Fic, Timey-Wimey Thursday, Rex, Sanctuary

[fredbassett]

Title : Timey-Wimey Thursday
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Rex, Ryan/Stephen, Nick, Claudia, Leek, Helen, Dave, Torrence, Felix
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : In Sanctuary, there’s no such thing as a normal day.
A/N : 1) Written for Rex Week on 52 Weeks of Primeval 2) The lovely graphic is by lsellersfic

A scream echoed through the house dragging Ryan out of a very pleasant dream involving his cock, Stephen’s hot wet mouth and…

Training kicked in and he was out of bed and into his jeans in a matter of seconds, running barefoot for the bedroom door, hauled his flies up as he went.

Stephen, slower by a couple of heartbeats, shimmied elegantly into his cargo pants and dashed after him.

The scream sounded like it had come from the kitchen.

The light was on and the door of the tall fridge was open. Claudia was standing in front of it, wearing a red silk dressing gown over a pair of cream pyjamas, her hair falling over her shoulders in thick tousled waves.

“There’s a lizard in the fridge!” She stepped back and stared accusingly at Ryan. “Things for the barbecue should be in the chest freezer.” She pointed to a set of house rules held up by a fridge magnet with a picture of a raccoon and the words ‘a raccoon is for life, not just for Xmas’.

“We’re not planning a barbeque,” Ryan said. “And for the record, lizard doesn’t really taste anything like chicken.”

Stephen reached into the fridge and pulled out a limp green creature that looked like a large wilted lettuce. “Rex?”

Ryan raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Abby’s lizard?”

“Wassgoin’ on?” Cutter appeared in the doorway in what looked suspiciously like a pair of tartan pyjamas. “Stephen, what was a lizard doing in the fridge?”

“How should I know?” Stephen said. “It probably passes for normal around here. Try asking management, not me.” He grabbed a towel and tossed it on the table, laying the lizard down on top of it… A lizard that appeared to be wearing a visitor’s pass tied around its neck.

“It’s a coelurosauravus,” Cutter declared. “Is that…?”

“Rex,” Stephen said. “Yes, I think it is.”

“What was he doing in the fridge?” Claudia demanded.

“Caroline put him in there,” Cutter said. “Stephen, we need to get him warmed up.”

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Claudia said. “Then you can explain who Caroline is and what she was doing putting Rex in our fridge.” She reached for the kettle.

“That won’t help! We can’t warm him up with boiling water.” Cutter sounded outraged, rolling the r in warm like the rumble of an approaching thundercloud.

“No, but I can use it to make coffee,” Claudia said. “Something tells me it’s going to be a long night.”

Ryan watched as Stephen carefully wrapped Rex in the towel and picked him up to share body heat with him. With Rex cradled in his arms, Stephen made himself comfortable in the large rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen.

“Is he still alive?” Ryan asked. The creature looked alarmingly pale, not the vivid green he remembered.

“I think so. I can feel him shivering. And his pass says he’s a visitor.”

From his Antarctic experience, Ryan knew that shivering was a good thing. It was when hypothermia victims stopped shivering that you needed to worry. The visitor’s pass was a bit of a clue, too. Or at least he hoped it was. It was never wise to take anything for granted around there.

“So why did someone called Caroline leave a lizard in our fridge?” Claudia asked, spooning coffee into their largest cafetiere. “It seems an odd thing to do.”

“She doesn’t like lizards,” Cutter said, winning that night’s prize for stating the bleedin’ obvious. “Abby thought she did it to get at her.”

Stephen shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense, Cutter. That happened before I…” he trailed off, leaving the word died hanging in the air like a bad smell.

“Maybe he makes a habit of getting shut in fridges,” Ryan suggested, earning himself a glare from his distractingly shirtless boyfriend.

“Funny sort of habit if you ask me,” Oliver Leek commented. The man could walk far too quietly for Ryan’s liking. “Maybe it would taste better if we used sage and onion stuffing.”

“They don’t really taste like chicken,” Ryan said for the second time, earning himself a glare from Claudia and a sceptical glance from Leek.

“The writing on his visitor’s pass is quite faded,” Stephen commented. “I might be reading too much into it, but that doesn’t seem like a good sign. Management?” He looked expectantly at the ceiling.

“Sorry, can’t say.” The Duty Manager sounded apologetic. “Spoilers.”

Leek rolled his eyes. “Have we all died and gone to Tumblr?”

Ryan had no idea what the man was talking about, and it looked like everyone else was just as clueless.

