fredbassett

Title : Busman’s Holiday, Part 1 of 3
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen, Lester, Connor, Becker, Ryan
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 6,000 in three parts.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Stephen takes time out from the team on Lester’s orders.
A/N : Written for the

primeval_denial Art Challenge for this wonderful artwork by the incredibly patient

goldarrow. So sorry it’s taken me so long to finish this!

“Take a holiday, Stephen. Preferably a long one.”

Lester’s words came as no surprise, but they still felt like a punch in the gut. Stephen forced himself to breathe slowly in and out before he trusted himself to reply. “Are you sacking me?”

“Did I say I was sacking you? I have a team to manage, and the situation between you and Cutter isn’t making that easy. I’m hoping some time apart will make the irascible academic realise that ten years of friendship is more important that a minor fling with his hell-bitch of a wife.”

“I loved her.” The words were out before Stephen could bite them back.

Lester executed a perfect eye-roll. “Spare me the amateur dramatics. You were young and impressionable, she was your tutor. You no doubt thought the sun shone out of her delectable backside; she should have kept her over-active libido firmly in the desk drawer. In time, Cutter will see it that way, but right now he’s still stalking around with his own personal thundercloud over his head and a bunch of kindling under his arm ready to turn himself into a burning martyr. That’s putting everyone on edge and I can’t rely on either of you to take the right decisions in the field.”

“Cutter’s a professional. He won’t let his feelings get in the way of the job.”

“Complete nonsense and you know it. I’ve read the incident reports, and not just the doctored versions the pair of you have tried to palm me off with. The cracks are showing. You two need time apart.” Lester hesitated, then added, “And you need time to grieve.”

Stephen drew in an involuntary breath. “I… I don’t know what you mean.”

“I really don’t know why you all persist in thinking I’m blind, deaf and stupid. Do I give that much of a wrong impression?” Lester held a hand up. “No, don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. Let me be clearer: you were in a relationship with Captain Ryan; you were close friends with the other men who died; you’ve made your views perfectly plain about the decision to pull the remaining special forces soldiers off the project and replace them with the current bunch of cut-price, tea-drinking muppets. And, for the record, I agree with you, but none of that has added to team harmony, has it?”

“You knew?” Even to his own ears, the words sounded weak. Stephen thought he and Ryan had done a good job of keeping their relationship to themselves. Ryan had been a serving soldier assigned to the anomaly project. It had been as much of a no-no as his relationship with Helen. They’d both known that and had done their best to keep their dealing with each other professional. But too many beers after an emotionally-charged day on which Ryan had lost his team medic, Connor had lost one of his best friends and they’d successfully repatriated the Pteranodon had broken down the barriers they’d so carefully erected. They’d ended up back at Stephen’s flat, stumbling towards the bed, doing their best to remove inconvenient clothing as quickly as possible.

Had he loved Ryan? Stephen acknowledged that he hadn’t had chance to find out. Losing Ryan had hurt more than Stephen had believed possible, and he was still hurting. That was one reason he hadn’t felt like pandering to Cutter’s bruised ego. He’d apologised – and meant it – but Cutter seemed determined to play the aggrieved husband, even though he and Helen had been separated in all but name. And Lester was right, the cracks were showing. The trust that had glued them together for over eight years had been shattered and neither of them knew how to put their friendship back together again. Once he would have trusted Cutter with his life, but now, no. And to do their job, they needed complete trust in their team-mates.

Stephen drew in a slow breath. He’d take that holiday. A long one, maybe even a permanent one. But, for the moment, if Lester was happy to keep him on the payroll and give him leave of absence, then fine. He exhaled equally slowly, feeling some of the stress already starting to slip away.

“Do you need to know where I’m going?”

“Send me a postcard.”

****

Stephen sent the first postcard from a little village just outside Orleans. He’d taken an early morning train through the Channel Tunnel and was intending to work his way down through France to the Gorge du Tarn, avoiding autoroutes. He had a friend who worked at the wolf park in Gevaudan who’d told him that they had an opening on a research project for a couple of months over summer for someone who had experience tracking and working with animals.

He’d allowed himself a week to make the journey down through France and intended to make the most of it. Finding small hotels didn’t seem to be a problem and he intended to spend time walking and enjoying the countryside, without worrying about keeping himself or anyone else safe.

