Fic, The Guns Fall Silent, Part 2 of 2, Art Challenge Fic

[fredbassett]

Title : The Guns Fall Silent, Part 2 of 2
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Claudia/Ryan, Becker, Stephen, Cutter, Connor, Abby
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 5,400 in two parts
Summary : Claudia has some reservations about the young captain who’s joined the team.
A/N : 1) Written for the primeval_denial Art Challenge for this lovely artwork by tli 2) This poem by Philip HendyDavis sums up what was in my mind when writing this.

Stephen took off at a run for the imposing abbey ruins, its vaulted archways and neat grey stonework towering about the closely cut grass that surrounded it on all sides. Becker stayed close behind. Claudia followed them. If there was a chance of a civilian being involved in this, that made it her business, whatever the young captain thought.

The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the grass, and highlighted the myriad daisies studding the greenery. Under other circumstances, Claudia would have found the ruin stunningly beautiful, but now the high walls broken up by numerous arches and windows, together with the maze of lower walls criss-crossing the area between them and the main remnants of the tall buildings, all held potential danger.

As she ran, she listened to the stream of information coming in from the soldiers as they started their methodical sweep through the ruins. Claudia didn’t have their photographic memory for maps and plans, but she knew that Cutter and the rest of the team had started in the northwest corner, whereas Stephen was heading for the opposite end of the complex ruins. From the description they’d had from the firearms officers, and from the data Connor had been able to obtain from the ADD’s GPS system, the anomaly was in the main area of the medieval abbey, but there was no guarantee anything that had come through would have remained nearby. The figure the police team had spotted had been on the north side of the south transept.

Stephen took a low wall in his stride with all the grace of a natural athlete. Becker’s running wasn’t as elegant, but he was equally fast. Claudia kept herself in good shape, but the walls slowed her down. She wasn’t prepared to risk missing her footing and ending up flat on her face. When Stephen paused to check the ground around him, Claudia had a chance to narrow the gap. Stephen took off again, this time on a different trajectory. Claudia failed to catch an exchange between the two men as she redoubled her efforts to draw level with them now there were no walls in the way.

Cutter’s voice in her ear announced that they’d found the anomaly and would leave two men standing guard while the rest continued the sweep.

Her breath was labouring in her chest as Stephen came to an abrupt halt. At his side, Becker dropped to one knee and sighted along the barrel of his combat shotgun. He held up a hand to tell Claudia to stay back. Claudia ignored him. If they’d found the figure the police officers had seen, she wanted to be there, not watching from the sidelines. It was her job to deal with civilians.

“Stay back, ma’am, please!” Becker’s voice, low and urgent came over her radio headset.

Claudia was panting too hard to risk a reply. She came up to the two men and, in deference to Becker’s sensibilities – and common sense – she stayed behind them. Looking in the direction Becker was pointing his gun, she saw a man, walking behind one of the low stone walls that was all that was left of this area of the abbey buildings. He was of medium height, wearing a long white robe, not the gleaming white of the washing powder adverts, more the dull white of a sheep’s fleece that has seen wind and weather. He was walking alongside one of the walls, taking slow, measured steps.

From the tilt of his head in their direction, Claudia knew they had been seen, but there was no hint of fear in the man’s weather-beaten face as he stopped and held their gaze. His age was hard to determine. Claudia guessed maybe mid-50s. His hair was grey and cropped very short and the hands that were loosely clasped in front of him looked like they’d seen plenty of rough work.

“Contact,” Beker said softly on an open radio channel. “Male, looks to be unarmed, wearing a monk’s get up. He’s seen us.”

“It’s been a long time since they had monks here,” Stephen commented. “Claudia, how do you want to play this?”

“Nicely,” she said firmly, taking a step forward and holding out both hands, palms upright to show that she was not carrying a weapon. Even Ryan hadn’t succeeded in persuading her to carry a gun. “Hello,” she said, feeling thoroughly self-conscious, but not knowing how else to address the man. The temptation to trot out a cliché like ‘we come in peace’ was almost overwhelming, but the sentiment sat rather oddly with Becker pointing a bloody great big shotgun at the man. “Can you understand me?”

