Abby had had a shite day. She'd spent most of it writing up a report for Lester, trying to convince the minister they needed funding for more animal enclosures in the menagerie. The outcome of that was uncertain and not particularly hopeful, but it had to be done. The mammoth alone took up so much space.

Danny was moodier than usual, even now that he was off probation and back on active duty. He had seemed to be getting better. He'd been more focused lately, almost like he'd been before. But today, every time he and Sarah were in the same room together, it felt like he'd snap at the slightest provocation. And then finally he'd barked at Abby for something so stupid that she'd gone and barked back, which she now realized was exactly what he'd wanted because he'd had his go at taking all his frustrations out on her until Sarah herself had interceded and told him to bugger off.

Then they'd had a late afternoon anomaly in Surrey involving a very close call between a juvenile mastodon and a three-year-old boy named Thomas Dixon.

Little Tommy was fine, only shaken up a bit, but it had left her a bit shaken as well. She didn't question the decision they'd all made to keep the anomalies secret; the world at large wasn't ready for time-travel and evolutionary chaos. Still, there was a price to pay for the world's ignorance. With every near miss, with every loss of life, that price became harder to stomach.

But the day was over, finally. All she wanted to do was to get home, put her feet up, drink a spectacularly large glass of wine, and have a nice, hot bath.

Connor hadn't been in his lab when she'd gotten back to the ARC, which had surprised her. He hadn't been home the previous night, as expected, and she'd expected the same tonight. If he kept on the way he was going, he'd wear himself out within the month. Tonight, then, she'd make sure he got some rest, even if she had to mother-hen him into it. Even if she had to sacrifice her bath. She'd make him a good dinner and nag him into a shower before bed (because he'd been neglecting them at the ARC; she could tell). And she'd hold hostage whatever work he'd brought home until he got a decent eight hours of sleep.

The first thing she noticed when she opened the front door was the noise—the high-pitched beep, beep, beep of the smoke alarm. As she dropped her bag and rushed down the hall past a highly disgruntled Rex, she smelled the smoke and, last of all, heard the half-intelligible cursing of her housemate.

"Connor?"

He seemed not to hear her in the flurry of activity. He had pulled the oven door open and was slapping a flaming casserole dish with a tea towel, coughing and sputtering and cursing as he hopped on his one good leg. Once it was extinguished, he reached in—she hissed as he yelped—and heaved the whole thing under the faucet.

"Connor, you tosser!" She rushed to his side and shoved his hands under the running cold water. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"Damn fucking shagging bloody hell!" he yelled, pulling off the fingerless gloves that had, thankfully, borne the brunt of the damage. The fingers had escaped with minor burns, barely worse than a sunburn save a few spots where it blistered painfully white.

Abby left him there and took a chair from the table to reach the smoke alarm. Once it was quiet, she turned back to him.

"What the hell was all that about?" she demanded, still standing on the chair so he was looking up at her.

"Nothing," he growled over the sound of running water. "A bloody waste, that's all."

Abby sighed and then coughed, stepping down so she could go and open a window. When she came back, Connor was drying his hands gingerly on a new tea towel. She sighed again.

"Are you all right?"

He huffed moodily. "I'm fine. Can't even make one stupid dinner without almost burning the house down. I'm just brilliant."

Abby glanced into the sink. "Toad in the hole?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "My mum's recipe."

"You tried to make dinner." It made her smile, and that just seemed to irritated him more.

"Well yeah. I'm not a complete invalid. You've been doing all the cooking and the washing up and everything else around here, so I figured I'd make you dinner so you wouldn't have to. And it would have been fine if I hadn't fallen asleep, but I didn't get any sleep last night because I wanted to get as much done as I could so I could come home and do this. And now it's bugger all."

It was sweet, even if it had sent Rex into hysterics and might have left them homeless. He'd been trying to take care of her, in his own way, to take the load off of her for one evening. He'd put off work to come home and cook for her. For Connor, it was almost like buying her jewelry.

"And you can stop smiling like that," he snapped. "I know I'm a tosser. It's my middle name. Connor 'Tosspot' Temple."

She chuckled, shaking her head as she moved to stand in front of him. When he just scowled, she took his face in her hands and placed a long, lingering kiss on his cheek. Then she put her arms around him and leaned her head against his chest.

"Thank you for making dinner," she sighed as he tentatively returned the embrace. "I've had a really awful day."

She felt the rumble of his laughter against her cheek, all irritation apparently gone. "You're welcome, I guess."

After another deep breath, resting in the comfort of his arms, she pulled away. His smile was soft and fond.

"Now, what do you say we order in?"

He grinned and grabbed up his crutches. "I'll get the take-away menus."

