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fredbassettTitle : Diamond Fire, Green Ice
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Connor/Blade
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Blade), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Blade really hates anomalies. And things too many teeth that snack on his leg.
A/N : Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
isamazed for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
primeval_denial monthly pairing Connor/Blade
Anomalies were unpredictable. That was what the soldiers hated about them most.
They all knew that no plan survived first contact with the enemy but impressing that on the science team was easier said than done, especially when Cutter and Connor got enthusiastic about something.
Just a quick look after repatriating the latest stray with too many teeth and a bad attitude had turned into let’s just take some readings, it’s good for another three hours, honestly it is.
Blade could see that Ryan was getting ready to thump Cutter again and chuck him over his shoulder and haul him back to the anomaly. Blade knew the signs by now, they all did. Ryan was more patient than most officers, but he’d done it once, and they all knew he’d do it again if he needed to. All of them knew that except the bloody professor.
Then Stephen, the only one with any fucking common sense, yelled that the anomaly was fading.
In the mad scramble that followed, Connor hesitated then turned back to grab his laptop and monitoring gear and that was enough to fuck things up big time.
And that was why Blade had been stuck on the wrong side of an anomaly with Connor for two months, three days, ten hours and about thirty-five minutes. Give or take a few lifetimes.
Blade really fucking hated anomalies.
To be fair, he hated most things he couldn’t gut with a knife if the occasion demanded it, which it often did in his line of work.
What he didn’t hate, much to his own surprise, was Connor. The team’s resident geek had been bloody terrified when the anomaly had closed, leaving the pair of them stuck in the past. The first thing the lad had done was stammer an apology, then he’d started to set up his kit up again, monitoring the magnetic field, checking and rechecking with a single-minded determination that Blade had admired. After an hour, Connor announced that there was now no remaining trace of any anomaly-related magnetic field in the area, so he’d shut everything down to save battery power and they’d taken stock of what they had.
Answer, not much, but enough for Blade to be reasonably confident that they could survive. He’d had been in worse positions with a lot less kit and had still stayed alive. At least this time he had an M4 carbine with five 30 round magazines, a Glock 19 with five 15 round magazines, six knives and a basic survival pack with med kit, water purification tables, survival blanket, water bottle, laser flares, LED torch and spare batteries and all the usual stuff he liked to carry, including two days’ worth of power bars and three garrotting wires.
Connor had his laptop, monitoring gear, solar chargers, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Cretaceous and a sense of humour.
He was surprisingly calm in a crisis. Mostly it was either because he didn’t quite realise how big the crisis was or because he’d been distracted by something new and interesting, and getting stuck in the past was pretty big on the list of new and interesting things in Connor’s life. It was also pretty high on Blade’s list of things he could have done without, only beaten by having to slot six shots from his Glock into the head of something that had been trying to remove his leg from his body before it had finally done the decent thing and succumbed to persuasion and died. Until that encounter, he'd not used a single bullet, but ramming his Fairbairn-Sykes into its skull had been surprisingly ineffective, something that in other circumstances, Blade would have taken as a personal insult, if he hadn’t been trying really fucking hard not to scream.
Connor had picked up a better sense of priorities in two months, three days, nine hours ete etc and had removed the knife from the ruin of the creature’s skull and handed it to him before he’d half-dragged, half-carried Blade back to the cave they’d been using for shelter and set about getting field dressings on the wreckage of his lower leg, while he held onto the knife like a fucking teddy bear.
Luckily, Ditz always packed the good stuff. Or the bad stuff, depending on your views on being off your face on drugs when just about everything alive was trying to kill you. Bit like living in Australia. There was a good reason he never went on holiday there.
He’d had to agree to one morphine jab or not screaming wouldn’t have been an option for very long. Blade liked pain as much as most card-carrying psychos, but he wasn’t keen on seeing his own bones, especially not when one of them was sticking out of his ragged flesh. He’d told Connor how to pull on his ankle to get the bones back into place and to keep pulling until they slid back into his mangled flesh. He ordered Connor not to stop even if he passed out. To his own surprise, he managed to stay conscious, but it had been touch and go and, to his irritation, he’d finally given in and screamed. That had annoyed him even more than having to use up six bullets.