A slight smile twitched at the corners of the man’s face. “Yes, I can.” His voice was oddly accented, and he sounded like the words didn’t come easily to him, but he was easy to understand.

Claudia smiled in relief. “Did you come through the light?”

The man nodded but didn’t venture any further information. Claudia could see that he was looking uneasily in Becker’s direction. Hardly surprising, with the unfamiliar weapon and the black uniform, the soldier wasn’t the most reassuring of sights, unless you were in danger of having your throat ripped out by something with big teeth and sharp claws.

“My name’s Claudia Brown.” For once, she managed to bite back the words that usually followed her name.

“John,” he said, hesitantly. “My name is John.”

“We will help you get back home, John,” Claudia said, trying to sound reassuring.

The man looked around, the slight smile still playing at the corners of his mouth. “In a way, I am home.” His speech was oddly stilted, as though he wasn’t used to speaking English, despite the fact that he appeared fluent. “What year is it, may I ask?”

“2018,” Claudia said. “Can you tell me what year it is where you come from?”

“The year of our Lord eleven hundred and thirty-five. King Henry has not long died.” John looked around. “I should have known, but it never really occurred to me that our abbey would grow so large. I laid some of the original stones myself.”

“Why should you have known?” Claudia asked.

The smile turned sad. “I played in these ruins as a boy. The custodian tried to keep us out, but he fought a losing battle.”

Claudia struggled to get her head around what the man was telling her. “You went through an anomaly to the past?”

The man called John nodded. “War was coming again. I could not bear to hear the guns a second time.”

“What year did you leave here?” The question came from Stephen. He smiled at the man and extended his hand. “My name’s Stephen Hart.”

John shook his hand. “August 1939.” He drew in a slow breath and clasped his hands tighter together. “I was a coward. I could not live through another war.” He hesitated, then words started tumbling out of him, faster, hard to distinguish at times, as if he had waited too long to make his confession, but now the floodgates had opened, the tide refused to be held back. “I fought in the Great War. I knew men who were shot for cowardice for being unable to fight but the truth was that the shells and the mud and the blood had broken their minds. I was an orderly in the medical corps. I carried men from the battlefield, their bodies and minds in tatters, the living barely better off than the dead. If their bodies were uninjured, we had no way to keep them back from the front, so we had to send them out again. And again. Eventually. the guns fell silent, but they never stopped sounding in my head. I could not bear to hear them start up again outside it, as well. So when I found the light, I went, thinking I would be rid of this world for good.” He gave a rueful smile. “I had hoped for heaven, but instead I walked into another world. When the light disappeared, I was terrified, but although I did not know it at first, I had found a world where I could follow my beliefs and live a different life.” The man fell silent and looked at Becker, his eyes taking in the man’s black uniform and unfamiliar weapon.

“This is Captain Becker,” Claudia said. “He’s here to protect us.”

“I presume the war did come. Who eventually won?” It was clear from the expression on his face that he wasn’t sure what answer he would get to that question.

“Hitler lost,” Claudia said. There had been plenty of times in her career in the civil service when she’d wondered who had really won. Her answer seemed the safest in the circumstances.

“Is the world a better place?”

The silence that greeted his question hung heavily in the air, broken a moment later by a radio transmission from Cutter demanding to know what was happening. Claudia was thankful the interruption prevented her having to offer an answer.

“We have contact, Professor,” Claudia said. “No cause for alarm.” She was responding on an open channel, and asked, “Connor, have you got any readings for us on the strength of the anomaly?”

“I’d say it’s good for about an hour.” Connor sounded confident, and that was enough for Claudia.

“Do you want to return through the light, John?” she asked, wondering how Lester would react if the man decided to stay.