Connor had shown great restraint (or maybe just common sense) by not bringing home any work, so they spent the entire, uninterrupted evening on the sofa, eating pizza straight from the box and watching one of the movies in their collection that hadn't been there before. It still felt odd, this getting reacquainted with their alternate lives, but Abby thought they were getting on with it about as well as they could be.

He let her pick the movie and didn't grumbled too much when she grinned and picked Love Actually. She wasn't sure how it had ended up in their collection in the first place, but she would take every advantage she could while he was being so accommodating. He didn't even laugh at her when she went all soft over the love stories.

She had a bad moment or two when the movie showed in passing a little boy who looked like little Tommy Dixon, but it had only lasted until Connor threw a napkin at her from his place on the floor, insisting that if he was forced to watch this romantic crap, she'd better be paying attention to it.

And he didn't complained about the so-called romantic crap after that.

"You liked it!" she accused when it was finished. "Admit it—you actually enjoyed a romantic comedy."

"I—"

"Don't you even deny it! I saw you smiling when Colin Firth proposed to that Portuguese girl. And the naked couple? Come on."

He grinned, a faint blush spreading up his neck. "It was tolerable. I still prefer Star Wars."

"Course you do," she laughed, mussing his hair. He ran a hand through it, rolling his eyes, but didn't put up any further fuss.

For a moment they just looked at each other, smiling, silent but for the credits soundtrack. Suddenly it occurred to Abby that this could actually be a moment.

"Well," she said, stretching hugely and looking around in a blatant attempt to be doing something, "I had had some thoughts earlier about a hot bath and a glass of wine, but I suppose it's a bit late now, isn't it?"

"I suppose," he replied without much conviction one way or the other, as he turned off the telly and the room dropped abruptly into quietness.

"I'd also had an idea of making you go to bed early, but it's a bit late for that as well. You should rest up. All this work isn't good for you."

"That's the pot calling the kettle black, I think," he said pointedly. "You've been putting in a lot of hours, at the office and here at home. You need it as much as I do."

"Are you worried about me, Connor 'Tosspot' Temple?"

He grinned. "I'm not going to live that down anytime soon, am I?"

"Not likely, no."

He shook his head in tempered amusement, and Abby took a moment to notice that, not too long ago, he would have been deeply embarrassed by the gentle ribbing. She wondered when it had changed.

"And yes, I do worry about you, sometimes," he answered finally, and the feeling of the moment changed abruptly, turning serious and sincere. "If you keep going on the way you have done, you're going to run yourself out. And then what happens if it catches up to you in the field, eh? Cutter said it yesterday, a lot of things can happen—have happened—in our line."

"I know that," she replied softly, the sting of defensiveness putting a sharpness in the words. "Of course I know that. I was there when you brought Cutter out of that fire. I was there when Jenny froze. And I may not have seen Stephen die like Cutter did, but I was sure as hell there in the aftermath. I'm being careful."

He nodded silently, his cheeks faintly pink, and it made her ashamed of her anger. Or maybe she was just slightly uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going, the transparent concern like they actually gave a damn about each other. In the midst of a perfectly routine movie night, the memory of their marriage was a sudden and unwelcome intruder.

She cleared her throat. "Anyway, all I meant was that you should get more rest. And on that note, I think it's about time we both turned in for the night."

He nodded and pushed himself carefully off the floor, then set about making his bed on the sofa. As Abby went to leave, she paused one last time in the doorway, feeling an unfamiliar ache in her chest. She wanted…something. Something she had no words for as she stood watching him settle on his makeshift bed. The vague emptiness had no place in what had been a lovely evening.

And for that reason, she turned away with a soft "goodnight" and headed up the stairs, determined not to spoil the night over nothing.

"Claudia, please talk to me," Nick sighed, knocking on the bedroom door for what had to be the fiftieth time. "This isn't helping anything, you shutting me out."

The silence stretched behind the locked door, broken only by an occasional creak of the mattress. It was the second night that Claudia had come home and, after pulling down a box of cereal and a jar of peanut butter from the cupboard, had gone straight into their room and locked the door without a word to him. He'd seen it coming, could have stopped her if he'd had a mind to, but he figured she was allowed her tantrum just as surely as he'd had his the afternoon before.

Besides, she was a wee bit scary face to face in a temper like this.

"Look, I know you don't like staying out of the field. I know you think I'm being stupid, and maybe I've gone about this the wrong way. Call me overprotective, but I don't want to take any chances with you or the baby. I'm sorry."

Again he waited, and again silence hung in the air, almost as physical a barrier as the door between them.

"It's not that I don't trust you," he continued, not really expecting anything at this point but resolved to give it his best attempt. "You know that, don't you? I know you'd never intentionally put our child at risk. It's only that, well, things don't always go to plan, do they? In fact, they rarely ever do. We bumble through this the best we can, but things happen. People die. People even just disappear, and the way things are headed, I don't think there's too much we can do about that."

