Fic, No More Secrets, Stephen, Nick, 12
Jun. 4th, 2012 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredbassettTitle : No More Secrets
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Stephen, Nick
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : 1.6
Summary : Someone decides it’s high time that Stephen stopped keeping secrets.
A/N : Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kristen_mara’s birthday. I hope you had a lovely day, sweetie! With thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.
Nick Cutter put down the book he’d been reading, ran his fingers through hair that was probably still slightly sticky with the salt on the wind from a day spent collecting fossils on a Dorset beach and yawned widely.
“Will you make sure all the lights are off when everyone else turns in, Stephen? You know what Mrs Dawlish is like if she sees lights left on all night.”
Stephen looked up from his own book and nodded.
The converted stable block that served as accommodation for numerous geology field trips to the area was opposite the owner’s farmhouse. Mrs Dawlish was a chronic insomniac who disliked waste in any shape or form. If a light got left on overnight they’d all be moaned at in the morning.
One by one, the other students finished their drinks – making sure to put any bottles or cans in the boxes provided as their landlady was also a holy terror on the subject of recycling – and made their way into the bunkroom at the far end of the building, leaving Stephen with a half-empty bottle of beer. As usual on a field trip, they’d gone to the pub when they’d finished on the beach and had sunk several pints there before making their way back across the fields to the hostel. Dinner had consisted of an enormous chilli con carne and baked potatoes that two of the third years had cooked, and had been followed by more alcohol.
There would be a few sore heads around in the morning, including Stephen’s, but as ever, Nick would be up with the lark, cooking bacon and making copious amounts of strong tea. Anyone who didn’t want the piss taken out of them for the rest of the trip would struggle out of their bunks by eight o’clock, no matter how bad they felt.
Despite the amount he’d drunk, Stephen wasn’t quite ready for bed. He threw another log into the wood-burning stove, finished the beer in one long swallow and poured himself a nightcap of whisky from the bottle that Nick had left beside his chair.
If truth be told – and there hadn’t been much of that in Stephen’s life for a while – he wanted to make sure Nick was fast asleep before he made his way to the small twin-bedded room next to the main bunkroom that they always shared. Nick had drunk a fair amount that night and when he was drunk, if he didn’t just fall asleep straightaway, he had a habit of getting talkative, and Stephen couldn’t face another night of lying through his teeth if the subject of Helen came up.
He’d known Nick Cutter for two years and had worked with him for 18 months of that time. He’d known Helen, Nick’s wife, for longer. She had been his supervisor on his PhD. The PhD he’d jacked in when his affair with her had turned sour. He knew he should have cut his losses at that stage and gone to lick his wounds elsewhere, preferably on another continent, but somehow he’d ended up taking a job with the man whose wife he’d spent two months sleeping with. Although to be strictly accurate, there had never been much sleeping involved. Helen had always refused to let him spend the night in her bed, always sending him away like a whipped puppy.
Stephen knew perfectly well that he should have never got involved with a married woman, even though Helen had been living apart from Nick at the time. Nick and Helen had fought like cat and dog on the subject of Helen’s wild theories and their rows had taken on the stuff of legend in the department. But despite the tempestuous nature of their relationship, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that Nick was still madly in love with his wife. Sadly, the only person Helen appeared to be madly in love with was herself. She was happy enough to let Stephen warm her bed or her settee or her desk or wherever else she fancied having sex, but that had been the extent of things between them, and Stephen had known the instant the words had left his lips that telling her he loved her had been a mistake.
Helen didn’t want commitment, or at least not from a wet-behind-the-ears student like him. Stephen had badly misjudged the situation and had been left high and dry. Within a week she had stopped returning his calls, had started making every excuse under the sun to avoid being alone with him and had finally told him that he would need to find another supervisor. There had also been a thinly-veiled threat that she would claim that he had been harassing her if he didn’t back off and leave her alone.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Stephen could now admit to himself that he’d only taken the job as Nick’s lab assistant in the vain hope of staying close to Helen, but much good it had done him. Three months later, she’d disappeared into thin air, leaving her husband a broken man and Stephen – metaphorically speaking – holding the baby.
It had taken nearly a year for Nick to return to anything even remotely resembling normality. A year in which Stephen had covered for him in the department, done his best to make sure Nick lived on something other than booze and fags and simply been there for him. During that time, he’d come close to telling Nick the truth on numerous occasions, usually after copious amounts of alcohol, but he’d always ended up holding back, not wanting to wreck a friendship that now meant more to him than the brief affair had ever done.