John looked around at the ruins, a smile returning to his face. “I have an abbey to build, Claudia Brown. I had not expected to leave it, but when the light came again, I was curious. But this world is not somewhere I want to stay.” He glanced at Becker and added, “No offence intended, Captain.” It seemed that the man had formed his own opinion of whether the world was now a better place than it had been in 1939.

“None taken,” Becker said.

The sound of booted feet on the grass announced the arrival of Cutter and two of the soldiers at a run. They got a lot of practise running and Cutter wasn’t even out of breath when he stopped at her side.

“This is Professor Nick Cutter,” Claudia said. “He helps us study the lights. We call them anomalies.”

Cutter had heard the conversation through the open channel on the comms units and needed no explanations. “Have you seen any other anomalies?”

John shook his head. “I joined my brothers ten years ago, but it seems nearly 80 years have passed here. In all that time, the light did not return.”

“Did you ever want to return home?”

“I made my home there. I learned to work stone, tend animals and grow vegetables. I put what medical skills I had to work in the infirmary. I made friends who became closer than brothers to me. I have my faith. I left no one behind that would have missed me. My mother died when I was a child, and I buried my father two days before I walked through the light. I doubt I was missed.” The words were coming to him more easily now, the hesitation loosening its grip as the man returned to the language he’d spoken in his previous life. “No one will remember me now.”

“John Dawson,” Connor said over the radio link. “He went missing on the 9th July 1939. There’s an article about him on the Helmsley Local History Group website. The local folks looked for him for weeks. They said he never got over the horrors of the war and thought he’d drowned himself or fallen down a mineshaft. They ended up inscribing his name on his father’s headstone in the churchyard.”

“You were missed, John Dawson.” Claudia said. “And they gave you a memorial on your father’s headstone.”

“Dawson?” His tone held a note of wonder. “Yes, that was my name. A memorial? That’s more than I expected.” A frown drew his eyebrows together and Claudia could sense his confusion. “Thank you, Claudia Brown, but how did you know my name? The people of my time would cry witchery on a woman who knew that much more than a man had said.”

Claudia tapped the small earpiece of her comms system. “This is a very small radio transmitter. One of our team researched missing people in this area for the time you left here.”

“Radios I remember but not any means of finding information so quickly.”

“The world has changed a lot, John. We now have information at our fingertips that would have taken a vast amount of time to retrieve. We have things called computers. The first was developed out of the need to decrypt messages sent between Hitler’s generals and their troops. It helped turn the tide of the war.”

John Dawson weighed Claudia’s words in his mind, the frown diminishing to be replaced by wonder. “I never expected my name to be remembered as anything other than a man who would not fight again and so took the coward’s way out.”

“There’s nothing cowardly about not wanting to go through another war,” Becker said quietly. “And it’s recognised now that the men who were shot for refusing to fight were suffering from a medical condition, not cowardice.”

“Do wars still leave men broken in their minds as well as in their bodies, Captain Becker?”

Becker nodded. “We try to treat them better now, but it still happens.”

An unexpected smile lightened John Dawson’s solemn face. “This isn’t a conversation I expected to have today.” The more he’d spoken, the more his voice had lost the stilted cadence of someone doing their best to make themselves understood in a foreign language.

“It’s not what I expected either,” Becker said, standing up, his shotgun cradled in his arms, no longer pointing at the man who stood before them in a monk’s habit.

“I am happy I followed the light today, but I must return before evening prayers at compline.” He looked around at the ruins of the abbey. “I will not see this abbey at its height, but I am content to have been there at its birth. And maybe if the light returns, I will see how this world has changed.” He looked at Becker and smiled. “I hope maybe there will come a time when we no longer need warriors with weapons.”

“I hope that’s a day I live to see, too.” Becker held his hand out to the man. “It’s been good to meet you, sir.”

John Dawson gripped Becker’s hand firmly. “Thank you for not judging me harshly. Thank you all for that. And for the knowledge that I have not wholly been forgotten.” He glanced around at the ruins. “In truth, the stones of the abbey are all the memorial I ever wanted.”

“If another light appears, be careful,” Cutter said. “They might not all lead back here.”

