fredbassett | Fic, Silk and Steel, Part 74

Title : Silk and Steel, Part 74
Authors : fredbassett & munchkinofdoom
Fandom : Primeval
Characters : Ryan, Norman
Rating : 18
Disclaimer : Not ours, no money made, don’t sue
Spoilers : None
Summary : It appears that Ryan has been shot dead whilst attempting to escape a date with a Government executioner. Leek and Thomson have to contain the fallout in the ARC from Ditzy's actions and prevent him from meeting the fate that had been about to overtake Ryan.
Warning : Slave!fic.
A/N : 1) So much for a short hiatus! As most of you know, events very much overtook us last year and turned the gap into something much longer than expected, but we’re back now. The links to all previous parts can be found HERE and for convenience, the last part posted can be found HERE. We will be back to posting weekly on Wednesdays. 2) Captain Thomson, who is mentioned in this chapter, appears by kind permission of his creator,

deinonychus_1

Ryan did his best to keep his breathing slow and even, betraying no hint that he was gradually returning to consciousness. He had no fucking idea where he was or what had happened to him, but his mouth tasted like something small and furry had crawled in there and died. To make matters worse, his head ached abominably and he felt sick.

He drew in a long slow breath through his nose, clinging desperately to all his training to help him control his reactions and fight the nausea. He was lying on his left side in the classic first aid recovery position, his left arm outstretched, his right leg drawn up to keep him stable and prevent him rolling onto his stomach. Whoever had brought him here – wherever here was – hadn’t intended him to choke on his tongue or on his own vomit. It was taking every ounce of self-control Ryan possessed, reinforced by long hard years in one of the toughest military units in the world, to remain unmoving. The only good thing about his current situation was that the enforced concentration was helping to clear his mind.

The only thing he knew for certain was that he wasn’t dead yet, nor was he strung up on a frame in the Punishment Room awaiting the first, agonising stroke of the executioner’s whip, which is where he should have been.

His last memory was of sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in one of the ARC’s holding cells, accepting a cup of coffee from Ditzy. He remembered half-wondering if the medic had been using the drink as a cover for administering some sort of painkiller, but the executioner charged with carrying out the flogging would also administer drugs tests before doing his job, and if they revealed the presence of any substances designed to ease Ryan’s death, Ditzy would be the next one to feel the bite of the man’s whip. He counted Ditzy as a close friend, but Ryan had known the medic wouldn’t be that stupid.

That notwithstanding, something had happened and Ryan still didn’t know what. He could feel a hard but slightly yielding surface underneath him. The surrounding air was warm, tainted with a musty smell overlain with a mix of oil, paint and metal. He could hear a low humming noise from some sort of plant or machinery, but he couldn’t quite work out what was producing the noise, or where it was coming from although he did know there had been no noises like that in his cell. Or anywhere else in the ARC that he was familiar with.

A wave of sickness washed over him, causing warmth to rush to his head at the same time as his stomach churned unpleasantly, threatening to imminently expel its contents. Ryan knew he was fighting a losing battle against his body’s reactions but all his instincts were still working overtime to prevent him revealing the fact that he had come back to his senses. The last thing he wanted was to betray his wakefulness before he had ascertained where the hell he was or whether he was under observation but the ability to make a choice in the matter appeared to be diminishing rapidly. He concentrated on his breathing the way he’d been taught: in for the count of three, out for the same count, in, out, repeat, repeat…

As the general feeling of disorientation and sickness finally started to subside, Ryan became aware of the fact that he wasn’t alone. Accompanying the background hum was the soft, almost imperceptible sound of someone else’s breathing. Ryan forced himself to remain still, fighting against the instinct to open his eyes and find out who the hell was with him. He was certain now that he was lying in semi-darkness. Opening his eyes the barest fraction had confirmed that, as well as revealing that he was laying on a thin foam camping mattress on what looked like a dusty concrete floor.

The shock of hearing a sudden hacking cough from only a few feet away almost succeeded in startling Ryan into betraying the fact that he was awake. Adrenaline surged through his system, forcing down the feeling of sickness and almost triggering his flight or fight mechanism.

Before he had chance to properly process what he’d heard, a familiar voice commented dryly, “You can stop pretending now, laddie. There’s only me ‘ere.”

Of all the voices in the world, Norman’s hadn’t been one that Ryan had expected to hear. His eyes flew open in surprise and, forgetting his cracked ribs, Ryan came upright in a movement too sudden to be advisable. His vision clouded for a moment and pain lanced though his chest as his stomach contents chose that moment to make a break for freedom. A moment later, a bucket was shoved under his head and a strong hand held Ryan’s shoulder while he retched. The cold bacon roll he’d eaten in the early hours of the morning was the only food he’d had that day, so very little actually came up, but even so sweat sprang out on Ryan’s forehead and he started shaking with reaction to the pain and fear he’d been trying so hard to suppress.

