Fic, Beating the Clock, Danny/Ryan, 18
Jun. 15th, 2014 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredbassettTitle : Beating the Clock
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Danny/Ryan, Lester, Becker, Nick
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 4,550
Summary : When the phone call he’s been waiting for doesn’t come, Danny wants to know why, and he’s not a man to give up easily.
A/N: Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
primeval_denial Art Challenge for this artwork by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fififolle. Thanks are also due to fifi for making this fabulous cover for the fic! And many thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.
The movement of the duvet sliding off his shoulder brought Danny out of a pleasant dream to the realisation that early morning sun was slanting in through the window and warming his face. He rolled onto his side and took in the sight of his lover’s smoothly muscled back, skin tanned from a holiday where they’d done little more for a week than swim, walk and fuck like a pair of randy teenagers.
The UK had been basking in some unusually warm weather for the time of year, and even the sea off the coast of Cornwall had been warm enough for once without having to resort to wearing wetsuits.
But the fact that Ryan was sitting on the side of the bed staring at the screen of his mobile phone told Danny that all good things had no doubt just come to an end. “Tom?”
Ryan finished reading the message and turned to him. “A job’s just come up. Sorry…”
Danny held his finger up to Ryan’s lips, forestalling the apology. “I’m a copper, remember. We’re as good at broken marriages as soldiers, so no apologies needed.”
“Good job we’re not married then,” Ryan said, before catching the tip of Danny’s finger between his teeth and nipping lightly. “Fancy a shag and a bacon roll before we go?”
Danny grinned, making sure not to let any hint show in his face that he was disappointed that their much-needed break had been cut short by a few days. He’d known the score when he’d started dating a soldier, so there was no point whinging now.
“I knew there was a reason why I liked you, soldier boy. My turn to top.”
* * * * *
Despite the fact that he’d just received a summons back to Credenhill, the sex was unhurried, with Ryan lying in a relaxed sprawl on the wide bed, enjoying Danny’s lazy thrusts. His lover was currently entertaining himself by withdrawing almost to the tip and then sliding back in a long, smooth movement, raking Ryan’s prostate and sending bursts of pleasure dancing up his spine.
Danny was a generous lover, despite his smart mouth and bad-boy posturing. They’d met six months ago in London. Ryan had been on secondment to the Sabre team based in the capital; Danny had been running errands for his harassed DI, busy liaising with them over a big terrorist surveillance op. The whole thing had been a monumental fuck-up based on some extremely dodgy intel, but the powers that be had been in a flat spin as usual, so they’d had to go through the motions.
When the job had finally been called off, Ryan had spent the evening with Danny in the French House, a back street Soho pub that reminded him of his favourite dive in Hereford. They’d drunk too much, gone for a Chinese meal at nearly midnight, and then ended up in the same bed back at Danny’s flat, too pissed to manage more than an uncoordinated but satisfying mutual wank. Ryan had ended up falling asleep in the wet patch and waking up in the middle of the morning distinctly sticky, with a faint headache, but more than ready for a return match once a fried breakfast and some strong coffee had taken the edge off the previous nights excess.
Since then they’d developed a comfortable closeness that allowed them both to come and go in the relationship as needed, with no promises made or demanded, but Ryan knew perfectly well that Danny hadn’t been with anyone else in the time they’d been together, and neither had he. Their jobs came with similar pressures, and even when Ryan was in the country, they hadn’t always been able to see much of each other, and they were both crap at texts and phone calls, but somehow they’d managed just fine.
“Stop thinking,” Danny said, punctuating the words with more powerful thrusts that drove Ryan’s hard cock against the sheets, the friction almost enough to send him over the edge.
“Thinking’s against the rules?”
“It is when I’m fucking you and I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”
Ryan turned his head to the side. “Danny?”
Danny pressed a kiss to the side of his face. Neither of them had bothered to shave for a week and the rasp of stubble added to the sensations coursing inexorably through Ryan’s body as Danny’s thick cock continued to move inside him.
“Sorry. Talking crap’s definitely against the rules.”
Danny pushed himself up on his arms and started to move faster, fucking Ryan hard and deep. Ryan pushed back, knowing he was going to feel this for the rest of the day and wanting that reminder of the past week with him in whatever job he was on his way to next.
Climax took them both at the same time, driving all thoughts of either past or future from Ryan’s mind. When Danny finally withdrew, Ryan turned onto his back and pulled his lover into a sweaty hug, feeling the come leaking from his arse and not caring. They’d stick the sheets in the washing machine before leaving the cottage. Danny kissed him with open-mouthed enthusiasm, and if there was a sharper than usual edge to the embrace, neither of them mentioned it.
* * * * *
Riding shotgun for a top secret government project wasn’t exactly what Ryan had expected when a message had arrived on his phone in Cornwall, but it made a nice change from chasing around after terrorists in the UK and insurgents in Afghanistan.
On his first day on the job, his arse still feeling the effects of the early morning shag with Danny, he’d ended up millions of years in the past, seen things that looked like dinosaurs but apparently weren’t because they’d been born too early, or something, and had had to knock some sense into a crazy academic with the butt of his pistol. Danny would have been proud of him.
The sight of some poor sod’s skeleton in a makeshift grave had put something of a damper on the day, but apart from that it had been the most fun he’d had with his clothes on for quite a while. He’d even taken the time to send a quick text to Danny. Nothing special, just a note to say he was sorry their holiday had been cut short and that he’d ring when he had a minute.