“In turbulent times being careful comes easily. Trusting comes harder.”

“Good luck.” Claudia said.

They each shook the man’s hand in turn, then kept their distance as he walked back through the ruins. The anomaly stood out brightly against the grey stone of the abbey wall, the bright, diamond-hard light glittering in the last of the afternoon sun. It wasn’t hard to understand how John Dawson had mistaken it for the end to all his troubles. Claudia was glad he’d made a good life for himself. She wished they’d had longer with him, but the risk of becoming trapped away from the world that had become his home was too great to run.

He’d made his choice nearly 80 years ago.

John raised his hand, made the sign of the cross in the air, then turned and stepped through the light.

“Brave man,” Cutter said.

Twenty minutes later, the anomaly shimmered and drew together again, leaving no trace of his passing.

*****

“Sorry I missed that shout,” Ryan said. He took the glass of wine Claudia held out to him. “So, what’s your opinion of Becker now?”

“Not quite as young and gung-ho as I’d thought,” Claudia said, trying hard not to sound grudging. “I don’t think today was quite what he expected. But then I don’t think any of us expected to end up talking to a man who’d lived through World War 1 and then spent the last 80 years of his life in the past.”

“Can’t say I blame Dawson for not wanting to go through war a second time.”

“Neither did Becker.”

And that had been what had impressed Claudia the most about the young soldier.

Comments

[goldarrow]

Holy wow. That was fantastic!

Eventually. the guns fell silent, but they never stopped sounding in my head.
This line brought tears to my eyes.

Superb. The combined sadness and hope for John and his difficulties, the way they all responded to him, even Becker showing he's not just a gun-happy warrior were all lovely.

[fredbassett]

Thank you! that's such a lovely compliment!

[nietie.livejournal.com]

Such a bittersweet story, but so wonderful John was able to have this conversation.
And Becker is so much older than his age.

You were missed, John Dawson.

The poem and the story are beautiful.

[fredbassett]

Thank you. I was worried about this story being too introspective, but that was the bunny that bit, so I went with it.

[thelibraniniquity]

Oh, John.
That was incredible. Everything worked so well, from Becker being more than his remit to Connor and Claudia showing that John hadn't been forgotten, or despised.

[fredbassett]

Thank you! I'm so glad it worked and that I was able to do justice to your image!

[knitekat.livejournal.com]

That was brilliant! Lovely take on the prompt.

[fredbassett]

Thank you!!

[bigtitch.livejournal.com]

Oh lovely. Dawson's story left me with tears in my eyes.

*sniffles delicately*

[fredbassett]

Aw, thank you. No finer compliment, I think.

With emotion, you never know if you;re evoking in others what you;re feeling, and I didn't know if this would hit the spot or miss by a mile.

[fififolle]

Wow, that was fascinating. Another John!! And this one had an incredible tale. Bless him, thinking no one would miss him, and running from war. Seems like he is doing a brilliant job where he is.
I loved the action and the way Becker went up in Claudia's estimation *g*

[fredbassett]

I smiled when I saw we both had Johns.

Thank you, I'm glad it worked!

[eriah211.livejournal.com]

“Is the world a better place?”
That moment was painful. Silence would have been my answer too, unfortunately.

This was really touching. John's story was so sad, but at the same time it was nice to see that he found peace leaving in the past. This anomaly incursion was more moving than I expected.

It was a great story to read, bittersweet but hopeful. Great fic!

[fredbassett]

Thank you! I'm really, really happy people liked this fic, as it took a very unexpected direction for me.

[isamazed]

What a wonderful, bittersweet story. Thanks for sharing!

[fredbassett]

Thank you so much!!

[purplecat]

Ooh! That didn't go in the direction I was expecting at all! A clever and moving tale.

[fredbassett]

Thank you! After all this time, there's a huge satisfaction that comes from being able to craft something that goes in an unexpected direction for readers.

While I was writing this I wasn't sure if it would work, but I decided to plough on anyway, and I'm glad that I did.