Over a couple of beers outside a small pavement café, he’d toyed with the idea of sending a card to Lester, just as a joke. He didn’t particularly like or trust the man, but there had been a level of empathy from him over Ryan’s death that had taken Stephen by surprise. Lester was the only person who had openly acknowledged his relationship with the special forces captain. The soldiers had been silently supportive, but they were dealing with their own grief and talking hadn’t been high on anyone’s list of priorities. Cutter had been too wrapped up in himself as usual, Abby seemed to have taken the long-buried infidelity personally while Connor was piggy in the middle, shyly offering friendship but not wanting to offend Cutter, the man he looked up to so much.

A rack of postcards stood next to Stephen on the pavement. Castles of the Loire valley featured heavily, as did Orleans cathedral. Nestling amidst an array of impressive architecture were a few cards featuring Joan of Arc. One of them showed her tied to the stake with piles of wood at her feet. On impulse, Stephen bought the card and a stamp, then sat there wondering what to write. Eventually, he just addressed it to Lester, scrawled his signature across the back and stuffed it into a box outside the nearby post office before he could change his mind.

He hoped Lester would get the joke.

****

Staying off the autoroute took him across country to Poitiers. He stopped for a meal and a look around the town, then found a convenient farmhouse displaying a Logis de France sticker. He sat on the terrace at the back of the house and watched the sun go down, enjoying several glasses of local red wine with the owners, a cheerful couple in their 50s who spoke excellent English, but happily gave him the opportunity to practice his rusty French.

Being away from the ARC and the weight of disapproval that had pressed down on him like a lead-lined jacket had helped to clear his head. He’d always been largely solitary by nature and without a need to please anyone other than himself, he found that the fog that had gathered in his head since the double-whammy of the news of Ryan’s death and Helen’s calculatedly cruel betrayal was finally starting to dissipate.

He had no idea if he would ever be able to return to the ARC but that was a bridge he’d cross later – much later. Lester had made it clear that he’d continued to be paid for the next three months and after that it would be up to him to decide what he wanted to do. Stephen was a long way off even thinking about that. He allowed himself to think about Ryan, to remember, and to grieve. But his relationship with Cutter – and Helen – was a different matter.

He’d been 23. Technically a mature student. Helen had been his tutor. He’d been flattered by her attention and had gradually fallen under her spell. The affair hadn’t lasted long; he’d learned later that they never did where Helen was concerned. She’d moved on to her latest victim, leaving him nursing what he’d naively believed to be a broken heart. His studies had suffered, and he’d deferred his final year. CMU had been surprisingly accommodating, and he wondered if they’d been aware of Helen’s extra-mural activities. If they had, they’d made no effort to deal with her, but had no doubt heaved a collective sigh of relief when she’d disappeared. He’d taken a job as her husband’s lab technician and had ended up supporting him through the resulting police enquiry that had – not unnaturally – focussed a lot of time and energy on the grieving husband.

Their enquiries into Stephen relationship with her had been both brief and discreet.

Stephen pushed thoughts of Helen away. There was nothing to be gained by wishing he’d taken different decisions nine years ago.

****

A day walking in the forests of Limousin allowed him the freedom just to let his mind wander, remembering Ryan and being able to let the tears flow with no concern about being watched or judged. All he saw on a six-hour walk were trees, birds and deer. He ate bread, cheese and cold meat he’d picked up that morning and spent the night in the woods in the small tent he kept in the car.

The villages and towns he passed through were chocolate-box pretty. Warm, honey-coloured stone, flower baskets everywhere, and almost no tourists. The wettest May on record, according the local people he’d chatted to, had finally given way to a scorching hot June.

Stephen enjoyed the heat and was free to spend most of the day wearing nothing more than tatty denim shorts and a pair of sandals, only pulling on a teeshirt when he went shopping or into a bar.

The next leg of his journey took him into the Dordogne, and he started hearing more English spoken, but avoiding tourist traps proved easy. The rivers were all still swollen from the recent rain and Stephen liked the idea of a canoeing trip. A quick check online told him that finding somewhere to hire a canoe wouldn’t be difficult.

He took a detour off the main road to look at the Vézère river, running strong and brown. A bakery in a pretty village called Condat supplied him with bread and pastries, and he ate them on the rocks next to the waterfall where the tributary flowed into the main river. He cooled his feet in the water and although he fancied a swim, the current looked strong and he decided not to take any risks, and instead went for a walk along a wide path on the edge of a wheat field.