Stephen knocked back the whisky, enjoying the smoky taste, and reached for the bottle again.
“That isn’t the answer, you know,” a voice said quietly.
He nearly knocked the bottle over in surprise. He’d been certain he was alone. The room was dimly lit – Mrs Dawlish was a great believer in 40 watt light bulbs being entirely adequate – but he could clearly see the figure of a man sitting opposite him in one of the sagging armchairs.
Stephen rubbed a hand over his eyes, wondering whether he’d actually drunk more than he remembered, as over-consumption of alcohol was the only thing that was likely to be able to explain the fact that he was now being talked to by someone who bore an uncanny resemblance to himself.
Stephen reached for the bottle, poured another generous measure of Scotch into the glass and stared at the man in the chair, doing everything he could to convince himself that he was alone in the room.
“You need to just get on with it and tell him. You can’t keep putting it off.” The man was looking at him with the same mixture of fondness and exasperation he’d been used to getting from his grandmother when she’d been alive.
“Christ, I have drunk too much,” Stephen muttered, taking another mouthful of spirit.
“Yes, you have.” The man’s lips quirked into a half-smile. “You really are an idiot.”
“I must be, if I’m talking to myself,” Stephen muttered, blinking furiously.
He stood up, somewhat shakily, and walked over to the man in the chair. As he expected, his hand passed straight through him and came to rest against the threadbare material of the chair back. But what really bothered Stephen was the fact that up close, he could see that he wasn’t looking at a mirror image of himself, but rather what he thought he might end up looking like in maybe ten years time. There were lines at the corner of his eyes that weren’t there now and a thin scar on his jawline that Stephen didn’t recognise.
Blue eyes stared up at him and the man’s smile widened. “I’m sorry, am I scaring you?”
Stephen took a pace backwards and took in the other man’s clothing. He didn’t own a shirt like that, or a pair of cargo pants that colour, but the boots were the make he always favoured and they looked like they’d seen a lot of wear.
“No, you’re not scaring me,” he lied, equally quietly, glad of the fact that the bunkroom and the bedroom he shared with Nick were down a long corridor on the other side of the kitchen and that no one was likely to hear him talking to himself.
The smile slid into a grin. “That’s a shame, because you need a bloody good scare and I was rather hoping that I’d be the one to oblige. Why haven’t you told him yet?”
“Told him what?” Stephen said, backing up and sitting down rather heavily in his own chair.
The older and considerably more insubstantial version of himself rolled his eyes. “Christ, was I really that annoying when I was your age? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Why haven’t you told Cutter that you spent two months shagging his wife?”
“If you’re me then you know the answer to that as well as I do,” Stephen said. The words came out somewhat more petulantly than he’d intended and earned him another eye roll.
The man gestured to the whisky bottle. “Go on, pour yourself another one, you’re going to need it by the time I’ve finished with you.”
Stephen stared stubbornly at himself. “I don’t need another drink.”
“Trust me, you will.” The man stood up. “Do you want to end up looking like this?”
In the blink of an eye, instead of looking at himself as he might look in another ten years or so, he was looking at a hideously mutilated corpse, clothes ripped to shreds and flesh that was no better. One eye had been torn out; his face had been slashed to ribbons by claws or teeth. His right arm ended in a bloody stump and his left leg had been chewed to the bone.
Stephen felt bile rise in his throat and he closed his eyes against the horrific sight. When he opened then again, the man was back in the other chair, whole again.
“I told you you’d want another drink,” he said pleasantly. “Don’t worry, play your cards right and we can stop you ending up in the same mess that I got myself into.”
Without further argument, Stephen reached for the bottle.
An hour later, he’d finished the whisky but had never felt more sober. A glance at his watch told him that it was now 2.30am. He stood up surprisingly steadily for someone who had just been told how he’d died.
“Don’t worry,” his older self remarked. “You can blame all this on the booze in the morning. And you never know, you might even believe it.”
Without a backward glance, Stephen successfully negotiated the chairs and stools scattered around the kitchen, opened the door to their shared room and shook Nick gently by the shoulder. The response he got was a Gaelic curse and the sight of Nick trying to burrow deeper into the blankets.