Connor had looked like he wanted to puke, but he hadn’t, elevating him above a few trained medics Blade had known. Helping Ditz get puke out of someone’s mangled guts hadn’t been a high point of his army career. It looked really bad if you managed to get the casualty back to base and then had to explain why there were carrots in the wound. Some medics didn’t have much of a sense of humour for that sort of thing.
Blade knew his chances of survival had just thrown themselves off a high cliff, but there was no point in telling Connor that; he’d probably already worked it out for himself.
They had enough antibiotics for two courses, but that was all. But his chances of lasting 14 days like this probably weren’t high, so at least Connor would be left with some in reserve for himself, if he needed a course. The morphine wouldn’t last long, either, but he wasn’t too fussed about that, he hated the fucking muck. Ordinary painkillers were better. But even he’d get fed up of pain at some point, especially when the wounds got infected as they usually did in jungles, and the Cretaceous was near enough to a fucking jungle as made no difference.
He really fucking hated jungles. Almost as much as he hated fucking anomalies.
The bandaging bit wasn’t too bad. At least he could still feel his foot, so that was good. He’d taken the precaution of cutting, smoothing and stockpiling a few wooden splints, so once his lower leg was neatly sandwiched between two of them, he could start thinking about what to do next …
Connor knew how to use the M4 and the Glock, although he’d never fired a single bullet. There was no way Blade was letting him waste rounds on practice shots, but Connor could now strip and reassemble both weapons in the dark without fucking up and had dry-fired both until his muscle memory was as good as the average squaddie’s, probably better. The laser sight on the M4 meant they’d been able to work on his aim until Blade was confident he’d be able to hit whatever he was aiming at. He was good with a knife now as well and carried two of Blade’s spares in arm-sheaths. They’d fashioned spears and harpoons of varying lengths, some with fire-hardened tips, and a few others now had carved bone points as well.
Connor knew how to survive. Blade was as sure as he could be about that. He’d stay alive as long as he could for the lad, but he reserved the right to finish things on his own terms if he needed to. He’d do it without wasting a bullet, though. He had some fucking principles. OK, not many, and most of them involved knives, but he liked to stick to the ones he still had left.
The morphine was doing a good job of blocking the pain. Too bloody good. Blade preferred to be in control of his own reactions, not have some sodding drug telling him everything was all right when he bloody well knew it wasn’t. And he definitely didn’t like the way it was slowing his breathing down.
He was also really fucking pissed off that his adrenaline induced hard-on hadn’t amounted to anything but wasn’t going away, either. Dying with a boner definitely wasn’t his idea of fun, but if something with too many teeth followed the blood trail he’d left behind, he was going to need both hands, and dying with one stuck down the front of his pants while having a wank wasn’t his idea of fun, either.
Biting hard on his lower lip brought him out of the morphine fog long enough for him to keep his eyes on the mouth of the cave while Connor got on with lighting the fire. Collecting dry wood was too labour intensive to keep it going all the time so every day they laid it ready for when they needed it. Like now.
When the flames were dancing around and the fire was producing enough smoke at the entrance to keep most of the predators away, Connor sat down next to him, not fussing, just waiting and watching. He was a quick learner, even if he was totally out of his element. He was easy on the eye, too, and he suited the short beard. Fuck, things were bad if he was admitting to that. Perving the principal was bad form in the bodyguards’ union. But so was getting your fucking leg nearly chewed off and then thinking about the best way to top yourself.
“Your breathing’s gone all weird.” Connor’s soft voice jolted Blade out of the drug-induced fog that blanketed his mind.
“Too slow,” Blade said. His tongue felt too big for his mouth and his voice sounded odd, even to him. “Fucking drug.”
“Your eyes are weird too. All green, almost no pupil. Should I check your pulse?”
“No point.”
“What would Ditzy do?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
Connor looked scared shitless and he was covered in blood, but there was a stubbornness in his eyes that Blade had come to recognise and respect. Then his eyes widened, and Blade would have laughed if he’d had enough control over his breathing. Connor was an open book, and Blade knew all his tells by now. He’d also been around the soldiers long enough to have heard all the jokes and seen them letting off steam.