On his way back to the village, he admired a large, mansion house surrounded by a high wall and an equally tall box hedge. At the back, an avenue of trees allowed him an unobstructed view. It looked like something straight out of a film set for The Three Musketeers. The building was equally impressive from the front, with a half-timbered tower protruding from one side.

A sign on the outside wall announced that La Commanderie was a hotel and restaurant, and, to Stephen’s surprise, the room price wasn’t outrageous. The lady who ran the hotel was more than happy to show him to a large room with windows overlooking the gardens at the rear. She didn’t even bat an eyelid at his scruffy shorts and teeshirt that had both seen better days.

Half an hour later, Stephen was sitting under an enormous tree that had, according to the owner, been grown from a seedling presented to one of her predecessors by Marie Antoinette in 1793.The Commanderie’s current owner proudly told him that this was one of the only tulip trees of that age left in the country, as the other two planted at the same time in the grounds of Versailles had been destroyed in the great storm of 1999. The tree spread its shade over a wide area and made a perfect spot to sit and just taken in his surroundings and listen to the constant chirping of crickets and the ever-present birdsong.

Madame Roux brought him a tall glass of chilled white wine flavoured with a pleasant hint of peach syrup and joined him for another history lesson about the house and garden. The current building dated to the mid-1550s and was built adjacent the site of a command house of the Knights Hospitaller. The house wore its history lightly and was surprisingly bright and airy inside. The only other guests were an elderly Frenchman from Paris who holidayed there every year and an American couple doing a whirlwind tour of Europe. The following day they intended to visit the newly-opened replica of the prehistoric painted cave of Lascaux. Stephen was tempted by a visit before he moved on, but his immediate priority was a canoe trip for the following day. Madame Roux assured him he’d have no problem with this, and she advised him to start from the nearby town of Montignac. If he got there early enough, he could do a six-hour trip on the river and be picked up at the far end.

A second night at the Commanderie seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t as if he was strapped for cash. When Madame Roux went off to prepare for the evening meal, Stephen closed his eyes and was content to simply sip his wine and savour the late afternoon warmth.

After an excellent meal of trout, new potatoes and fresh asparagus, followed by a chocolate mousse that tasted like heaven on a spoon, Stephen equipped himself with a large glass of red wine and retired to the garden again to watch the sunset. The heat of the day gradually diminished, and the birdsong faded away, but the noise from the crickets remained constant.

One by one, the lights in the rooms behind him went out, leaving Stephen relaxing in the cool of the terrace. A rustle in the undergrowth made him wonder if a deer was about to trot across the grass, but whatever it was minded its own business, and a little while later, Stephen retired to bed.

The bright light of a full moon left the room in no more than semi-darkness. The air was cooling fast and Stephen fell quickly into a deep and for once dreamless sleep.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

knitekat.livejournal.com

Lovely start. Some great Lester lines and do I detect a possible fixit? *purrs* and *pokes you with paw, claws currently sheathed*

From:

fredbassett

Thank you! You'll just have to wait and see...

From:

bigtitch.livejournal.com

This is a great beginning. Love Lester being professionally sympathetic! I would be very tempted to stay at that hotel in Condat if I didn't know of better lodgings close by!

From:

fredbassett

The hotel is really lovely! I had a look around the inside with M-A to check for marks. The owner is really nice.

From:

goldarrow

Brilliant beginning!
Your descriptions were so good I recognised everything.

Good for Lester. I like it when he shows his perspicacious side. It fits better with his management background than the blinders he wore in the show.

I'm hearing ominous music in that last line!

From:

fredbassett

I still find it so funny it took me ages to recognise the location. I just wasn't expecting it to be somewhere I knew!

Yes, I like Lester the way he was in the later series ie not too oblivious.

From:

goldarrow

In a way, I do too! I imagined that you'd know it immediately (in fact, I was a bit torn about actually using it for that reason), but I can see that it's a completely different thing when not expected!

From:

fredbassett

I knew instantly it was in France, but then blanked on where until I notice the sign on the wall and blew it up so I could just read it. I laughed at lot then. It's a great picture.

From:

nietie.livejournal.com

Lester is a very sensible man. This is exactly what Stephen needs. But I have a feeling something will happen in ~~heaven~~ La Commanderie and its gorgeous surroundings.