Chapter 6: Consolation

Danny came back to the world by degrees. The first thing he was aware of was that someone was pounding on the side of his head with what had to be a crochet mallet. The next was that he couldn't lift his hand to bat away said mallet because his arms were too heavy to lift. It took him a good three or four minutes to realise that the reason they were too heavy was that they were, in fact, strapped down to the sides of the bed. It seemed an unpromising start to the day.

He took a moment to try to remember how he'd gotten to this point, and the more he remembered the more he wanted to forget.

The last day played out like one horrible, never-ending nightmare. Things had started off well enough and then just gotten worse and worse from there, and now he was strapped to a bed wondering if Lester would be garnishing his wages for the next twenty years or so for all the damage he'd done in that supply room. He should have just stayed asleep.

"Danny, are you awake?"

He must have been more groggy than he'd thought because he hadn't noticed Sarah sitting in the chair next to his bed until she brought it to his attention. She had a book sitting open, face-down over her knee as though she'd been reading it until a moment ago. Her eyes were soft, worried, and a little tired. There wasn't a window in the room, but he assumed it was probably only a few hours since he'd been knocked out.

He would certainly have to talk to Abby about knocking him out, when next he had the chance.

"So," he sighed, looking round his little prison cell, "I'm a nutter now, am I?"

"No, of course not."

He arched an eyebrow and jiggled his leather restraints.

"Yes, well, maybe a little," she amended. "You did fly off in a rage and destroy a perfectly harmless storage cabinet. They're just worried about you doing yourself further harm. Have you taken a look at your hands, by the way?"

He looked down and found both bandaged from halfway up his forearms to eh/HeHHHl;'sfl;'sdlf;' first knuckles. Flexing and bending his fingers pulled at some injury underneath, but he wasn't in the mood to investigate.

"I'll admit, not my brightest idea. How long do they plan to keep me in here?"

"You're free to go as soon as the doctor sees you've calmed down. He wants to make sure you're only angry, not unstable."

He grinned at that. "I've never been quite stable, but I'll try to fake it for the doctor."

She smiled tightly but didn't laugh with him. Her brow was tense, a frown resting between her eyes. He knew he had put it there.

"I'll be all right," he assured her. As long as I don't think about it. "Long day, you know? Wouldn't be able to loose my hands for me, would you? I'd quite like to use the facilities."

"Well I don't know. Are you feeling any inclination to throw something against the wall. I'd just like to know so I'm braced to duck."

He gave her his most charming smile in lieu of an answer. She rolled her eyes and started to unbuckled the belts around his wrists.

"Becker's going to have my head for doing this. You know he didn't want me coming in here on my own, even with you strapped down and all. Thinks you've gone off."

"Quite chivalrous, our captain," Danny commented, rubbing his wrists over the bandages. "What, are you and he a thing in this reality?"

She looked put out, stepping back as he stood to stretch his sore muscles. "Course not. You should know that."

"Why? Are you and me a thing in this reality?"

"No," she replied again, more softly. "We're not. Danny, you keep talking about realities as though there's more than one, and it's starting to worry me. You go completely crazy over losing this woman who isn't even real—"

"She was," he cut in angrily, stepping up so they were inches apart. "She was real, Sarah, and you should know that. You should, but you don't because everything's fallen apart and come back together differently. And I guess I'm going to have to live with that, but don't try to tell me that it didn't happen. It did."

With a loud thwack the door burst open to find Becker holding a gun on him as though he were a dangerous creature. A small part of him found that amusing; another small part took it as a dare. Would the man really shoot him if he took another step? Would that be so bad?

"It did," he repeated once more before backing away and walking past her into the loo.

Despite Becker's misgivings, Danny behaved himself well enough to warrant release after a brief psychiatric evaluation. Also against the captain's exhaustively expressed advice, Sarah took it upon herself to drive Danny home, as the tranquilizers he'd been shot up with would not allow him to drive his own motorcycle.

He did live in the same flat, which he was disappointed to see, complete with the same dirty dishes in the sink and the same framed picture of his brother sat on the shelf.

"Come on in," he called over his shoulder as he walked through the door, not really caring if she followed. Certainly his dirty clothes hung over the back of the sofa didn't make the best impression, but he was far past caring at this point. A long shower, a lot of alcohol, and a week's worth of sleep were the only things on his mind, and not necessarily in that order.

"You want a beer?" he asked as he began tossing old takeaway containers from the refrigerator. "I'm having a beer. I never did make it to the pub earlier."

