I feel the need to disclaim before I write this. I normally do not like rap at all, but this song keeps playing on the radio and I do like it. I think it's sad, and true—to me it's about how easy it is for something you love to become something you hate under just the right circumstances. (This is why I refuse to make writing or art my career—I would eventually grow to hate it.) Bizarrely, it fits with everyone's favourite melancholy Scot, Nick Cutter.
Disclaimer: I do not own Primeval, Nick Cutter, or any other familiar concepts or characters within this story. Nor do I own the song 'Airplanes', which is written by B.O.B. (The version of the song that I wrote this fic to is the B.O.B and Hayley Williams version, not the Eminem version. Eminem is a good-looking guy, until he opens his mouth...)
o...o
'Somebody take me back to the days
before this was a job, before I got paid
(...)
I'm guessin' that maybe if we could make some wishes out of airplanes
then maybe, oh maybe we'll go back to the days.'
Nick Cutter wasn't sure when, exactly, it had happened, but somewhere along the lines the work he did with anomalies became a drudgery.
Maybe it wasn't a single event at all, but a slow process—beginning when he found out his wife wasn't dead at all but had chosen prehistory over their marriage, and getting progressively worse ever since he stepped back through the anomaly from the Permian and into a world without Claudia Brown.
Somewhere in the course of events it became clear that this amazing miracle of science and history and discovery came at a tremendous cost of human life. People died at the hands of the creatures coming through from distant, long-dead worlds—and they would continue to be victims, again and again. People, bad people, like Oliver Leek and Helen and goodness knew what other unsavoury characters were lurking, waiting, plotting—they would try and harness the power of anomalies and use them for personal, selfish gain and in doing so risk the entire planet, the world as they all knew it.
The boyish awe at seeing living specimens from the distant, ancient past was replaced by the dull throb of stress and reluctance. His life before was hardly one that anybody would envy, but at the very least his world was uncomplicated. Now he didn't know what to think—everything he'd ever learned and everything he thought he knew was thrown to the wind, replaced by a world dominated by mad scientists and prehistoric beasts and monsters from the far-distant future. And death. So much death, so much loss.
Stephen's death marked the point of no return. Anomalies weren't something to be looked upon with gleeful awe but with awed terror. Seeing just what evil could be done—and how easily it could be accomplished—in the right hands... it was a wakeup call. This wasn't a game. This wasn't an archaeological dig where he could retire at night and leave the past buried in the dust, dead and gone.
It wasn't fun anymore. It wasn't fascinating. The patina was long gone, and now he saw the anomalies for what they truly were: dangerous.
Anomalies opened all the time to different timelines, different dimensions. If he could, he wondered, would he go back to the days before this? When Helen was still dead and he was still a cranky, curmudgeonly old professor knocking golf balls around his cramped office with an auroch femur and depending on his assistant to remind him to eat and sleep and shower occasionally?
Would he go back to a world in which Claudia Brown existed but didn't know who he was?
Would he go back to a time and place where sweet Abby and dear Connor had never met and probably never would?
Would he go back to a time when he remained ignorant of Helen's affair with Stephen, before he knew just what a manipulative hold she had on people? Before he knew just what she'd become?
If he had one chance, one wish, would he go back in time to the day one of his students showed him the newspaper and led him to the rabbit-hole in the Forest of Dean and simply refuse the offer?
Would it change anything?
It was raining and he was the only person in the cemetery. He came to leave flowers for Stephen because it would have been his birthday that day, and he found the shreds of the photo of himself and Claudia still clinging to the manicured grass. And he stayed for hours lost in thought, surrounded by the dead. Here, at least, he could be alone with his thoughts, morbid as they may have been.
Would he, though? Would he change the past, change history? Change himself?
His mobile phone went off. Without even looking at the screen he knew who was calling him, because only two people ever called his phone and one of them was laying in pieces in the coffin under the fresh mound of dirt.
"I'll be right there," he said, before Lester had the opportunity to tell him what he already knew, that another anomaly had been sighted.
He wouldn't, he decided. He couldn't, even if given the chance.
He left the cemetery and climbed into his truck, setting off to do the work he now hated with a passion but in which he was caught far too deep to leave.
'Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?
I could really use a wish right now,
wish right now,
wish right now.'