Blade normally took care of his own after-action hard on. Sometimes the action was intense enough to take care of it for him, which some of the lads used to find disconcerting. Even by special forces standards, getting your rocks off killing someone or nearly being killed by them was enough to fail a psych assessment, unless you were really fucking good at passing for normal, which he was, most of the time. And the rest of the time, he was good enough at what he did for the bosses to look the other way. The one thing that always went in his favour was that he didn’t like killing animals. That was just sick. He wasn’t impulsive or irresponsible and he couldn’t be arsed with being manipulative, so on the face of it, he didn’t tick all the psycho boxes. He just had an unusual relationship with pain, And death. Preferably other people’s deaths.
Not his own, that was something he preferred to avoid.
Fucking drug.
He’d rather die in fucking agony than breathe like this, too shallow, too slow, knowing his heart rate was dropping, but still wanting to come so fucking hard …
“I’m going to touch you,” Connor said. “Do me a favour and don’t slit my throat, mate.”
Shaking fingers tugged at the zip on what was left of his black uniform trousers, and a warm hand wrapped itself around his cock.
That was all it took.
Tension emptied out of him in one long breath and his heartrate jumped as a white-hot climax shot through him, searing every nerve ending that the thing with big teeth had left intact. The biggest hot rush he’d ever felt pushed back against the drug and brought back the pain, mingling with it into the best fucking feeling he’d ever had. Probably not worth losing his leg over, or his life - he wasn’t quite that weird - but it still felt fucking good. More than good. Fucking brilliant.
And at least he knew he had fuck all chance of getting addicted to drugs; the rush he got from them just wasn’t up to his exacting standards. But he could get addicted to what he’d just had. Without the chewed leg, for preference.
Connor grinned at him and wiped his hand on his own filthy, blood-soaked trousers. “Your breathing’s better and your eyes aren’t so green.”
“Thanks. Take the Glock.”
Connor’s eyes widened. “You’re not …”
“Probably not, but you might need the gun if we were followed. If my breathing gets too slow, hurt me. A lot. OK? That’ll probably work.”
And if it didn’t, at least he’d go out on his own terms.
When he finally woke up, Blade wasn’t sure which of them was most surprised by the fact that he was still alive. On balance, probably him.
Connor kept the Glock, but didn’t use it, not even a week later when he had to take down two raptors with a spear.
Blade was impressed.
Connor was fucking stunned, but all he did was drag them far enough away from the cave to gut, pluck, strip for sinew and sort anything that might be useful from the carcasses before leaving the rest for the scavengers. Raptor tasted nothing like bloody chicken, and they were both soon heartily sick of it, but a plentiful supply of smoked raptor meant Connor didn’t have to go hunting and could stay close to the cave.
Blade’s chances still weren’t good, but they didn’t talk about that. They just planned for a future that only one of them was likely to see. A future that consisted of doing whatever they needed to do to survive.
Connor still checked the anomaly site every day and made sure his batteries stayed charged, but for the last week, there’d been a lot of cloud cover and he’d cut down his tests.
Blade could still feel his foot, but they’d had to be sparing with bandages, so he didn’t have much of an idea how things were underneath them. He was just relying on the antibiotics. He liked them a lot more than he liked morphine.
The night the anomaly came back took them both by surprise.
Connor was leaning against the cave wall, his head resting on Blade’s shoulder while he dicked around on his phone, playing games and occasionally reading out chunks of one of his favourite comics. Connor still thought solar chargers were sexier than guns and knives, which was probably a good thing, but if they ever did get back home, he’d have a few more transferable skills.
When one of Connor’s detectors let out a loud bleep, he grabbed the laser flare and the LED torch and scrambled out of the cave.
Blade kept his breathing level, clamping down hard on any hope.
He hated anomalies.
This one would probably lead somewhere even bloody worse, then Connor would feel like shit. They couldn’t afford to take any risks. They’d have to stay here unless Connor was certain the alternative was a big improvement. And if they left here, their chances of ever being found would get even lower.
When Connor ran back into the cave with a smile on his face, Blade started to allow a small trickle of hope to flare inside him.
Connor started to pack up his laptop and the rest of the kit. He swept the small wooden carvings they’d spent long nights occupying themselves with into the bag along with their stock of carved bone points, making sure he had everything that had come to matter to them in a single bag, ready to go. His movements were fast and economical. He’d learnt not to hesitate.
Connor didn’t hate anomalies.
Blade might be prepared to give some of them the benefit of the doubt now, as well.