He’d received a message back saying: Take care, soldier boy. Next round in the French is on you.
But time passed all too quickly, even though time was something they seemed to have in abundance, and they never did get that drink.
* * * * *
Danny waited six months for another message, but it never came.
At the end of that time, he started making a few discreet enquires with the SAS lads on detachment in London. They were all as close-lipped as a bunch of clams and Danny drew a very resounding blank. But two months later, one of them appeared in the French House late one night and, after a few drinks, quietly delivered the news Danny had been more than half-expecting ever since Ryan had gone off the grid.
In SAS parlance, Ryan had failed to the beat the clock.
His name was no doubt already inscribed at the base of the old clock tower, originally erected in the Regiment’s first home at the barracks in Stirling Lines, then subsequently rebuilt at their new base in Credenhill. Danny only knew about it through a chance remark of Ryan’s that he’d later Googled.
The news turned the beer in Danny’s stomach to acid, and ten minutes later he was as sick as a dog in the bogs, adding to the already unpleasant aroma of piss and worse. The guy, a veteran of god knows how many actions even at 27, gave him a sympathetic look when he came back out, but no more information. It was left to Danny to do his own digging. And dig he certainly did. He was a nosy copper through and through and wasn’t going to let a complete lack of any useful leads stand in his way.
With the help of a mate who’d better remain nameless, he established that Ryan’s last text message had originated in the UK, so armed with that information it wasn’t too hard to narrow down the sort of activity he’d been involved with. The team in London were bored out of their brains on routine crap, but word was starting to get out onto the streets about a crazy gig involving the Home Office. The body count had already been alarmingly high, if what he heard was to be believed, but everyone wanted in, despite that. Adrenaline junkies, the lot of them.
As far as Danny was concerned, the Official Secrets Act existed for the sole purpose of providing information to people like him who were more than happy to drive a double-decker bus though it, so that was exactly what he started to do.
His boyfriend had died on some lunatic government op, and Danny wanted to know what had happened.
Simple. Or maybe not, but he wasn’t going to let that stand in his way.
* * * * *
“I take it you’ve found the answers you were looking for, Danny?”
Lester’s soft-voiced question startled Danny into dropping the manila folder back onto the desk. He turned around, to find Lester standing behind him in the doorway. He’d used the skills picked up from someone he’d nicked a few years ago to pick the lock on the office used to house the confidential mission reports and personnel files. Once in, it had been an easy job to find the correct drawer in the filing cabinet. Lester ran a tight ship and the archives were correspondingly neat and tidy, much like the man himself.
“Yes,” Danny said quietly.
But whilst it was true that he now knew why he’d never got another text from Ryan, the knowledge hadn’t brought him the closure he’d been hoping for. Instead, it had raised even more questions, but none were ones he wanted to share with Lester. At least, not yet.
“Captain Ryan was a good man.” The words were delivered awkwardly, but were clearly meant sincerely.
Lester was not a man prone to overt displays of emotion, and it was obvious that he found Danny’s somewhat more mercurial temperament more than a little trying. He wasn’t too keen on Danny clambering around in the ventilation ducts either, but that was just another cross Lester would have to bear.
Danny nodded, not trusting himself to speak. A photo in the file of Ryan in full black combat kit with a pack over his shoulders and an assault rifle under his arm had brought back a rush of memories. He’d reached out and gently touched the photograph, remembering the feel of Ryan’s skin under his fingers, the softness of his lips and the way his hard, toned body had felt pressed up against him. Danny had wanted answers, but he’d never really expected to find them.
The thought of his lover’s body buried millions of years in the past sent a shiver through him that Lester must have seen. Danny’s boss stepped into the small office and closed the door.
“Now you know what happened, will you stay with the project?”
Lester’s words took Danny by surprise. He certainly hadn’t been thinking of leaving. Far from it. He’d gone to a lot of effort to infiltrate the ARC, he wasn’t going to butt out now.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, guv. Who’d keep soldier boy on his toes?” Danny forced a smile onto his face but he doubted Lester was fooled.
He half-expected Lester to ask more questions, but instead the man simply nodded, as though satisfied with the answer, and left Danny to it, with a murmur of, “Do effect a reverse break-in when you’ve finished. We can’t have everyone rummaging around in the personnel files.”
“Worried I might find out when your birthday is?” Danny called. “You can’t avoid buying cakes forever, you know!”
The sound of Lester’s footsteps retreating down the corridor was all the answer he got.
Danny turned his attention back to the file, swallowing hard around the lump that had appeared in his throat. The file gave the basic details of Ryan’s military career, nothing too sensitive, and also contained the information that he’d had no known next of kin other than an ex-wife who had emigrated to Australia with her parents two years before Ryan’s death. Ryan’s will, made six months after his divorce, left his estate to a charity providing care for injured army personnel, and made no provisions for the disposal of his body. He presumed Ryan had known – and come to terms with – the risks inherent in his chosen profession, and that he must always have been aware of the possibility that he would die in circumstances that made the recovery of his body impossible.
But that didn’t mean Danny had to like it.
