lukadreaming asked for Becker/Ryan and 'is it worth it?' Or 'waiting for the sky to fall'.

~~oOOo~~

They'd never officially met. At least, not while the other man was still alive. (Though now, Becker knew enough to considered death to be nothing more than a technicality.)

The first time they'd encountered each other had been Becker's first day on the job, the incident at the British museum. He'd seen a shadow lurking in the halls of the Egyptian exhibit and gone back to investigate. Seeing Ryan and Stephen Hart had completely thrown him, leaving him unfocused for the rest of the day as he tried to puzzle out why he'd seen two men whom he knew to be dead.

Eventually he forgot about the sighting in the eddy and swirl of his new posting within the ARC. He'd almost written off Abby's idiot brother's comment about seeing another SF team in the future, but then he'd found the two men lingering in the shadows of his flat's doorway that evening. Intensely aware of how odd the situation felt, Becker had invited them in.

The evening that followed had been both enlightening and disturbing. Discovering the true nature of the anomalies as understood by those who traveled them had been like twisting his brain into the shape of a mobius strip. It was too much to take in; the idea that anomalies were physical tears in time that bled outward, creating alternate pasts and futures. For the first time in his life, Becker had found himself wishing vehemently that he had the scientific background to explain what he know knew to Sarah and Professor Cutter.

But he'd been warned. Stephen was insistent that it wasn't time yet. Each of them would come to that understanding in their own time. But not before.

After the day he'd had, the things he'd seen, Becker had fumed and raged at the pair of would-be dead men. So many lives could be saved if only they shared what they knew. The barren desolation of the future he'd seen might be prevented.

They'd explained in exquisite detail why he could never tell. Why no one would believe him. And in the end, Becker had been forced to admit that they were correct. No matter how much the weight of that knowledge would drag him downward, he could never share it with another living soul. (The irony of the fact that it was being shared with him by two dead men was not lost on him at all.)

Still, he'd wanted to hand in his resignation the following morning.

It'd been Ryan who convinced him not to quit. There was an understanding intrinsic to the position which Captain Ryan had once held that now belonged to Captain Becker. A kindred brotherhood of those who would give their lives to protect the motley team of scientists giving their lives in the race to save their world as time folded in on itself with ever increasing speed.

As they'd sat there together in the lounge of his flat, Becker finally screwed up the courage to ask Ryan the one thing he'd always wondered.

"Was it worth it?"

Ryan looked over at him from his position on the sofa. Hart's arm, draped comfortable around his shoulders, gave him a rough but encouraging squeeze.

"You mean dying for them?"

Becker nodded silently.

"Yes," he answered unequivocally. "If I had it to do over again, I would still have made the same choices. Why else do you think I've never gone back, never tried to change the past?"

Now as he lay once again in the inky darkness of a decaying building in the future, he thought about those words. Abby's weight resting against his chest he knew what his decision would be. Because no one who worked for the ARC was ever truly dead. Even if he died in the here and now eventually the Travelers would come for him. And he would become one of them.