When Ryan had finished coughing and spitting, Norman took the bucket away and held out a clean handkerchief in one of his grimy thick-knuckled hands. Ryan took it gratefully and wiped his mouth. The next thing the white-haired maintenance supervisor offered him was a bottle of chilled water. Ryan swilled his mouth out, reached for the bucket again and spat, before taking another mouthful and savouring the clean, cold taste.

“Got some beer, if you’d rather,” Norman offered, with a blithe disregard for whatever drugs were clearly still making their presence felt in Ryan’s system.

Ryan stared at him incredulously, a thousand questions trying to claw their way out of his throat. He shook his head weakly and settled for, “What the fuck happened?”

“You’re dead, laddie,” Norman informed him with evident relish. “That’s what’s ‘appened.”

Ryan looked around him, finally taking in his surroundings. He appeared to be in some sort of basement. The walls were made of whitewashed breezeblocks, planks of wood were stacked up in one corner, next to an enormous roll of corrugated tubing wound into a loose coil and secured with cable grips. Tins of paint were heaped up precariously in another corner, with a large hammer and several other tools balanced on top of them. A few feet away from him, Norman was sitting on a huge wooden cable drum, looking like a gnome in a blue overall perched on an unlikely toadstool.

“It isn’t hot enough for hell,” Ryan commented, sipping at the bottled water and wondering exactly where in the bowels of Norman’s subterranean kingdom he’d ended up.

“Don’t you go believin’ everythin’ them bastards in Lambeth like to put about,” Norman declared, his blue eyes glinting with amusement.

Ryan leaned back against the wall and rested his aching head on the hard blocks. He’d never been able to make head nor tail of Norman’s theological diatribes at the best of times and, by any stretch of even the most demented of imaginations this couldn’t be described as the best of times.

“So, I’m dead but I might not be in hell… or maybe hell just isn’t very hot...” Ryan closed his eyes and began to wonder if he was just experiencing some sort of pain or drug-induced hallucination. “Norman, do me a favour, mate. Let me have this in words of one syllable.”

“I just told ‘ee, you’re dead,” Norman said smugly. “’im upstairs…” Norman turned his head and spat accurately into the bucket, “’as got a body to prove it, an’ all. So you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about, laddie.” Norman’s eyes narrowed slightly and he added, “But mebbe, just mebbe, there’s more to ‘im than we’ve reckoned.”

“’im upstairs?” Ryan queried weakly.

“Tommo,” Norman clarified. His lined face split into a wide grin. “Yon executioner chappie was up in Oily Ollie’s office creating merry ‘ell, sayin’ them idiots in White’all ‘ad promised their Saudi mates your ‘ead on a plate and what the ‘ell was Ollie doin’ lettin’ you get killed out o’ turn, like, when in marches Tommo with your ‘ead, still drippin’. Made a right mess o’ the carpets ‘e did. He ‘ad ‘alf o’ the bleeding staff throwin’ up and the other ‘alf fainting. Never reckoned the bugger ‘ad it in ‘im.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. He wasn’t quite sure what was more mind-boggling: Norman’s ability to deliver a summation like that whilst barely pausing to draw breath or the actual contents of his speech. “He cut my head off?”

“Borrowed one o’ young Blade’s knives, ‘e did. Only thing anyone ‘ad that was sharp enough. Collar made it a bit tricky, but Tommo managed all right.” The old man’s face was alight with mischief as he made a sawing motion with one hand and then mimed holding up a severed head with the other. “Would ‘ave been a mite easier to carry if your bleedin’ ‘air wasn’t so short.”

“Can you run that past me again in English?” Ryan pleaded.

Norman sighed. “Do keep up, laddie.” He tossed Ryan a battered hip flask. “Get some o’ that down you, it’ll put ‘airs on your chest.”

Ryan caught the flask, unscrewed the top and swallowed a generous measure of what appeared to be brandy-flavoured paint-stripper. He had a feeling he was going to need it.

* * * * *

Ryan took another swig of the brandy, feeling it burn a fiery trail down his throat and into his stomach. The alcohol had succeeded in quelling the nausea, but he dreaded to think how it would react with the drugs that he now knew Ditzy had contrived to administer along with the coffee.

“I’ll fucking kill the lot of them,” he muttered, completely aghast at the risks his men had taken for him while struggling to get what was left of his brain around what the hell had been going in.

“You can’t, laddie. You’re already dead.”

“So you keep saying.” Ryan took another drink then handed the flask to Norman, who took a mouthful and passed it back.