“Cutter, we need to talk!”
Nick eventually rolled over onto his back and blinked up at Stephen like surprised kitten. “What’s so urgent that it won’t wait? Has Mrs D just paid us a visit?”
“Not Mrs D, no.” Stephen sad down heavily on the side of the narrow bed. “There’s something I need to tell you…”
Nick propped himself up on his elbows and stared at him. “You look like you’ve just seen a bloody ghost,”
Stephen sighed. Yes, he had, very literally, but he didn’t think now was the time to come clean on that particular score. Especially not when he had something else to get off his chest.
“Just hear me out before you thump me, OK?”
Nick stared at him for a moment and then said quietly. “Aye, lad. Now get on with it...”
Seven Years Later
Standing side by side, Stephen and Nick watched as Helen turned on her heel and disappeared back through the anomaly.
“I don’t think that quite went according to her plan,” Nick commented quietly, brushing his knuckles across the back of Stephen’s hand. “Was it my imagination, or was she hoping you hadn’t already told me?”
Stephen let out a long, slow breath.
As they walked back to the vehicles, just for a moment, he thought he caught sight amidst the trees of the man he might have become.
He raised his hand in a gesture of farewell and in response to Nick’s raised eyebrows said, “It’s a long story. Do you believe in ghosts?”
Nick raised his eyebrows, a thoughtful look on his face. “No, but I remember a night when you looked like you’d seen one.”
Stephen nodded. “That’s because I had.” He glanced around at Ryan and his men packing crates back into their Range Rovers and getting ready to leave the clearing. He exchanged a smile with Claudia and he and Nick climbed into the Hilux.
It was time to tell the truth about something else now, as well.
No more secrets.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Stephen, Nick
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : 1.6
Summary : Someone decides it’s high time that Stephen stopped keeping secrets.
A/N : Written for
kristen_mara’s birthday. I hope you had a lovely day, sweetie! With thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.Nick Cutter put down the book he’d been reading, ran his fingers through hair that was probably still slightly sticky with the salt on the wind from a day spent collecting fossils on a Dorset beach and yawned widely.
“Will you make sure all the lights are off when everyone else turns in, Stephen? You know what Mrs Dawlish is like if she sees lights left on all night.”
Stephen looked up from his own book and nodded.
The converted stable block that served as accommodation for numerous geology field trips to the area was opposite the owner’s farmhouse. Mrs Dawlish was a chronic insomniac who disliked waste in any shape or form. If a light got left on overnight they’d all be moaned at in the morning.
One by one, the other students finished their drinks – making sure to put any bottles or cans in the boxes provided as their landlady was also a holy terror on the subject of recycling – and made their way into the bunkroom at the far end of the building, leaving Stephen with a half-empty bottle of beer. As usual on a field trip, they’d gone to the pub when they’d finished on the beach and had sunk several pints there before making their way back across the fields to the hostel. Dinner had consisted of an enormous chilli con carne and baked potatoes that two of the third years had cooked, and had been followed by more alcohol.
There would be a few sore heads around in the morning, including Stephen’s, but as ever, Nick would be up with the lark, cooking bacon and making copious amounts of strong tea. Anyone who didn’t want the piss taken out of them for the rest of the trip would struggle out of their bunks by eight o’clock, no matter how bad they felt.
Despite the amount he’d drunk, Stephen wasn’t quite ready for bed. He threw another log into the wood-burning stove, finished the beer in one long swallow and poured himself a nightcap of whisky from the bottle that Nick had left beside his chair.
If truth be told – and there hadn’t been much of that in Stephen’s life for a while – he wanted to make sure Nick was fast asleep before he made his way to the small twin-bedded room next to the main bunkroom that they always shared. Nick had drunk a fair amount that night and when he was drunk, if he didn’t just fall asleep straightaway, he had a habit of getting talkative, and Stephen couldn’t face another night of lying through his teeth if the subject of Helen came up.
He’d known Nick Cutter for two years and had worked with him for 18 months of that time. He’d known Helen, Nick’s wife, for longer. She had been his supervisor on his PhD. The PhD he’d jacked in when his affair with her had turned sour. He knew he should have cut his losses at that stage and gone to lick his wounds elsewhere, preferably on another continent, but somehow he’d ended up taking a job with the man whose wife he’d spent two months sleeping with. Although to be strictly accurate, there had never been much sleeping involved. Helen had always refused to let him spend the night in her bed, always sending him away like a whipped puppy.