“If it’s the same fridge incident, he didn’t die,” Cutter said. He frowned, warming his hands on the mug of coffee Claudia had handed him. “But that doesn’t mean he won’t this time…”

“Too early in the morning for timey-wimey stuff,” Stephen muttered. “Like Cutter said, we need to get him warmed up and I could do with a sweater. This is a bit like hugging a bag of frozen peas.”

A skeletal head appeared around the doorframe, drool dripping onto the lino.

Claudia pulled off a handful of kitchen roll and handed it to Leek, who wiped the saliva from the future predator’s lipless jaws.

“Come in, Dave,” she said.

The predator sidled into the room, clutching a large bundle of yellow wool, the same colour as the long scarf wound around his skinny neck. He held up the amorphous mass and shook it at Stephen. It looked like a misshapen sweater, last worn by someone with very, very long arms.

Stephen gamely dredged up a smile.

They all knew it was the thought that counted where Dave’s knitting was concerned. Ryan had several pairs of yellow legwarmers and two yellow bobble hats. He tried to remember to wear them occasionally, just out of politeness.

Stephen stood up and was about to hand the shivering towel-wrapped lizard to Cutter when a black and white furry tank came barrelling into the room, hopped up onto the rocking chair and held out two long-fingered paws.

“I wouldn’t argue with him, if I were you,” Ryan said. He still had the bruises from his last encounter with Torrence. If the raccoon wanted to hold the lizard, that was fine by him.

Stephen unwound the towel and settled Rex on Torrence’s furry stomach.

Dave knuckled across the floor. After handing the sweater to Stephen, he proceeded to carefully envelope Rex in what looked like a small, lizard-shaped yellow coat, with holes for all four legs and another for his tail. Between him and Torrence, they soon had Rex properly dressed, which was more than could be said for Stephen. The yellow sweater came down almost to his knees and could probably have cheerfully housed half of the regimental rugby team, while the other half pointed and laughed.

“Coffee?” Claudia said brightly.

Ryan found a bottle of whisky in one of the cupboards and proceeded to dispense generous measures into each mug. It was definitely turning into one of those nights.

A loud knock on the front door made Claudia jump, spilling some coffee on the work surface, which. Dave helpfully mopped up.

“I’ll get it,” Ryan offered quickly, wondering who the hell was about to join them in the Big Sister House and whether they would be wearing a visitor’s pass or not. He glanced up at the ceiling as he walked down the hall, but Management were obviously continuing with their no spoilers policy. “Coming!” he called, over another barrage of knocks.

He flung the door open and found himself face to face with Abby Maitland, but she didn’t look much like the neatly – if somewhat eccentrically – dressed woman that he remembered. Her clothes were dirty and ragged and her hair was longer than when he’d last seen her. She looked like she was growing dreadlocks. Blood was flowing sluggishly from a gash on her temple.

Ryan scanned her quickly for any sign of a visitor’s pass. To his relief, one was hanging from a lanyard around her neck.

“Ryan?” She took a step back, her eyes hard and untrusting. “But Cutter said you were dead…”

“We try to avoid the D word round here,” Ryan said, standing to one side and waving her into the house. “Hasn’t Connor told you about this place? He turns up often enough.”

Abby’s eyes narrowed. “You mean he’s not just been having weird dreams when he gets knocked out?”

“Well, he might be having weird dreams as well…”

Abby stalked past him, all 1.63 metres of ‘don’t mess with me if you value your bollocks’. Ryan liked Abby. She had a level head in a crisis and had quickly earned the respect of all the soldiers attached to the anomaly project.

“The others are in the kitchen,” he told her. “Come on, I think that cut needs looking at. What happened?”

“A juvenile Albertosaurus happened. I think it knocked me into a tree.”

Ryan ushered Abby into the kitchen with a muttered, “Surprise, surprise!”

With the benefit of hindsight, that wasn’t one of his better introductions. On seeing Dave crouched next to Claudia, Abby promptly whipped out a pointed stick from somewhere in her jacket and dropped into a defensive crouch.

“He’s harmless” Ryan said quickly, stepping in between them. “Stand down, Abby, he won’t hurt you or anyone else!”

Claudia looked alarmed, but managed to avoid dropping a mug of coffee on the floor. “Abby, are you all right?”

Confusion and alarm warred for precedence on Abby’s grubby face. Confusion won by a short head as Abby took in the various people in the kitchen and tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

Eventually, she settled for asking, “Why is a raccoon cuddling Rex?”

“He was cold,” Stephen said. “Rex, I mean, not the raccoon.”

Abby flung her arms around Stephen and gave him a hug. Looking faintly self-conscious in his misshapen yellow sweater, Stephen hugged her back.

“Don’t I get a hug, lass?” Cutter asked.