He slowly turned the pages of the file, committing to memory the few details it did contain: Ryan’s blood group (0), army number (25010643), place of birth (Bury St Edmunds). Then, as he turned the last page, a couple of photographs slipped out from a pocket at the back. The first was of a list of names inscribed on a block of dark stone. He recognised Ryan’s, and those of three other soldiers that he was familiar with from the reports of that fated mission through the anomaly, all killed by the same nightmare creatures from the future that had claimed his lover’s life. The second photograph was of an inscription on the same memorial stone:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea ...
Ryan and the other men who’d died with him had certainly gone further than most, but Danny doubted that James Elroy Flecker had had the Permian in mind when he’d penned those words. From the descriptions in Nick Cutter’s reports, there had been no snow-capped mountains to climb, just a barren wilderness of rock, black sand and scrubby bushes. A desolate landscape that contained the bones of a man Danny might have to come to love if they’d had longer together.
Danny slipped the photograph of Ryan into his pocket. He’d never thought of himself as a sentimental man, and he didn’t need a picture of Ryan to keep his memories of his lover alive, but it would make a better memento than the memories of Ryan’s last moments, as related by Cutter, a man Danny had never actually met.
He got the picture copied and kept it in his wallet.
* * * * *
“It’s definitely the Permian,” Connor said, staring intently on the display screen on his latest gizmo.
“The Permian lasted nearly 48 million years, Connor. You couldn’t narrow it down a bit, could you, mate?” Danny refused to meet Becker’s eyes, steadfastly ignoring the sharp look the young captain shot at him and the slight questioning rise in the scarred eyebrow.
“Not really. It’s not particularly accurate over that sort of period.”
“It was not particularly accurate last week, either,” commented Emily, referring to Connor’s confident declaration that an anomaly had led to the Eocene, when in fact it had landed them in the Carboniferous, up to their thighs in a particularly smelly swamp being buzzed by insects with the size and attitude of angry Rottweilers. But they’d managed to retrieve two lost teenagers, so it had been a definite success.
Connor waved a hand airily. “Teething problems.”
“No one goes through,” Becker said with his usual belligerence on the subject.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sol…” Danny left his usual taunt hanging in mid-air and wandered off, feigning nonchalance.
He didn’t need Connor’s box of tricks to tell him he was looking at an anomaly to the Permian. The fact that he was standing in the same clearing in the Forest of Dean that formed the backdrop to the battered photograph in his pocket was all the information he needed to reach that conclusion. The Permian anomaly had a bad habit of returning to the same spot, sometimes disgorging something for them to play with, and sometimes acting as a magnet for sheep and – on one notable occasion – a rather surprised wild boar. As far as Danny could tell, it opened on the same spot on the other side, as well, but he’d never had any way of knowing what exact time it led to, as Cutter’s reports had made it clear that his second expedition to the Permian with Ryan had arrived back several years before the first one.
On one occasion, Danny had managed to give Becker the slip long enough to make his way to the hill that would, at some unspecified point in time, come to play host to his lover’s dead body. But when he’d arrived at the right spot, the hillock had been unmarked by any rough cairn of stones, and there was no way of knowing if he’d been too early, or just very, very late.
Danny simply bided his time until Becker was called away to investigate a report of something in a nearby village that would almost certainly turn out to be another wild boar, and then, with a muttered apology, he dropped the guard on duty with a swift upper-cut to the jaw, flicked the relevant switch on the locking device and watched the anomaly flare open with the intensity of a small supernova.
“Tell him I’m sorry,” Danny said to Connor, quickly and efficiently stripping the downed man of his weapons and equipment vest, slinging both the EMD rifle and the man’s M4 over his shoulder. “But I can’t let an opportunity like this slip through my fingers. Lock it behind me, give me an hour, then unlock it again, and tell Becks not to get his hair off. I’ll be fine.”
Connor simply gaped at him, doing a very passable impersonation of something Danny had last seen on a fishmonger’s slab.
Danny slipped through the dancing light, staring quickly around him, to make sure there was nothing nasty lurking close by. There wasn’t, although he could see a herd of scutosaurus wandering placidly along a nearby hillside. Getting his bearings in a landscape not known for its variations on a theme was tricky, but Danny was fairly certain this wasn’t the same hillside he’d ended up on last time he’d been here. One thing that did catch his eye, though, was another anomaly, shimmering amidst a heat haze on a twin hillside, no more than half a mile away. Excitement prickled like heat on his skin.
There was a stiff breeze blowing but despite that, Danny could already feel the sweat breaking out on his skin, and it got worse as he set off at a steady jog-trot across the barren landscape, heading for the valley that lay between the two hills.
How the hell Ryan had managed to carry Nick Cutter up hill and down dale, after exercising the famous Special Forces brand of tact and diplomacy that had become something of a legend in the ARC, Danny would never know. He was sweating like a pig before he’d even reached the valley. Down there, in the lee of the slope, the wind was barely discernible, and Danny realised, with sudden elation, that he was staring straight at a disturbance in the sand that looked for all the world like several sets of human footprints.
His stomach lurched uncomfortably and Danny felt a prickle of anxiety run down into his fingers. The tracks had definitely been left behind by more than two pairs of booted feet. Danny drew in a deep breath and started running. He had no idea how long prints would remain evident with this sort of wind blowing, but he had to hurry. If he’d arrived too late, Danny would never forgive himself…
* * * * *
The creature bounded in Ryan’s direction like some sort of mutant ape, covering the ground faster than he would have believed possible, its red-stained jaws agape, dripping with the blood of Ryan’s men. Good men who’d died in this godforsaken wilderness, further from their own time than anyone would have believed possible.
