He watched from the edge of the roof, smoke swirling up around him, coating a rumpled green canvas jacket in soot that can't be seen for dirt and blood.
The smell of burning plastic and metal and flesh is everywhere, because they had forgotten in the panic that all those creature's who couldn't get home, were still trapped within. The building and their lives are gone before anyone remembers, he knows more lives were lost than will ever be remembered because of Helen's insanity.
He picked this roof for a reason; it's all that stands in the new ARC that belonged to the old. Of all the towers it was possibly the most appropriate, the central strut that held the building together. The ARC will survive, that beating heart will live on and they will grow again. There are very few people in this world who know that better than he does. It almost makes him sad that he won't be remembered.
He's got a lot to regret in his life, this moment, he thinks, is not regret, because he knows there's nothing he could have done. Knows he did everything right in the end. But it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
He can feel the familiar taste of ashes on his tongue and the burning in his lungs, the strain of every muscle as the gangly dinosaur nerd carried the cooling body of his mentor from the building. He'd known it was too late as soon as he'd found him, had seen enough hero movies to know that Nick wasn't going to make it, and he deserved more than to be dragged out of the building screaming, to meet his death in the eyes of everyone he was leaving. So he'd sat through the last minutes, and he had comforted, and he hoped with all his heart that Nick had passed on knowing he was loved.
"I wonder if he knew," the voice is old, but so familiar that Connor doesn't even blink; perched on the ledge of a building swiftly burning out from beneath his feet he even doesn't bother to turn. The other man will not leave him.
"I don't know if he'd have passed on quite so readily if he had." Connor whispers, turning away before he see's himself emerge from the building. There are very few rules now that everything is burning, but he still doesn't know, can't test, what would happen if he were to see, to meet, himself.
The glass device Helen used to open anomalies feels cold in his hands, it's always cold, the golden light that erupts before him is no comfort to that.
"I think he was coming to find you." Because Nick had died, taking a lot of secrets with him, knowing more than any other person on the base about the future, and the past and all the new things that were appearing in between.
But there's one thing he didn't know.
He didn't know that Lester had lied.
He didn't know that the body of Stephen Hart, had never been found.