Abby swiped a dirty hand across her face, smudging mud and blood into an unappetising mix and transferred her attentions to Cutter. When they parted, Abby looked at Claudia and said, “Jenny? You look… different. What are you doing here? Did something… happen?”

“I’m Claudia, Claudia Brown… Would you like some coffee?”

Abby drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out again before answering. “Thanks. I think this is all going to take some getting used to. So, Cutter was right, there was – is – a Claudia Brown.”

Ryan admired her composure.

Claudia smiled. “He can be right sometimes. Just not quite as often as he thinks he is.”

Abby looked around the kitchen, trying to come to grips with what she was seeing. Dave had shambled over to Leek and was sitting next to him, drooling slightly. Leek wiped his jaws with a handkerchief.

Ryan pulled out a chair and Abby sank into it, a grateful look on her face. He sincerely hoped Sinister and Dexter were still safely tucked up in their basket. That was one conversation he really didn’t feel up to having.

Torrence got up out of the rocking chair and walked over to Abby, Rex still clasped firmly to his hairy stomach. To everyone’s surprise, the raccoon just clambered onto Abby’s lap and continued cuddling the lizard. She inspected the visitor’s pass hanging from Rex’s neck, compared it with her own and smiled in relief.

“How long do people normally stay for?” she asked.

“Depends on what they’ve done to themselves,” Ryan said. “If you’ve just been knocked out, it might only be an hour or so, but we’re not sure whether time passes at the same rate outside here.”

“Unless Rex has ended up in the fridge twice, it doesn’t,” Abby said. “And I don’t think that’s very likely.”

“This place has a habit of re-defining the concept of ‘likely’,” Cutter commented.

“There’s good eating on one of them,” said a fresh voice. Helen, dressed in nothing more than an old, over-sized shirt lounged in the doorway, her long, tanned legs crossed at the ankles. “They taste like…”

“No, they don’t,” Ryan and Stephen chorused in unison

Helen shrugged. “I was going to say pork, boys, not chicken, but suit yourselves.”

Torrence swivelled around on Abby’s lap and fixed Helen with a beady-eyed stare. There was no love lost between those two. Whilst Helen fell firmly into the category of mad, bad and dangerous to know, Ryan would still put his money on the raccoon if it came to a fight. Torrence stroked Rex’s head with one long-fingered paw and was rewarded with a weak chirrup.

Dave sidled over to them and held out a yellow knitted blanket.

Ryan wondered where the hell he produced the things from. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of knitwear, all in varying shades of yellow.

Abby took the blanket and tucked it around both Rex and Torrence. “May I have that coffee, please?” she asked, with admirable composure.

****

“This doesn’t make a great deal of sense, you know,” Abby said. Tact had never been her strong suit, as several work-related appraisals had pointed out.

Three mugs of coffee – all laced with whisky – and some really excellent cookies given to her by a giant octopus had done nothing whatsoever to make the whole out-of-body experience seem any less surreal.

“Sorry about that.” The disembodied voice that came from somewhere above her head sounded awfully contrite. But Abby wasn’t sure there was enough whisky in the world to make the whole Management thing seem anything less than utterly weird.

“Where I come from, Caroline stuffed Rex in the fridge ages ago.”

Stephen nodded.

Abby got the impression he’d made the same point before she’d arrived.

“Someone’s probably written about it recently,” the woman the others had referred to as the Duty Manager said, still sounding apologetic.

“Someone writes about it and it happens here?”

“Sometimes.”

“So how did the raccoon end up here?”

The Duty Manager sighed. “Long story, even by our standards. I’ll leave you to it, folks, shift change coming up… Nice to meet you, Abby. Do make yourself at home, even if this is only a flying visit.”

Abby had the distinct impression that the woman was scarpering before she could be asked any more awkward questions. Abby fought the urge to sigh. She was worried it would make her sound judgmental. It was good to know that Stephen, Ryan and Cutter all seemed fine, it really was, and nice to know that Cutter hadn’t been suffering from delusions when he’d kept calling their PR guru Claudia, but none of that made the whole house-share anything less than deeply weird.

The scary-looking raccoon was still cuddling Rex, who had finally stopped shivering. Abby had checked his temperature several times and was satisfied that he was out of danger. No one seemed inclined to challenge the raccoon for possession of the large, comfortable-looking rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen, where he’d retired to so that Abby could drink her coffee, and she could understand why. The creature gave off a very distinct ‘mess with me or I bite off something you would much prefer to have kept’ vibe. Even Ryan was giving it a wide berth.