Ryan didn’t fancy his own chances much, either. His first few shots had gone wide, and the ones that did hit didn’t seem to do any fucking damage. It just kept going coming towards him and Ryan kept firing. Regardless of its own injuries, the creature hit him with the force of a charging bull, knocking him onto his back on the hot, dry sand with a force that drove a rock into his back and the breath from his lungs.
Sharp, strong claws scrabbled at his tac vest and jacket, tearing through the material and trying to rend at Ryan’s throat. He groped for his fighting knife, but the predator had him pinned to the ground as blood and saliva dripped down onto him from its lipless jaws.
He could hear Cutter yelling and then another voice shouted, “Oi you, Ugly! Pick on someone your own fucking size!” and then the creature went rigid over him, its jaw locking together as its body started to shake uncontrollably.
Ryan seized his chance with both hands and pushed the predator off him. His rifle had been knocked from his hands, but Ryan grabbed hold of it and, still lying on his side, calmly put a three round burst straight into his attacker’s head. It twitched once as its head exploded like a watermelon he’d once used for target practice, and then lay still, in the graceless sprawl of death.
Coming up to his knees and staring around him, Ryan took in the shock on Cutter’s face as he watched another man running towards them down the hillside, a type of bulky rifle in his hands that Ryan had never seen before. But the man himself was certainly familiar: tall, craggy-faced, with an untidy, stand-up mop of ginger hair that no comb had ever been able to take for long, dressed in dusty black clothes.
Danny’s face was split in a wide smile of elation as he pulled Ryan into a tight hug.
“Danny?” Ryan knew his voice was shaky, but hell, he’d come within a cat’s whisker of having his throat ripped out, he’d earned a bit of honest emotion.
“You’re alive!” Danny held him even tighter and buried his face in Ryan’s neck, kissing any scrap of skin he could reach. “You’re fucking alive!”
Ryan kissed him back. He had no idea what the fuck had just happened, apart from the fact that Danny had saved his life with some sort of futuristic weapon that Ryan had never seen before, not even on an MoD R&D range. Now he had the chance to get a better look at him. Ryan realised that there were lines on Danny’s face that hadn’t been there before. His lover seemed to have aged far more in the six months that they’d been apart than Ryan would have expected.
“Danny?” he repeated, cupping the stubbled chin with one hand. “What the fuck’s that gun? And what the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’ll wait, Ryan, it’ll all wait. We need to get out of here now. There are men waiting on the other side of the anomaly. We can come back for your guys, but we need to get you and Cutter out of here, now!”
The shock of seeing Danny in the Permian when Ryan had last seen him at a railway station in Taunton made rational thought difficult to sustain, and Danny’s urgency was catching. Ryan had made sure he put a bullet in the head of each of the young predators, but then he simply grabbed Cutter by the sleeve and set off, following Danny’s lead. At least this time he hadn’t had to get Cutter to see sense by means of a pistol butt. A rapid introduction had left the professor none the wiser, but the shock of seeing Ryan’s men torn apart by the predator had been enough to chasten anyone, and Ryan was uncomfortably aware of how close he’d come to suffering the same fate.
As they made their way over the black sands, Danny started to explain, his words hitting Ryan like a bucket of icy water, despite the heat of the day. The knowledge that so far as Danny was concerned, he’d been dead for a couple of years was hard to get his head around.
When the reached the bottom of the valley, Ryan stared up in shock at two anomalies on opposite hillsides, winking like two stars, one large, the other smaller, shrunken to a more concentrated version of the rips in time he was used to seeing.
Cutter turned to stare at Danny in amazement, clearly as shaken as Ryan by what Danny had told them.
“This is where we part company, Prof,” Danny said calmly. “That’s your ticket out of here.” He pointed to the larger of the two anomalies. “So we don’t fuck with the timeline any more than we have to, you tell them that Ryan didn’t make it. Don’t let them try to send anyone back for the bodies, we’ll deal with that side of things.”
“What…?”
Danny simply shook his head. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one, mate. Just tell them that. It’s all you need to do.” He grabbed hold of Cutter’s shoulders, turned him around and gave him a shove in the direction of the anomaly. A moment later, he called out, “Prof, just one other thing! Your wife is a manipulative cow. No matter what she tells you, don’t listen to her. Nothing’s worth losing Stephen’s friendship over. He’d give his life for you, trust me on that, so don’t make him prove it, OK? That way you both stand a better chance. Now bugger off, and don’t tell anyone about this!”
As soon as Cutter started on his way up the other hill, Danny grabbed Ryan’s hand and started running as well. “Come on, soldier boy, you’ve got a clock to beat!”
With his eyes fixed on the strangely shrunken anomaly, Ryan simply held fast to his lover’s hand and together they ran up the slope.
As they approached, the anomaly flared into life, expanding to its normal size, shimmering around them as they burst through into another world, then Danny grabbed him again and kissed him on the lips, regardless of the looming presence of a tall, dark-haired young soldier in a familiar black uniform who was staring at them with a look of amazement on his face.
When Danny had finished snogging Ryan senseless, he turned to the other man and declared happily, “We did it, Becks, we beat the clock!”