When Ditzy got to the cave, he took one look at Blade’s outstretched leg, still bandaged and splinted, and just grinned. “Bet you only used one shot of morph, you stubborn fucker.”
Blade just grinned at him.
They had him on the stretcher and ready to move out with the sort of efficiency that told him they had no fucking idea how long the bastard thing would stay open for this time.
Connor shoved an armful of their best spears at Stephen, keeping hold of his favourite one.
Cutter looked surprised by the Glock holstered on Connor’s right thigh and the two strapped to his arms in Blade’s sheaths.
Ryan didn’t.
Nor did Abby. She just smiled, hugged her friend and made sure she stayed close to him,
Connor stayed close to the stretcher, his eyes watchful.
Finn hoisted up the back end of the stretcher and asked< “How many bullets did you use, mate?”
“Six, nine mil. Fucker didn’t die easily. Who wins the pool?”
“Lyle, who’d you bloody think? Drinks’ll be on you. Did you save us any of the carcass?”
“Sorry, ate it all,” Connor said. “Tasted like cardboard marinated in raccoon shit.
Cutter laughed. He probably thought Connor was joking.
Only the soldiers – and possibly Stephen – had any idea that the Connor Temple who walked back through the anomaly, armed to the teeth, was wholly different in outlook and ability to the Connor Temple they’d previously known.
He now knew how and when to kill. He knew how to stay alive.
Blade was so fucking proud of him.
But he still mostly fucking hated anomalies.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Connor/Blade
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Blade), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Blade really hates anomalies. And things too many teeth that snack on his leg.
A/N : Written for
isamazed for the primeval_denial monthly pairing Connor/BladeAnomalies were unpredictable. That was what the soldiers hated about them most.
They all knew that no plan survived first contact with the enemy but impressing that on the science team was easier said than done, especially when Cutter and Connor got enthusiastic about something.
Just a quick look after repatriating the latest stray with too many teeth and a bad attitude had turned into let’s just take some readings, it’s good for another three hours, honestly it is.
Blade could see that Ryan was getting ready to thump Cutter again and chuck him over his shoulder and haul him back to the anomaly. Blade knew the signs by now, they all did. Ryan was more patient than most officers, but he’d done it once, and they all knew he’d do it again if he needed to. All of them knew that except the bloody professor.
Then Stephen, the only one with any fucking common sense, yelled that the anomaly was fading.
In the mad scramble that followed, Connor hesitated then turned back to grab his laptop and monitoring gear and that was enough to fuck things up big time.
And that was why Blade had been stuck on the wrong side of an anomaly with Connor for two months, three days, ten hours and about thirty-five minutes. Give or take a few lifetimes.
Blade really fucking hated anomalies.
To be fair, he hated most things he couldn’t gut with a knife if the occasion demanded it, which it often did in his line of work.
What he didn’t hate, much to his own surprise, was Connor. The team’s resident geek had been bloody terrified when the anomaly had closed, leaving the pair of them stuck in the past. The first thing the lad had done was stammer an apology, then he’d started to set up his kit up again, monitoring the magnetic field, checking and rechecking with a single-minded determination that Blade had admired. After an hour, Connor announced that there was now no remaining trace of any anomaly-related magnetic field in the area, so he’d shut everything down to save battery power and they’d taken stock of what they had.
Answer, not much, but enough for Blade to be reasonably confident that they could survive. He’d had been in worse positions with a lot less kit and had still stayed alive. At least this time he had an M4 carbine with five 30 round magazines, a Glock 19 with five 15 round magazines, six knives and a basic survival pack with med kit, water purification tables, survival blanket, water bottle, laser flares, LED torch and spare batteries and all the usual stuff he liked to carry, including two days’ worth of power bars and three garrotting wires.
Connor had his laptop, monitoring gear, solar chargers, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Cretaceous and a sense of humour.
He was surprisingly calm in a crisis. Mostly it was either because he didn’t quite realise how big the crisis was or because he’d been distracted by something new and interesting, and getting stuck in the past was pretty big on the list of new and interesting things in Connor’s life. It was also pretty high on Blade’s list of things he could have done without, only beaten by having to slot six shots from his Glock into the head of something that had been trying to remove his leg from his body before it had finally done the decent thing and succumbed to persuasion and died. Until that encounter, he'd not used a single bullet, but ramming his Fairbairn-Sykes into its skull had been surprisingly ineffective, something that in other circumstances, Blade would have taken as a personal insult, if he hadn’t been trying really fucking hard not to scream.