Cutter had spent much of the last half an hour quizzing Abby about how things had progressed on the anomaly project. The fact that Becker, Connor and Danny all seemed to have ended up in the Big Brother – or should that be Big Sister? – House with monotonous regularity didn’t seemed to have assuaged Cutter’s desire for contact with the outside world, leaving Abby wondering what the boys got up to when they didn’t have visitors. She could understand why her colleagues hadn’t said too much about it, though. Even when you chase dinosaurs for a job, some things were just too weird to share.

“Will I remember any of this when I get back?”

Cutter shrugged. “You can tell us the answer to that if you pay us another visit.”

“But if I don’t remember being here, it’ll end up being like Groundhog Day.” The raccoon glared at her. “All right, like Raccoon Day, then.”

She glanced up at the ceiling. It didn’t seem likely that the current Duty Manager was going to give away any clues about whether her and Connor would ever get back to their own time, or see any of their friends again, but there was something strangely comforting about the thought that if she ever failed to outrun a T. rex, she might end up being greeted with coffee, biscuits and… a raccoon. But there was also something deeply unsettling about being a pawn in someone else’s game, playing by rules that no one seemed to entirely understand, where going off-piste seemed to be an everyday activity.

A gentle touch on the shoulder drew her out of her reverie. “Don’t try to overthink things,” the woman called Claudia Brown said.

Abby smiled and tried to blink away the tears forming in her eyes. “Thanks.” She drew in a long, steadying breath. “We missed you guys,” she said, looking at Cutter, Stephen and Ryan.

“We’ve missed you, too,” Cutter said, in one of his rare displays of affection. “It’ll all work out, lass.”

Feeling slightly self-conscious, Abby touched his hand lightly. “Thanks. It’s good to know you’re all OK.” Rex, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, looked up from munching an apple, and chirruped loudly. He’d re-gained his usual vibrant colour and worked his way through a box of mixed fruit and veg served up by the octopus-thing – sorry, Felix – and was looking a lot happier. The writing on his Visitor’s Pass was easily legible now, and Abby had a feeling his visit – and hers – was drawing to a close.

She stood up and picked Rex up. “Thanks, guys. It’s been nice seeing you all again. But I think it’s time for us to go now.”

The raccoon hopped up onto the table and held up a paw for a high five. Abby obliged. She knew when to just go with the flow. There were some days when there was simply no point attempting to swim against the tide.

If it was all a dream, it was the strangest one she’d ever had.

If it wasn’t… Abby smiled. If it wasn’t, then the alternative was rather comforting. And after six months living in the Cretaceous, she’d take any comfort she could get.

Comments

[goldarrow]

That was alternately gigglingly funny, full of pathos, and slightly sad. All in all, a brilliant fic.

[fredbassett]

Thank you! Abby rather took over this one.

[goldarrow]

I do like Abby when she goes into "take no prisoners" mode.

[nietie.livejournal.com]

Cutter in tartan pyjamas and Stephen having another wardrobe malfunction.

I hope Abby remembers and that it won't be like Raccoon Day.

Lovely fic, funny and sweet.

[fredbassett]

I'm sure Dave causes a lot of wardrobe malfunctions. Imagine what the yellow sweater would look like with the orange cargo pants!

[mysteriousaliwz.livejournal.com]

"The yellow sweater came down almost to his knees and could probably have cheerfully housed half of the regimental rugby team, while the other half pointed and laughed."
I love Dave's knitwear :)

I think Abby coped with her first visit to Sanctuary pretty well. Sensible lass. I love how she has the knowledge that Sanctuary is there to comfort her through the ordeal of the Cretaceous.

[fredbassett]

Thank you! Abby's arrival was a little unexpected, but as far as I can remember, she hadn't been there before. But of she has, we can always attribute it to Raccoon Day.

[fififolle]

Aw, this was lovely!!! Torrence was perfect for wrapping up Rex and getting him warm, with a little help from Dave's knitwear, of course *g*
Brilliant *g*
All fixed at newsletter, sorry about that!

[fredbassett]

I think Torrence would make a very good hot waterbottle.

Thank you! It was my mistake for not being clearer about the header.

[fififolle]

Not at all! I was a little hasty :)

[purplecat]

Great fic! Sanctuary really has become very bonkers!!! I think Abby coped admirably!

[fredbassett]

Thanks! This rather went off at a tangent, but I;d just realised that Abby had never been to Sanctuary!

[isamazed]

This was lovely! The knitting is so cute and fun! I must admit the yellow is even more hilarious for me since it is our company colour and triggers very inadequate thoughts, haha ;-) Hope there will be more Sanctuary in 2018!

[fredbassett]

The yellow comes from the colour of the scarf fifi knitted for her Dave action figure!