Then his arms tightened around Ryan again and, for the moment, nothing else in the world mattered.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Danny/Ryan, Lester, Becker, Nick
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 4,550
Summary : When the phone call he’s been waiting for doesn’t come, Danny wants to know why, and he’s not a man to give up easily.
A/N: Written for the
primeval_denial Art Challenge for this artwork by fififolle. Thanks are also due to fifi for making this fabulous cover for the fic! And many thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.The movement of the duvet sliding off his shoulder brought Danny out of a pleasant dream to the realisation that early morning sun was slanting in through the window and warming his face. He rolled onto his side and took in the sight of his lover’s smoothly muscled back, skin tanned from a holiday where they’d done little more for a week than swim, walk and fuck like a pair of randy teenagers.
The UK had been basking in some unusually warm weather for the time of year, and even the sea off the coast of Cornwall had been warm enough for once without having to resort to wearing wetsuits.
But the fact that Ryan was sitting on the side of the bed staring at the screen of his mobile phone told Danny that all good things had no doubt just come to an end. “Tom?”
Ryan finished reading the message and turned to him. “A job’s just come up. Sorry…”
Danny held his finger up to Ryan’s lips, forestalling the apology. “I’m a copper, remember. We’re as good at broken marriages as soldiers, so no apologies needed.”
“Good job we’re not married then,” Ryan said, before catching the tip of Danny’s finger between his teeth and nipping lightly. “Fancy a shag and a bacon roll before we go?”
Danny grinned, making sure not to let any hint show in his face that he was disappointed that their much-needed break had been cut short by a few days. He’d known the score when he’d started dating a soldier, so there was no point whinging now.
“I knew there was a reason why I liked you, soldier boy. My turn to top.”
* * * * *
Despite the fact that he’d just received a summons back to Credenhill, the sex was unhurried, with Ryan lying in a relaxed sprawl on the wide bed, enjoying Danny’s lazy thrusts. His lover was currently entertaining himself by withdrawing almost to the tip and then sliding back in a long, smooth movement, raking Ryan’s prostate and sending bursts of pleasure dancing up his spine.
Danny was a generous lover, despite his smart mouth and bad-boy posturing. They’d met six months ago in London. Ryan had been on secondment to the Sabre team based in the capital; Danny had been running errands for his harassed DI, busy liaising with them over a big terrorist surveillance op. The whole thing had been a monumental fuck-up based on some extremely dodgy intel, but the powers that be had been in a flat spin as usual, so they’d had to go through the motions.
When the job had finally been called off, Ryan had spent the evening with Danny in the French House, a back street Soho pub that reminded him of his favourite dive in Hereford. They’d drunk too much, gone for a Chinese meal at nearly midnight, and then ended up in the same bed back at Danny’s flat, too pissed to manage more than an uncoordinated but satisfying mutual wank. Ryan had ended up falling asleep in the wet patch and waking up in the middle of the morning distinctly sticky, with a faint headache, but more than ready for a return match once a fried breakfast and some strong coffee had taken the edge off the previous nights excess.
Since then they’d developed a comfortable closeness that allowed them both to come and go in the relationship as needed, with no promises made or demanded, but Ryan knew perfectly well that Danny hadn’t been with anyone else in the time they’d been together, and neither had he. Their jobs came with similar pressures, and even when Ryan was in the country, they hadn’t always been able to see much of each other, and they were both crap at texts and phone calls, but somehow they’d managed just fine.
“Stop thinking,” Danny said, punctuating the words with more powerful thrusts that drove Ryan’s hard cock against the sheets, the friction almost enough to send him over the edge.
“Thinking’s against the rules?”
“It is when I’m fucking you and I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”
Ryan turned his head to the side. “Danny?”
Danny pressed a kiss to the side of his face. Neither of them had bothered to shave for a week and the rasp of stubble added to the sensations coursing inexorably through Ryan’s body as Danny’s thick cock continued to move inside him.
“Sorry. Talking crap’s definitely against the rules.”
Danny pushed himself up on his arms and started to move faster, fucking Ryan hard and deep. Ryan pushed back, knowing he was going to feel this for the rest of the day and wanting that reminder of the past week with him in whatever job he was on his way to next.
Climax took them both at the same time, driving all thoughts of either past or future from Ryan’s mind. When Danny finally withdrew, Ryan turned onto his back and pulled his lover into a sweaty hug, feeling the come leaking from his arse and not caring. They’d stick the sheets in the washing machine before leaving the cottage. Danny kissed him with open-mouthed enthusiasm, and if there was a sharper than usual edge to the embrace, neither of them mentioned it.
* * * * *
Riding shotgun for a top secret government project wasn’t exactly what Ryan had expected when a message had arrived on his phone in Cornwall, but it made a nice change from chasing around after terrorists in the UK and insurgents in Afghanistan.
On his first day on the job, his arse still feeling the effects of the early morning shag with Danny, he’d ended up millions of years in the past, seen things that looked like dinosaurs but apparently weren’t because they’d been born too early, or something, and had had to knock some sense into a crazy academic with the butt of his pistol. Danny would have been proud of him.
The sight of some poor sod’s skeleton in a makeshift grave had put something of a damper on the day, but apart from that it had been the most fun he’d had with his clothes on for quite a while. He’d even taken the time to send a quick text to Danny. Nothing special, just a note to say he was sorry their holiday had been cut short and that he’d ring when he had a minute.