Connor had picked up a better sense of priorities in two months, three days, nine hours ete etc and had removed the knife from the ruin of the creature’s skull and handed it to him before he’d half-dragged, half-carried Blade back to the cave they’d been using for shelter and set about getting field dressings on the wreckage of his lower leg, while he held onto the knife like a fucking teddy bear.
Luckily, Ditz always packed the good stuff. Or the bad stuff, depending on your views on being off your face on drugs when just about everything alive was trying to kill you. Bit like living in Australia. There was a good reason he never went on holiday there.
He’d had to agree to one morphine jab or not screaming wouldn’t have been an option for very long. Blade liked pain as much as most card-carrying psychos, but he wasn’t keen on seeing his own bones, especially not when one of them was sticking out of his ragged flesh. He’d told Connor how to pull on his ankle to get the bones back into place and to keep pulling until they slid back into his mangled flesh. He ordered Connor not to stop even if he passed out. To his own surprise, he managed to stay conscious, but it had been touch and go and, to his irritation, he’d finally given in and screamed. That had annoyed him even more than having to use up six bullets.
Connor had looked like he wanted to puke, but he hadn’t, elevating him above a few trained medics Blade had known. Helping Ditz get puke out of someone’s mangled guts hadn’t been a high point of his army career. It looked really bad if you managed to get the casualty back to base and then had to explain why there were carrots in the wound. Some medics didn’t have much of a sense of humour for that sort of thing.
Blade knew his chances of survival had just thrown themselves off a high cliff, but there was no point in telling Connor that; he’d probably already worked it out for himself.
They had enough antibiotics for two courses, but that was all. But his chances of lasting 14 days like this probably weren’t high, so at least Connor would be left with some in reserve for himself, if he needed a course. The morphine wouldn’t last long, either, but he wasn’t too fussed about that, he hated the fucking muck. Ordinary painkillers were better. But even he’d get fed up of pain at some point, especially when the wounds got infected as they usually did in jungles, and the Cretaceous was near enough to a fucking jungle as made no difference.
He really fucking hated jungles. Almost as much as he hated fucking anomalies.
The bandaging bit wasn’t too bad. At least he could still feel his foot, so that was good. He’d taken the precaution of cutting, smoothing and stockpiling a few wooden splints, so once his lower leg was neatly sandwiched between two of them, he could start thinking about what to do next …
Connor knew how to use the M4 and the Glock, although he’d never fired a single bullet. There was no way Blade was letting him waste rounds on practice shots, but Connor could now strip and reassemble both weapons in the dark without fucking up and had dry-fired both until his muscle memory was as good as the average squaddie’s, probably better. The laser sight on the M4 meant they’d been able to work on his aim until Blade was confident he’d be able to hit whatever he was aiming at. He was good with a knife now as well and carried two of Blade’s spares in arm-sheaths. They’d fashioned spears and harpoons of varying lengths, some with fire-hardened tips, and a few others now had carved bone points as well.
Connor knew how to survive. Blade was as sure as he could be about that. He’d stay alive as long as he could for the lad, but he reserved the right to finish things on his own terms if he needed to. He’d do it without wasting a bullet, though. He had some fucking principles. OK, not many, and most of them involved knives, but he liked to stick to the ones he still had left.
The morphine was doing a good job of blocking the pain. Too bloody good. Blade preferred to be in control of his own reactions, not have some sodding drug telling him everything was all right when he bloody well knew it wasn’t. And he definitely didn’t like the way it was slowing his breathing down.
He was also really fucking pissed off that his adrenaline induced hard-on hadn’t amounted to anything but wasn’t going away, either. Dying with a boner definitely wasn’t his idea of fun, but if something with too many teeth followed the blood trail he’d left behind, he was going to need both hands, and dying with one stuck down the front of his pants while having a wank wasn’t his idea of fun, either.
Biting hard on his lower lip brought him out of the morphine fog long enough for him to keep his eyes on the mouth of the cave while Connor got on with lighting the fire. Collecting dry wood was too labour intensive to keep it going all the time so every day they laid it ready for when they needed it. Like now.
