of life were catered for. A small, well-stocked travel case always lived in the boot of her car and she kept another in her wardrobe at home. Old habits died hard.

Movement was clearly still painful for Blade, which was hardly surprising. His right side was livid with bruising from the results of the Land Rover he’d been travelling in losing a game of cat and mouse to a Tyrannosaurus rex. Ditzy had only given Lorraine the bare minimum of information, but she knew that the vehicle had been badly damaged and one of its passengers – Ed Mason – had been killed, his neck broken in the crash.

It was a measure of Blade’s discomfort that when Ditzy offered him a shoulder to lean on, he took it. The two men made their way slowly to the small bathroom and a few moments later, she heard the sound of her boyfriend’s bladder being emptied. She suppressed a smile. He’d been right, the two egg-box bottles wouldn’t have been enough.

The look Blade gave her as he made his way slowly back to the bed said, I told you so, without the need for words. She schooled her features into a neutral expression and said, “Feeling better, darling?”

“Yes, thank you,” he said. He cast a hopeful look in her direction and added, “Will you plump my pillows up for me?”

Ditzy groaned. “Oh Christ, he’s been taking lessons from Lyle. He’ll be demanding boiled eggs for breakfast and wanting his toast cut into little fingers, I can see it bloody coming. All right, sunshine, you be a good little wounded soldier and Uncle Ditzy will be back to tuck you up in half an hour.” He glanced at Lorraine and asked, “Is that long enough?”

“He needs to get some sleep,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” And however much her boyfriend might deny it, he knew she was right. The walk to the toilet and back had sapped Blade’s energy. However much he hated hospitals, he wasn’t going anywhere until the following day at the earliest and sleep would be the best thing for him.

When the door had closed behind the medic, Lorraine plumped up her boyfriend’s pillows, being careful not to dislodge the sheathed knife nestling underneath them, and stood back to admire her handiwork. He looked reasonably comfortable on the narrow hospital bed. Stubble stood out darkly on his face and neck, but that wasn’t unusual. The bandage around his shoulder and the sling that held his arm across his chest was a pale contrast to his deeply-tanned skin. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the trail of hair than ran down from his navel to disappear into the waistband of the boxer shorts that were riding indecently low on his slim hips. A trail of hair that she always enjoyed following…

He caught the direction of her glance and grinned. “A little something to help me sleep, maybe?”

“You’ve got a headache.”

“It’s better than it was,” he said, clearly lying through his teeth. “You know I hate hospitals.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” she demanded, using a phrase she’d learnt from Blade’s beloved grandmother.

“It’ll take my mind off being stuck here and give me something nice to think about after you’ve gone.” He was shamelessly wheedling now, and Ditzy was right, he had been taking lessons from Lyle.

She glanced at the door. Ditzy may have said half an hour, but there was always the prospect of one of the nurses deciding to look in on them… She caught the drift of her own thoughts and treated him to one of the glares that normally sent even the cheekiest of his team-mates scurrying for cover.

His pupils were blown wide with a mix of whatever cocktail of painkillers and anti-inflammatories they’d stuffed him full of and she could barely make out the rim of emerald green surrounding them. He’d broken out the puppy-dog eyes now and her self-control was slipping as fast as his had.

Lorraine reached out and ran her fingers down the trail of dark hair, over the taut skin of his stomach and under the waistband of his boxers to encircle his already half-hard cock. She hadn’t spent several months in the company of soldiers not to know what they were like after an op, as they called it. And by that they didn’t mean the sort of operation that went on in a hospital. She was used to him and the others coming back into the ARC as high as kites on adrenaline, laughing and joking even after incidents that had made her want to throw up just from reading the reports. But she’d long since learnt not to judge. She’d been there, done that and worn that particular blood-stained teeshirt so she certainly wasn’t in any position to cast the first stone.

His skin was silky and smooth under her fingers and she knew from the quiet gasp that she’d just drawn from him that this wasn’t going to take long. With one ear out for any sounds that might indicate someone heading in their direction, Lorraine leaned down and captured his lips with hers. He was pliant for once, letting her direct the kiss, eyes closed as he surrendered to the pleasure she was bringing him. A few moments later, he moaned into her mouth and she felt a tell-tale stickiness cover her palm.

She smiled against his lips and murmured, “Better now?”

He looked wholly relaxed for the first time since she’d entered the room. “Fucking peachy. I think you might just have made me think differently about hospitals.”

She pulled a tissue from her bag and wiped her fingers. “Good, but if one word of this gets anywhere near any of your mob then I’ll have to kill you.”

“A gentleman never kisses and tells.”

“You’re no gentleman.”

He grinned like a cat that had got both the cream and the canary but was polite enough not to point out that anyone who wanked their boyfriend off in a hospital bed was probably no lady.

“That’s twice you’ve threatened to kill me tonight,” he said sleepily. “Which is worse, nosing in your handbag or telling the lads what you just did?”

Without hesitation, she replied, “Nosing in my handbag, of course. But don’t push your luck, or I might just suggest they keep you in for another night.” She kissed him firmly on the lips then said, “Go to sleep, Niall, there’s a good boy.”

He closed his eyes obediently and was asleep within moments.

She fished a packet of wet-wipes out of her bag, proceeded to clean her hand rather more thoroughly, then drew the sheet up around his chest, even though the room was warm and made sure that he had a glass of water on the table if he woke up during the night.

By the time Ditzy arrived back, Blade was sleeping deeply, a rare look of peace on his face. She brushed a feather-light kiss across his forehead and followed the medic out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

Ditzy drew her into a brief hug. “Come on, he’s not the only one who needs a decent kip. You look all in.”

“We’ll take good care of him,” the nurse she’d spoken to on arrival said as Lorraine walked past her desk.

“So much for my cover story,” Lorraine commented wryly, as they walked down the corridor.

Ditzy laughed. “Nurses are scary, but believe me, when you’re on a mission, you’re worse. And she didn’t even know that there’s a Sig Sauer P228 in your handbag.”

The look Lorraine trained on him didn’t even cause him to flinch. She sighed. She was obviously losing her touch…