He’d received a message back saying: Take care, soldier boy. Next round in the French is on you.
But time passed all too quickly, even though time was something they seemed to have in abundance, and they never did get that drink.
* * * * *
Danny waited six months for another message, but it never came.
At the end of that time, he started making a few discreet enquires with the SAS lads on detachment in London. They were all as close-lipped as a bunch of clams and Danny drew a very resounding blank. But two months later, one of them appeared in the French House late one night and, after a few drinks, quietly delivered the news Danny had been more than half-expecting ever since Ryan had gone off the grid.
In SAS parlance, Ryan had failed to the beat the clock.
His name was no doubt already inscribed at the base of the old clock tower, originally erected in the Regiment’s first home at the barracks in Stirling Lines, then subsequently rebuilt at their new base in Credenhill. Danny only knew about it through a chance remark of Ryan’s that he’d later Googled.
The news turned the beer in Danny’s stomach to acid, and ten minutes later he was as sick as a dog in the bogs, adding to the already unpleasant aroma of piss and worse. The guy, a veteran of god knows how many actions even at 27, gave him a sympathetic look when he came back out, but no more information. It was left to Danny to do his own digging. And dig he certainly did. He was a nosy copper through and through and wasn’t going to let a complete lack of any useful leads stand in his way.
With the help of a mate who’d better remain nameless, he established that Ryan’s last text message had originated in the UK, so armed with that information it wasn’t too hard to narrow down the sort of activity he’d been involved with. The team in London were bored out of their brains on routine crap, but word was starting to get out onto the streets about a crazy gig involving the Home Office. The body count had already been alarmingly high, if what he heard was to be believed, but everyone wanted in, despite that. Adrenaline junkies, the lot of them.
As far as Danny was concerned, the Official Secrets Act existed for the sole purpose of providing information to people like him who were more than happy to drive a double-decker bus though it, so that was exactly what he started to do.
His boyfriend had died on some lunatic government op, and Danny wanted to know what had happened.
Simple. Or maybe not, but he wasn’t going to let that stand in his way.
* * * * *
“I take it you’ve found the answers you were looking for, Danny?”
Lester’s soft-voiced question startled Danny into dropping the manila folder back onto the desk. He turned around, to find Lester standing behind him in the doorway. He’d used the skills picked up from someone he’d nicked a few years ago to pick the lock on the office used to house the confidential mission reports and personnel files. Once in, it had been an easy job to find the correct drawer in the filing cabinet. Lester ran a tight ship and the archives were correspondingly neat and tidy, much like the man himself.
“Yes,” Danny said quietly.
But whilst it was true that he now knew why he’d never got another text from Ryan, the knowledge hadn’t brought him the closure he’d been hoping for. Instead, it had raised even more questions, but none were ones he wanted to share with Lester. At least, not yet.
“Captain Ryan was a good man.” The words were delivered awkwardly, but were clearly meant sincerely.
Lester was not a man prone to overt displays of emotion, and it was obvious that he found Danny’s somewhat more mercurial temperament more than a little trying. He wasn’t too keen on Danny clambering around in the ventilation ducts either, but that was just another cross Lester would have to bear.
Danny nodded, not trusting himself to speak. A photo in the file of Ryan in full black combat kit with a pack over his shoulders and an assault rifle under his arm had brought back a rush of memories. He’d reached out and gently touched the photograph, remembering the feel of Ryan’s skin under his fingers, the softness of his lips and the way his hard, toned body had felt pressed up against him. Danny had wanted answers, but he’d never really expected to find them.
The thought of his lover’s body buried millions of years in the past sent a shiver through him that Lester must have seen. Danny’s boss stepped into the small office and closed the door.
“Now you know what happened, will you stay with the project?”
Lester’s words took Danny by surprise. He certainly hadn’t been thinking of leaving. Far from it. He’d gone to a lot of effort to infiltrate the ARC, he wasn’t going to butt out now.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, guv. Who’d keep soldier boy on his toes?” Danny forced a smile onto his face but he doubted Lester was fooled.
He half-expected Lester to ask more questions, but instead the man simply nodded, as though satisfied with the answer, and left Danny to it, with a murmur of, “Do effect a reverse break-in when you’ve finished. We can’t have everyone rummaging around in the personnel files.”
“Worried I might find out when your birthday is?” Danny called. “You can’t avoid buying cakes forever, you know!”
The sound of Lester’s footsteps retreating down the corridor was all the answer he got.
Danny turned his attention back to the file, swallowing hard around the lump that had appeared in his throat. The file gave the basic details of Ryan’s military career, nothing too sensitive, and also contained the information that he’d had no known next of kin other than an ex-wife who had emigrated to Australia with her parents two years before Ryan’s death. Ryan’s will, made six months after his divorce, left his estate to a charity providing care for injured army personnel, and made no provisions for the disposal of his body. He presumed Ryan had known – and come to terms with – the risks inherent in his chosen profession, and that he must always have been aware of the possibility that he would die in circumstances that made the recovery of his body impossible.
But that didn’t mean Danny had to like it.