Stephen knew perfectly well that he should have never got involved with a married woman, even though Helen had been living apart from Nick at the time. Nick and Helen had fought like cat and dog on the subject of Helen’s wild theories and their rows had taken on the stuff of legend in the department. But despite the tempestuous nature of their relationship, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that Nick was still madly in love with his wife. Sadly, the only person Helen appeared to be madly in love with was herself. She was happy enough to let Stephen warm her bed or her settee or her desk or wherever else she fancied having sex, but that had been the extent of things between them, and Stephen had known the instant the words had left his lips that telling her he loved her had been a mistake.
Helen didn’t want commitment, or at least not from a wet-behind-the-ears student like him. Stephen had badly misjudged the situation and had been left high and dry. Within a week she had stopped returning his calls, had started making every excuse under the sun to avoid being alone with him and had finally told him that he would need to find another supervisor. There had also been a thinly-veiled threat that she would claim that he had been harassing her if he didn’t back off and leave her alone.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Stephen could now admit to himself that he’d only taken the job as Nick’s lab assistant in the vain hope of staying close to Helen, but much good it had done him. Three months later, she’d disappeared into thin air, leaving her husband a broken man and Stephen – metaphorically speaking – holding the baby.
It had taken nearly a year for Nick to return to anything even remotely resembling normality. A year in which Stephen had covered for him in the department, done his best to make sure Nick lived on something other than booze and fags and simply been there for him. During that time, he’d come close to telling Nick the truth on numerous occasions, usually after copious amounts of alcohol, but he’d always ended up holding back, not wanting to wreck a friendship that now meant more to him than the brief affair had ever done.
Stephen knocked back the whisky, enjoying the smoky taste, and reached for the bottle again.
“That isn’t the answer, you know,” a voice said quietly.
He nearly knocked the bottle over in surprise. He’d been certain he was alone. The room was dimly lit – Mrs Dawlish was a great believer in 40 watt light bulbs being entirely adequate – but he could clearly see the figure of a man sitting opposite him in one of the sagging armchairs.
Stephen rubbed a hand over his eyes, wondering whether he’d actually drunk more than he remembered, as over-consumption of alcohol was the only thing that was likely to be able to explain the fact that he was now being talked to by someone who bore an uncanny resemblance to himself.
Stephen reached for the bottle, poured another generous measure of Scotch into the glass and stared at the man in the chair, doing everything he could to convince himself that he was alone in the room.
“You need to just get on with it and tell him. You can’t keep putting it off.” The man was looking at him with the same mixture of fondness and exasperation he’d been used to getting from his grandmother when she’d been alive.
“Christ, I have drunk too much,” Stephen muttered, taking another mouthful of spirit.
“Yes, you have.” The man’s lips quirked into a half-smile. “You really are an idiot.”
“I must be, if I’m talking to myself,” Stephen muttered, blinking furiously.
He stood up, somewhat shakily, and walked over to the man in the chair. As he expected, his hand passed straight through him and came to rest against the threadbare material of the chair back. But what really bothered Stephen was the fact that up close, he could see that he wasn’t looking at a mirror image of himself, but rather what he thought he might end up looking like in maybe ten years time. There were lines at the corner of his eyes that weren’t there now and a thin scar on his jawline that Stephen didn’t recognise.
Blue eyes stared up at him and the man’s smile widened. “I’m sorry, am I scaring you?”
Stephen took a pace backwards and took in the other man’s clothing. He didn’t own a shirt like that, or a pair of cargo pants that colour, but the boots were the make he always favoured and they looked like they’d seen a lot of wear.
“No, you’re not scaring me,” he lied, equally quietly, glad of the fact that the bunkroom and the bedroom he shared with Nick were down a long corridor on the other side of the kitchen and that no one was likely to hear him talking to himself.
The smile slid into a grin. “That’s a shame, because you need a bloody good scare and I was rather hoping that I’d be the one to oblige. Why haven’t you told him yet?”
“Told him what?” Stephen said, backing up and sitting down rather heavily in his own chair.
The older and considerably more insubstantial version of himself rolled his eyes. “Christ, was I really that annoying when I was your age? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Why haven’t you told Cutter that you spent two months shagging his wife?”