When the flames were dancing around and the fire was producing enough smoke at the entrance to keep most of the predators away, Connor sat down next to him, not fussing, just waiting and watching. He was a quick learner, even if he was totally out of his element. He was easy on the eye, too, and he suited the short beard. Fuck, things were bad if he was admitting to that. Perving the principal was bad form in the bodyguards’ union. But so was getting your fucking leg nearly chewed off and then thinking about the best way to top yourself.
“Your breathing’s gone all weird.” Connor’s soft voice jolted Blade out of the drug-induced fog that blanketed his mind.
“Too slow,” Blade said. His tongue felt too big for his mouth and his voice sounded odd, even to him. “Fucking drug.”
“Your eyes are weird too. All green, almost no pupil. Should I check your pulse?”
“No point.”
“What would Ditzy do?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
Connor looked scared shitless and he was covered in blood, but there was a stubbornness in his eyes that Blade had come to recognise and respect. Then his eyes widened, and Blade would have laughed if he’d had enough control over his breathing. Connor was an open book, and Blade knew all his tells by now. He’d also been around the soldiers long enough to have heard all the jokes and seen them letting off steam.
Blade normally took care of his own after-action hard on. Sometimes the action was intense enough to take care of it for him, which some of the lads used to find disconcerting. Even by special forces standards, getting your rocks off killing someone or nearly being killed by them was enough to fail a psych assessment, unless you were really fucking good at passing for normal, which he was, most of the time. And the rest of the time, he was good enough at what he did for the bosses to look the other way. The one thing that always went in his favour was that he didn’t like killing animals. That was just sick. He wasn’t impulsive or irresponsible and he couldn’t be arsed with being manipulative, so on the face of it, he didn’t tick all the psycho boxes. He just had an unusual relationship with pain, And death. Preferably other people’s deaths.
Not his own, that was something he preferred to avoid.
Fucking drug.
He’d rather die in fucking agony than breathe like this, too shallow, too slow, knowing his heart rate was dropping, but still wanting to come so fucking hard …
“I’m going to touch you,” Connor said. “Do me a favour and don’t slit my throat, mate.”
Shaking fingers tugged at the zip on what was left of his black uniform trousers, and a warm hand wrapped itself around his cock.
That was all it took.
Tension emptied out of him in one long breath and his heartrate jumped as a white-hot climax shot through him, searing every nerve ending that the thing with big teeth had left intact. The biggest hot rush he’d ever felt pushed back against the drug and brought back the pain, mingling with it into the best fucking feeling he’d ever had. Probably not worth losing his leg over, or his life - he wasn’t quite that weird - but it still felt fucking good. More than good. Fucking brilliant.
And at least he knew he had fuck all chance of getting addicted to drugs; the rush he got from them just wasn’t up to his exacting standards. But he could get addicted to what he’d just had. Without the chewed leg, for preference.
Connor grinned at him and wiped his hand on his own filthy, blood-soaked trousers. “Your breathing’s better and your eyes aren’t so green.”
“Thanks. Take the Glock.”
Connor’s eyes widened. “You’re not …”
“Probably not, but you might need the gun if we were followed. If my breathing gets too slow, hurt me. A lot. OK? That’ll probably work.”
And if it didn’t, at least he’d go out on his own terms.
When he finally woke up, Blade wasn’t sure which of them was most surprised by the fact that he was still alive. On balance, probably him.
Connor kept the Glock, but didn’t use it, not even a week later when he had to take down two raptors with a spear.
Blade was impressed.
Connor was fucking stunned, but all he did was drag them far enough away from the cave to gut, pluck, strip for sinew and sort anything that might be useful from the carcasses before leaving the rest for the scavengers. Raptor tasted nothing like bloody chicken, and they were both soon heartily sick of it, but a plentiful supply of smoked raptor meant Connor didn’t have to go hunting and could stay close to the cave.
Blade’s chances still weren’t good, but they didn’t talk about that. They just planned for a future that only one of them was likely to see. A future that consisted of doing whatever they needed to do to survive.
Connor still checked the anomaly site every day and made sure his batteries stayed charged, but for the last week, there’d been a lot of cloud cover and he’d cut down his tests.