He slowly turned the pages of the file, committing to memory the few details it did contain: Ryan’s blood group (0), army number (25010643), place of birth (Bury St Edmunds). Then, as he turned the last page, a couple of photographs slipped out from a pocket at the back. The first was of a list of names inscribed on a block of dark stone. He recognised Ryan’s, and those of three other soldiers that he was familiar with from the reports of that fated mission through the anomaly, all killed by the same nightmare creatures from the future that had claimed his lover’s life. The second photograph was of an inscription on the same memorial stone:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea ...
Ryan and the other men who’d died with him had certainly gone further than most, but Danny doubted that James Elroy Flecker had had the Permian in mind when he’d penned those words. From the descriptions in Nick Cutter’s reports, there had been no snow-capped mountains to climb, just a barren wilderness of rock, black sand and scrubby bushes. A desolate landscape that contained the bones of a man Danny might have to come to love if they’d had longer together.
Danny slipped the photograph of Ryan into his pocket. He’d never thought of himself as a sentimental man, and he didn’t need a picture of Ryan to keep his memories of his lover alive, but it would make a better memento than the memories of Ryan’s last moments, as related by Cutter, a man Danny had never actually met.
He got the picture copied and kept it in his wallet.
* * * * *
“It’s definitely the Permian,” Connor said, staring intently on the display screen on his latest gizmo.
“The Permian lasted nearly 48 million years, Connor. You couldn’t narrow it down a bit, could you, mate?” Danny refused to meet Becker’s eyes, steadfastly ignoring the sharp look the young captain shot at him and the slight questioning rise in the scarred eyebrow.
“Not really. It’s not particularly accurate over that sort of period.”
“It was not particularly accurate last week, either,” commented Emily, referring to Connor’s confident declaration that an anomaly had led to the Eocene, when in fact it had landed them in the Carboniferous, up to their thighs in a particularly smelly swamp being buzzed by insects with the size and attitude of angry Rottweilers. But they’d managed to retrieve two lost teenagers, so it had been a definite success.
Connor waved a hand airily. “Teething problems.”
“No one goes through,” Becker said with his usual belligerence on the subject.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sol…” Danny left his usual taunt hanging in mid-air and wandered off, feigning nonchalance.
He didn’t need Connor’s box of tricks to tell him he was looking at an anomaly to the Permian. The fact that he was standing in the same clearing in the Forest of Dean that formed the backdrop to the battered photograph in his pocket was all the information he needed to reach that conclusion. The Permian anomaly had a bad habit of returning to the same spot, sometimes disgorging something for them to play with, and sometimes acting as a magnet for sheep and – on one notable occasion – a rather surprised wild boar. As far as Danny could tell, it opened on the same spot on the other side, as well, but he’d never had any way of knowing what exact time it led to, as Cutter’s reports had made it clear that his second expedition to the Permian with Ryan had arrived back several years before the first one.
On one occasion, Danny had managed to give Becker the slip long enough to make his way to the hill that would, at some unspecified point in time, come to play host to his lover’s dead body. But when he’d arrived at the right spot, the hillock had been unmarked by any rough cairn of stones, and there was no way of knowing if he’d been too early, or just very, very late.
Danny simply bided his time until Becker was called away to investigate a report of something in a nearby village that would almost certainly turn out to be another wild boar, and then, with a muttered apology, he dropped the guard on duty with a swift upper-cut to the jaw, flicked the relevant switch on the locking device and watched the anomaly flare open with the intensity of a small supernova.
“Tell him I’m sorry,” Danny said to Connor, quickly and efficiently stripping the downed man of his weapons and equipment vest, slinging both the EMD rifle and the man’s M4 over his shoulder. “But I can’t let an opportunity like this slip through my fingers. Lock it behind me, give me an hour, then unlock it again, and tell Becks not to get his hair off. I’ll be fine.”
Connor simply gaped at him, doing a very passable impersonation of something Danny had last seen on a fishmonger’s slab.
Danny slipped through the dancing light, staring quickly around him, to make sure there was nothing nasty lurking close by. There wasn’t, although he could see a herd of scutosaurus wandering placidly along a nearby hillside. Getting his bearings in a landscape not known for its variations on a theme was tricky, but Danny was fairly certain this wasn’t the same hillside he’d ended up on last time he’d been here. One thing that did catch his eye, though, was another anomaly, shimmering amidst a heat haze on a twin hillside, no more than half a mile away. Excitement prickled like heat on his skin.
There was a stiff breeze blowing but despite that, Danny could already feel the sweat breaking out on his skin, and it got worse as he set off at a steady jog-trot across the barren landscape, heading for the valley that lay between the two hills.
How the hell Ryan had managed to carry Nick Cutter up hill and down dale, after exercising the famous Special Forces brand of tact and diplomacy that had become something of a legend in the ARC, Danny would never know. He was sweating like a pig before he’d even reached the valley. Down there, in the lee of the slope, the wind was barely discernible, and Danny realised, with sudden elation, that he was staring straight at a disturbance in the sand that looked for all the world like several sets of human footprints.
His stomach lurched uncomfortably and Danny felt a prickle of anxiety run down into his fingers. The tracks had definitely been left behind by more than two pairs of booted feet. Danny drew in a deep breath and started running. He had no idea how long prints would remain evident with this sort of wind blowing, but he had to hurry. If he’d arrived too late, Danny would never forgive himself…
* * * * *
The creature bounded in Ryan’s direction like some sort of mutant ape, covering the ground faster than he would have believed possible, its red-stained jaws agape, dripping with the blood of Ryan’s men. Good men who’d died in this godforsaken wilderness, further from their own time than anyone would have believed possible.