"A beer would be nice," she replied, which surprised him enough to look up at her.

Instead of going straight to the couch as a person familiar with the place would have done, she ambled about looking at the books on his shelves and the few personal items he kept out, not seeming to notice the mess. That confirmed, then, that they hadn't been seeing each other in this reality either, though he caught that sort of vibe off of her. Why else, after all, would she have been sitting by his hospital bed?

Brushing the thought away, he handed Sarah her beer, took one for himself, and then fell back on the recliner leaving her with nothing to do but sit on the sofa and nurse her drink. Talking wasn't one of the three things on his to-do list, so he let the silence stretch into awkwardness without bothering to feel it himself. He didn't do awkward, and he hadn't asked her to stay. Really, he had no idea what she was planning to do with herself now she was here.

"What was she like?" she asked without preamble, her tone lacking the timidity he thought the situation probably warranted. "This, Jenny person."

"Jenny Lewis. What's it matter? You'll never run across her on the street."

She shrugged, looking perplexingly at ease. "Curious, is all."

He debated a moment whether to bring it all up. He could very well end up destroying his whole flat if he wasn't careful, but then it wasn't worth much as it was. And what would it hurt, humoring her? At least then there might be someone else to know.

"She started off in public relations," he began, staring up at the ceiling and twisting the neck of his beer between his fingers. "That's how she got tangled with the ARC. And she was brilliant at it, let me tell you. The first time I met her, she got me thrown off my own investigation and got Connor out of lockup by phoning the Home Secretary." He smiled, remembering how angry he'd been at the time. "Guts. She had guts by the litre. I can't count how many times she threatened to have me arrested. I think she even threatened to shoot me once. Standing there looking at her, you wouldn't think she had that kind of backbone, but she'd fool you every time."

Sarah had a small smile on her lips like she could see it in her mind. "What did she look like?"

"Exactly like Claudia Brown," he said immediately, and she arched her eyebrows in surprise, "except her hair was darker. Her clothes were…sharper, more purposefully put together, I guess. She always looked brilliant and she knew it. I know I only just met the woman, but I don't see that sort of confidence when I look at Claudia. That was purely Jenny."

"You do know she's married? Claudia, I mean," she pointed out, taking a long pull off her beer to finish it off. Without invitation she went to his refrigerator and took them both out a second before returning to the couch.

He took his from her and lifted it in toast before continuing. "Doesn't matter, really. She isn't my Jenny like I wasn't Jenny's Cutter and Jenny wasn't Cutter's Claudia."

"You've completely lost me now."

He was sure she didn't really believe him up to this point, and this would probably just throw her over the edge on the issue of his sanity, but he needed to talk it out. He needed to try and understand it himself. Couldn't stop now.

"All right, so if you buy this whole evolutionary timeline theory of Connor's, then from what I understand there have been three separate timelines since the ARC's creation—or possibly only two, but for simplicity's sake we'll say three."

He waited to see if she was following, and she nodded him on.

"First there was Claudia Brown, with the anomaly project since it's inception when Cutter and the others discovered the first anomaly out in the Forest of Dean. She and Cutter got on extremely well, and then one day he comes back from an anomaly and finds there's no Claudia Brown."

"There's Jenny Lewis?"

"Not yet, but they met soon after that. She was hired on to be the ARC's public relations liaison, as I said, and over the next year she became very attached to him. But from what I've heard he was always thinking of Claudia Brown. I don't know how he did it, really—seeing Claudia's face, hearing her voice, and knowing it wasn't really her. So after he died—"

"He died?" she cut in, unmindfully spilling her beer down her front. "Oh, damn!"

Danny took her beer and left to fetch her a towel. "Sorry, didn't mean to spring that on you. I keep forgetting what people do and don't know here."

"It's fine, it's fine," she assured him, toweling herself off. "But he died? When?"

"That's its own long story, but suffice to say, Jenny took it pretty hard. I only met her just before Cutter died. I barely got a chance to know her before she quit the ARC…"

"But you fell in love with her," Sarah surmised, rolling the used towel between her hands. "And then the world changed again."

"I don't know if I loved her, as such," he admitted, thinking hard on it.

He'd been doing all right without her before everything changed, before he realised that his window was gone, and that the woman he'd come so much to admire was all but dead to him now. He'd accepted her loss from the ARC team because he'd known it was best for her, if not for the rest of them.