“If you’re me then you know the answer to that as well as I do,” Stephen said. The words came out somewhat more petulantly than he’d intended and earned him another eye roll.
The man gestured to the whisky bottle. “Go on, pour yourself another one, you’re going to need it by the time I’ve finished with you.”
Stephen stared stubbornly at himself. “I don’t need another drink.”
“Trust me, you will.” The man stood up. “Do you want to end up looking like this?”
In the blink of an eye, instead of looking at himself as he might look in another ten years or so, he was looking at a hideously mutilated corpse, clothes ripped to shreds and flesh that was no better. One eye had been torn out; his face had been slashed to ribbons by claws or teeth. His right arm ended in a bloody stump and his left leg had been chewed to the bone.
Stephen felt bile rise in his throat and he closed his eyes against the horrific sight. When he opened then again, the man was back in the other chair, whole again.
“I told you you’d want another drink,” he said pleasantly. “Don’t worry, play your cards right and we can stop you ending up in the same mess that I got myself into.”
Without further argument, Stephen reached for the bottle.
An hour later, he’d finished the whisky but had never felt more sober. A glance at his watch told him that it was now 2.30am. He stood up surprisingly steadily for someone who had just been told how he’d died.
“Don’t worry,” his older self remarked. “You can blame all this on the booze in the morning. And you never know, you might even believe it.”
Without a backward glance, Stephen successfully negotiated the chairs and stools scattered around the kitchen, opened the door to their shared room and shook Nick gently by the shoulder. The response he got was a Gaelic curse and the sight of Nick trying to burrow deeper into the blankets.
“Cutter, we need to talk!”
Nick eventually rolled over onto his back and blinked up at Stephen like surprised kitten. “What’s so urgent that it won’t wait? Has Mrs D just paid us a visit?”
“Not Mrs D, no.” Stephen sad down heavily on the side of the narrow bed. “There’s something I need to tell you…”
Nick propped himself up on his elbows and stared at him. “You look like you’ve just seen a bloody ghost,”
Stephen sighed. Yes, he had, very literally, but he didn’t think now was the time to come clean on that particular score. Especially not when he had something else to get off his chest.
“Just hear me out before you thump me, OK?”
Nick stared at him for a moment and then said quietly. “Aye, lad. Now get on with it...”
Seven Years Later
Standing side by side, Stephen and Nick watched as Helen turned on her heel and disappeared back through the anomaly.
“I don’t think that quite went according to her plan,” Nick commented quietly, brushing his knuckles across the back of Stephen’s hand. “Was it my imagination, or was she hoping you hadn’t already told me?”
Stephen let out a long, slow breath.
As they walked back to the vehicles, just for a moment, he thought he caught sight amidst the trees of the man he might have become.
He raised his hand in a gesture of farewell and in response to Nick’s raised eyebrows said, “It’s a long story. Do you believe in ghosts?”
Nick raised his eyebrows, a thoughtful look on his face. “No, but I remember a night when you looked like you’d seen one.”
Stephen nodded. “That’s because I had.” He glanced around at Ryan and his men packing crates back into their Range Rovers and getting ready to leave the clearing. He exchanged a smile with Claudia and he and Nick climbed into the Hilux.
It was time to tell the truth about something else now, as well.
No more secrets.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2012-06-04 08:52 pm (UTC)>It was time to tell the truth about something else now, as well.
That ever since he had seen his ghost, Stephen could be a high-functioning alcoholic, but only when he drank.
seriously, this is a though-provoking what-if, a unique counterfactual. excellently-woven.
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Date: 2012-06-04 11:04 pm (UTC)Yay, Ryan survives, the timeline doesn't change, and Helen doesn't ruin things for Nick and Stephen!
I love they way that Future Stephen talks to himself and gives himself a good scare - chilling and funny at the same time. Hee about those cargo pants. The background you've given for the affair makes perfect sense. Thanks very much for such a wonderful fix-it *hugs the boys*
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Date: 2012-06-05 09:45 am (UTC)*hugs*
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Date: 2012-06-05 12:57 am (UTC)Wish Helen had gotten hers that way in the show. grrr.
Many are fascinated by her, but she just gives me the creeps :(
And Yay for Ryan and Claudia still being there, too!
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Date: 2012-06-28 09:20 pm (UTC)The fix-it? Just great. ^_^
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Date: 2012-06-29 07:33 am (UTC)