Ryan didn’t fancy his own chances much, either. His first few shots had gone wide, and the ones that did hit didn’t seem to do any fucking damage. It just kept going coming towards him and Ryan kept firing. Regardless of its own injuries, the creature hit him with the force of a charging bull, knocking him onto his back on the hot, dry sand with a force that drove a rock into his back and the breath from his lungs.
Sharp, strong claws scrabbled at his tac vest and jacket, tearing through the material and trying to rend at Ryan’s throat. He groped for his fighting knife, but the predator had him pinned to the ground as blood and saliva dripped down onto him from its lipless jaws.
He could hear Cutter yelling and then another voice shouted, “Oi you, Ugly! Pick on someone your own fucking size!” and then the creature went rigid over him, its jaw locking together as its body started to shake uncontrollably.
Ryan seized his chance with both hands and pushed the predator off him. His rifle had been knocked from his hands, but Ryan grabbed hold of it and, still lying on his side, calmly put a three round burst straight into his attacker’s head. It twitched once as its head exploded like a watermelon he’d once used for target practice, and then lay still, in the graceless sprawl of death.
Coming up to his knees and staring around him, Ryan took in the shock on Cutter’s face as he watched another man running towards them down the hillside, a type of bulky rifle in his hands that Ryan had never seen before. But the man himself was certainly familiar: tall, craggy-faced, with an untidy, stand-up mop of ginger hair that no comb had ever been able to take for long, dressed in dusty black clothes.
Danny’s face was split in a wide smile of elation as he pulled Ryan into a tight hug.
“Danny?” Ryan knew his voice was shaky, but hell, he’d come within a cat’s whisker of having his throat ripped out, he’d earned a bit of honest emotion.
“You’re alive!” Danny held him even tighter and buried his face in Ryan’s neck, kissing any scrap of skin he could reach. “You’re fucking alive!”
Ryan kissed him back. He had no idea what the fuck had just happened, apart from the fact that Danny had saved his life with some sort of futuristic weapon that Ryan had never seen before, not even on an MoD R&D range. Now he had the chance to get a better look at him. Ryan realised that there were lines on Danny’s face that hadn’t been there before. His lover seemed to have aged far more in the six months that they’d been apart than Ryan would have expected.
“Danny?” he repeated, cupping the stubbled chin with one hand. “What the fuck’s that gun? And what the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’ll wait, Ryan, it’ll all wait. We need to get out of here now. There are men waiting on the other side of the anomaly. We can come back for your guys, but we need to get you and Cutter out of here, now!”
The shock of seeing Danny in the Permian when Ryan had last seen him at a railway station in Taunton made rational thought difficult to sustain, and Danny’s urgency was catching. Ryan had made sure he put a bullet in the head of each of the young predators, but then he simply grabbed Cutter by the sleeve and set off, following Danny’s lead. At least this time he hadn’t had to get Cutter to see sense by means of a pistol butt. A rapid introduction had left the professor none the wiser, but the shock of seeing Ryan’s men torn apart by the predator had been enough to chasten anyone, and Ryan was uncomfortably aware of how close he’d come to suffering the same fate.
As they made their way over the black sands, Danny started to explain, his words hitting Ryan like a bucket of icy water, despite the heat of the day. The knowledge that so far as Danny was concerned, he’d been dead for a couple of years was hard to get his head around.
When the reached the bottom of the valley, Ryan stared up in shock at two anomalies on opposite hillsides, winking like two stars, one large, the other smaller, shrunken to a more concentrated version of the rips in time he was used to seeing.
Cutter turned to stare at Danny in amazement, clearly as shaken as Ryan by what Danny had told them.
“This is where we part company, Prof,” Danny said calmly. “That’s your ticket out of here.” He pointed to the larger of the two anomalies. “So we don’t fuck with the timeline any more than we have to, you tell them that Ryan didn’t make it. Don’t let them try to send anyone back for the bodies, we’ll deal with that side of things.”
“What…?”
Danny simply shook his head. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one, mate. Just tell them that. It’s all you need to do.” He grabbed hold of Cutter’s shoulders, turned him around and gave him a shove in the direction of the anomaly. A moment later, he called out, “Prof, just one other thing! Your wife is a manipulative cow. No matter what she tells you, don’t listen to her. Nothing’s worth losing Stephen’s friendship over. He’d give his life for you, trust me on that, so don’t make him prove it, OK? That way you both stand a better chance. Now bugger off, and don’t tell anyone about this!”
As soon as Cutter started on his way up the other hill, Danny grabbed Ryan’s hand and started running as well. “Come on, soldier boy, you’ve got a clock to beat!”
With his eyes fixed on the strangely shrunken anomaly, Ryan simply held fast to his lover’s hand and together they ran up the slope.
As they approached, the anomaly flared into life, expanding to its normal size, shimmering around them as they burst through into another world, then Danny grabbed him again and kissed him on the lips, regardless of the looming presence of a tall, dark-haired young soldier in a familiar black uniform who was staring at them with a look of amazement on his face.
When Danny had finished snogging Ryan senseless, he turned to the other man and declared happily, “We did it, Becks, we beat the clock!”
Then his arms tightened around Ryan again and, for the moment, nothing else in the world mattered.