Identical replicas? Clones? It was like something from one of Temple’s sodding science fiction films. It finally explained the uncanny resemblance between the body that had disappeared from the basement after the attack on the ARC and Sergeant Miller, but who was at the back of it all? For all his dislike of the man, Ryan found it hard to believe that Thomson was up to his neck in that side of things, especially when, from what Norman had said, he’d actually gone out on a limb to shield Ditzy and the others from the consequences of their actions. Or at least the actions that the Section 42 captain had known about.

Ryan still wasn’t entirely clear how the hell his men had pulled off their stunt, but he knew it had involved Norman and Blade engineering selective malfunctions in large numbers of surveillance cameras under the guise of electrical failures that had been laid at the door of the contractors who were still attempting to put the ARC back together again. And from what Norman had said, Thomson had also made it perfectly clear that he’d expected Connor to deal with any remaining inconvenient images that might have been caught on camera.

“They’re not going to let Ditz get away with this, the stupid fucker. He’s got a bloody girlfriend to think about, for Christ’s sake. So’s Chris Wilkes. What the hell possessed them?” Ryan was talking more to himself than to his companion, as he struggled to get to grips with what his men had done.

If he’d understood Norman correctly, the maintenance supervisor and Blade had been chucking hand-grenades into the lake when they’d seen a man who looked like Sergeant Miller out in the grounds at a time when they’d been certain Miller had been in the armoury. They’d followed him and arrived in one of the old bunkers in the grounds in the middle of the morning in time to see the man who looked like Miller using a lethal injection to kill a man who looked like Ryan.

Jesus, his fucking head hurt just thinking about it!

They’d then smuggled the body that looked like Ryan back into the ARC with Ditzy’s help, drugged Ryan in his cell and done a swap, making it look to any casual observer that he was just asleep. Then, in the final crowning lunacy, they’d staged an elaborate charade in which Ditzy had blown two bloody great big holes in an already-dead body, exploding some bags of concealed blood in the process. It looked like they’d simply been relying on the fact that in those circumstances no one was going to have any reason to examine the body too closely. Ryan shook his head, unable to work out whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

The risks they’d taken had been off the scale, and even with Thomson busily running interference for them – for reasons that Ryan was completely failing to fathom – they weren’t out of the woods yet. Downing Street, or even Thomson’s masters in Section 42 were still quite capable of demanding more heads by way of appeasement, even though it seemed they’d already been made a present of one, in all its blood-stained glory.

He shook his head. “Jesus, Norman, they’re as mad as box of sodding frogs, the whole fucking lot of them!”

“Don’t blame them, laddie. They’re loyal to the man who’s watched their backs for long enough,” Norman said quietly, abruptly dropping his usual eccentric speech patterns in favour of the sort of Home Counties accent more usually associated with the likes of Lester.

Oh fuck, Lester! Ryan rested his forehead on his drawn-up knees, ignoring the pain in his chest. The man who, only that morning, had dropped his guard long enough to tell Ryan he loved him, had seen his dead body. And to make matters fucking worse, had probably even seen Thomson carrying Ryan’s severed head through the ARC like something out of a fucking horror film. His stomach churned again and he downed another mouthful of Norman’s brandy, fighting fire with fire.

“Told you it was good stuff,” Norman commented. “Now stop fretting.”

The old man’s voice was strangely reassuring when he dropped the persona he’d no doubt spent years cultivating, and Ryan was reminded of the fact that Norman had been around the Ministry of Defence longer than just about anyone and was rumoured to have a security clearance even higher than Lester’s.

“There’s bugger all you can do about it now,” Norman continued. “And for what it’s worth, my money is on Leek and Thomson pulling this one off. For whatever reason, Thomson has made it perfectly clear that your lads have got his backing and he’s got a fair bit of clout. Stringer is pulling in some favours as well. So stop worrying and get used to the fact that you’re still alive. There’s no way anyone is going to find you down here. There’s a bloody warren of passages under this place that no one knows about but me. I can have you out of here at any time without anyone being any the wiser”

And spend the rest of his life as a fugitive? The idea didn’t hold much appeal, but Ryan knew that he shouldn’t kick a gift horse in the teeth. He was alive and there was no way he was going to squander the gift he’d been given even though the army had been at the centre of his existence for so long that he’d actually stopped thinking about what life without a collar might me like.

“They’ve got a plan, laddie,” Norman said, no doubt divining exactly the turn Ryan’s thoughts had taken.

Ryan groaned. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know what sort of plan his lads had come up with, not if their efforts so far were anything to go by. For all he knew, they’d probably lined him up a place in a fucking travelling circus.

And the grin that Norman gave him did absolutely nothing to allay his fears.

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reggietate.livejournal.com

Yay! for the return of this :-) Can't wait to see how the fallout unfolds.

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Fic, Silk and Steel, Part 74

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