Blade could still feel his foot, but they’d had to be sparing with bandages, so he didn’t have much of an idea how things were underneath them. He was just relying on the antibiotics. He liked them a lot more than he liked morphine.
The night the anomaly came back took them both by surprise.
Connor was leaning against the cave wall, his head resting on Blade’s shoulder while he dicked around on his phone, playing games and occasionally reading out chunks of one of his favourite comics. Connor still thought solar chargers were sexier than guns and knives, which was probably a good thing, but if they ever did get back home, he’d have a few more transferable skills.
When one of Connor’s detectors let out a loud bleep, he grabbed the laser flare and the LED torch and scrambled out of the cave.
Blade kept his breathing level, clamping down hard on any hope.
He hated anomalies.
This one would probably lead somewhere even bloody worse, then Connor would feel like shit. They couldn’t afford to take any risks. They’d have to stay here unless Connor was certain the alternative was a big improvement. And if they left here, their chances of ever being found would get even lower.
When Connor ran back into the cave with a smile on his face, Blade started to allow a small trickle of hope to flare inside him.
Connor started to pack up his laptop and the rest of the kit. He swept the small wooden carvings they’d spent long nights occupying themselves with into the bag along with their stock of carved bone points, making sure he had everything that had come to matter to them in a single bag, ready to go. His movements were fast and economical. He’d learnt not to hesitate.
Connor didn’t hate anomalies.
Blade might be prepared to give some of them the benefit of the doubt now, as well.
When Ditzy got to the cave, he took one look at Blade’s outstretched leg, still bandaged and splinted, and just grinned. “Bet you only used one shot of morph, you stubborn fucker.”
Blade just grinned at him.
They had him on the stretcher and ready to move out with the sort of efficiency that told him they had no fucking idea how long the bastard thing would stay open for this time.
Connor shoved an armful of their best spears at Stephen, keeping hold of his favourite one.
Cutter looked surprised by the Glock holstered on Connor’s right thigh and the two strapped to his arms in Blade’s sheaths.
Ryan didn’t.
Nor did Abby. She just smiled, hugged her friend and made sure she stayed close to him,
Connor stayed close to the stretcher, his eyes watchful.
Finn hoisted up the back end of the stretcher and asked< “How many bullets did you use, mate?”
“Six, nine mil. Fucker didn’t die easily. Who wins the pool?”
“Lyle, who’d you bloody think? Drinks’ll be on you. Did you save us any of the carcass?”
“Sorry, ate it all,” Connor said. “Tasted like cardboard marinated in raccoon shit.
Cutter laughed. He probably thought Connor was joking.
Only the soldiers – and possibly Stephen – had any idea that the Connor Temple who walked back through the anomaly, armed to the teeth, was wholly different in outlook and ability to the Connor Temple they’d previously known.
He now knew how and when to kill. He knew how to stay alive.
Blade was so fucking proud of him.
But he still mostly fucking hated anomalies.
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no subject
Date: 2020-08-07 08:44 pm (UTC)That was terrific.
I loved the sort of stream of consciousness effect of it.
Connor's coming-of-age was beautifully drawn.
Brilliant addition to the monthly pairing!
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:14 pm (UTC)It took a bit of tidying up, but I ended up pretty happy with it.
And I really like the pairing now, so there will have to be a sequel to this!
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:16 pm (UTC)I can just see the others not being able to accept Connor's growth.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-07 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:15 pm (UTC)I wasn't sure quite how it was turning out at first, then I settled on stream of consciousness and exploring Blade's inner psycho. *g* And his outer psycho, for that matter!
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:16 pm (UTC)Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 05:20 pm (UTC)Loved the style, laughed at the teddybear and turned a little green over the nasty injury 😅 Good thing Connor rose to the occasion. And I totally had a giggle fit a this line:
Blade normally took care of his own after-action hard on. Sometimes the action was intense enough to take care of it for him, which some of the lads used to find disconcerting.
LOL
no subject
Date: 2020-08-08 06:17 pm (UTC)I'm glad you like it!
*g* Thanks, I was pleased with that line.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 05:42 pm (UTC)Carrots in the wound, oh god!! Loved all that :D Poor bloody Blade :D
Delicious and terrifying at the same time.
Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2020-08-10 12:47 pm (UTC)Thank you!
I think there might be a sequel.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-14 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-10 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-14 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-14 03:32 pm (UTC)