And now, if you took to this evolutionary timeline theory, she was Claudia. And Claudia was happily married to Nick Cutter, the man Jenny had never got over.

"The thing is," he mused aloud, talking more to himself than to Sarah, "Jenny was never really happy there at the ARC because she was always running from the idea that she had been someone else and lived another life. I think she always wondered if this Claudia Brown person could have done things better or stopped things happening the way they did. Or if Cutter could have loved her then.

"So maybe it's better. Maybe she is who she was always meant to be, now that she's back to being Claudia. I don't know. It's all pretty theoretical in the first place, isn't it?"

He ended softly, his anger all but dissipated in the light of realization. The sadness wasn't gone, the sense of loss, but it was the same feeling he'd had when Jen had left the ARC. It was more for himself than for her.

"Wow," Sarah sighed, running her hands through her hair. "That, I can honestly say, is the most incredible thing I've ever heard. And that's saying something, what with finding out about the anomalies by almost being eaten by an Egyptian goddess."

He chuckled, the tension easing up in his shoulders with the release. "Yeah, pretty fantastic, I'd say." He glanced out the window and noticed the inky blackness of night outside his window. A glance at the clock told him it was well past eleven. "Look, you should head on home and get some sleep. It's been a long day for all of us and I doubt Lester's changed enough to cut us any slack on that."

"No," she smiled, standing to her feet, "some people don't change. Speaking of which, do you have a shirt or something I could borrow for the trip home? Wouldn't want to be stopped, smelling completely wrecked."

He laughed again and went to find a clean shirt. When he came back into the lounge she already had her jacket laid over the back of the sofa with the rest of his dirty clothes. Her still-damp blouse clung to her front, which he couldn't help but notice, and she was toying distractedly with the top button.

"Thanks," she said when she saw him, taking the shirt from his hands and looking around. "Is there a place I can get changed?"

"Right, yes, just through here."

He led her through to the bathroom, but for some reason he didn't leave when he should have. She stood, waiting for him to, and he knew he must look like a right idiot, but he was too busy thinking on everything.

And finally, after a full unnerving minute, he came out and spoke on it. "There was a thing, I think, between you and me," he said, leaning against the doorjamb. "In the other world, I mean."

"Really?" she asked, not quite casually. "Was there?"

He nodded, remembering what she'd said just before he went through the anomaly. How she'd wanted to come with him. She hadn't said it as though speaking from professional curiosity. Her words had been strained with emotion, personal attachment.

"Neither of us ever acted on it, but it was there. I watched you play dress up with Abby in the safe-house, and I knew it then. I came after you when the medieval knight took you hostage, not because it was my job but because I couldn't stand thinking he would hurt you. Did that happen here, too?"

"It did," she replied, sounding slightly out of breath.

"And I know by the way you watched over me in that hospital room that there's something on your end."

She didn't say anything, but she couldn't seem to look away from him. Her eyes were wide, but not embarrassed. Almost afraid.

"There is, isn't there?"

"Yes," she whispered, "but that was before."

"And what's changed? Have you changed?"

"Don't know. I don't think so."

"Have I changed?" he asked, amused.

"It's hard to say."

"I don't think I have." He moved closer to her, feeling the heat of her body in the small room. She was alive and real and tangible in front of him, and that set his pulse racing in a totally familiar way. "So what's changed?"

"It's not the right time," she reasoned, glancing over her shoulder as she bumped into the sink.

Personally, he wasn't really in the mood for reason. Reason had stopped being pertinent about the time he started theorizing about alternate realities. This was about bringing things back to basics. Some things never changed.

She didn't fight him when he kissed her, deep and forcefully. On the contrary, she threw herself into the embrace with a fervor that spoke of prolonged anticipation and a need deeper than reason or even self-preservation. She wasn't a delicate woman, by any means, and when her fingernails scraped across his scalp he just about lost it then and there.

Her beer-stained blouse hit the floor in record time, and his shirt joined it soon after. They made a trail into the bedroom, pushing and pulling and bruising all the way as they bumped into furniture and walls.

Their first time was quick and heated, borne of desperation and a need to dispel old ghosts.

The second was slower, more deliberate. He touched her face and looked into her eyes as he came, eager to show her he wasn't thinking of anyone else.

The third time they moved together, came together, spoke each other's names into the darkness. Afterward she laid her head against his chest and fell asleep quickly, but he stayed awake a long time, wondering why he felt so ashamed of himself.