He was rambling, talking more to himself than to her now. He'd spent a lot of time lately thinking about all the ways they weren't safe-the ways they'd never been safe, even when they'd thought they had been. It was overwhelming, the possibilities that were opening up as the anomaly project progressed. It almost seemed that nothing was impossible anymore.

"It's not just the creatures anymore, either. We spend so much time trying to fix time itself, keep it in line. Some days it feels like we're putting plasters on an amputated leg. Things bleed through, and there's no way of knowing how much or in what ways. Maybe that's the natural order of things, but when I try to think about it these days... It's bloody terrifying, knowing our child is coming into a world that isn't just crazy in the usual way—violence and famine and war—but unstable at its very foundation.

"A man could go mad with worry, knowing the things we do."

His voice tailed away as he lost himself in thoughts better left unsaid so that, when the door opened, he'd almost forgotten where he was. He definitely didn't remember when he'd slid down the door to sit on the ground, so when he found himself looking up at Claudia instead of down, it took him a moment to orientate himself.

"I thought you were mad at me," he said, still in the same soft, woebegone voice he'd slipped into during his ramblings.

"I am," she replied in the same tone, "but now I'm sad, too, so I need my husband."

She reached a hand down to him, and he took it, comforted by the fact that some things were still that simple. His wife was sad, so she came to him. There was beauty in that.

Inside their room, he lay down and let her rest her head on his chest the way she had done a thousand times before. Now the silence that stretched between them was not a barrier but the beginnings of a peace treaty. Nick felt no need to fill it.

And by the softness of Claudia's voice, it was clear she was reluctant to as well. "Nick," she whispered, tilting her head up so the fingers he'd been running through her hair curled gently around the base of her skull, "with all of it, everything you said...are you still happy about the baby?"

"Yes, love," he replied without having to waste a thought on it, "happier than I've ever been."

She nodded and rested her head against his chest again, but not before he'd caught sight of the intense relief in her eyes.

"Me, too," she said, the melancholy of her voice at odds with her words, but he understood. She felt exactly as he did. "Happier than I've ever been."

The pub was borderline busy for a weekday, a mix of regulars and newcomers, a few tourists thrown in for the sake of novelty. Danny sat at a back table he'd started thinking of as his own, nursing a beer and watching the room around him.

Since he'd come through the anomaly, watching people had quickly become a habit. He'd watch the way they walked, the way they touched their hair or scratched the back of their necks, the way they interacted with friends, strangers. How they went about their daily lives, completely oblivious to the fact that they could be blinked out of existence because a complete stranger buggered something in their distant past.

They all just carried on, regardless. Some were loud and brazen, some shier and more self-contained. Some came to get pissed, others to let off steam, others to find company. There were sad drunks and angry drunks and happy drunks and some drunks you couldn't even tell were drunk unless you'd watched them throw back six shots of tequila in less than two hours.

Last week he'd watched a man in his twenties sit alone at the bar and drink tumbler after tumbler of whiskey, his face setting into an ever-deepening scowl until Danny could feel the anger and unhappiness radiating from him from five metres away.

He himself only nursed his beer. By the end of his second, he was usually ready to head back to his flat and fall into what always ended up a restless sleep, filled with dreams that he didn't remember on waking. It was frustrating, and it would have been so much easier to just drink himself unconscious, but he only ever just had the two beers. Not that he had a problem, per se, with occasionally getting sloshed, but since Sarah had left him...well, suffice it to say, he wanted to have his wits about him if he and Sarah ever got around to having another row. That, and he'd been wondering since watching the whiskey-drinker if that's how people were starting to see him.

He'd lost it again today, this time with Abby. Wasn't her fault really, only he'd seen Sarah talking to one of Becker's soldiers that morning. She'd put her hand on the man's arm to get his attention, and all he could think was that, if he did nothing to get her back, inevitably she'd end up with someone else. But Claudia had told him to leave her alone, so he was doing that. He was treating her like anyone else, like a stranger, just like she said. And it was bloody killing him.

So while that had played through his head, Abby had said something to him about the animals that had somehow seemed insulting at the time, though he couldn't remember how. So he'd snapped, and she'd snapped, and the whole damned situation snowballed until Sarah, of all people, had called him a git and dressed him down. Red-letter day, all around.

He was playing it over in his head, remembering the way her voice had broken just a little when she'd called him a juvenile prat, when he caught sight of a head of dark hair, long and swaying as she stood with her back to him, talking to some young bloke with shoulders like an ox and a wide, toothy smile. He was halfway out of his seat, tensed for a confrontation, when he realized it wasn't even her. The girl's hips were the wrong shape, and the jacket she was wearing wasn't anything he'd seen Sarah wearing before. But the flare of misplaced jealousy had set his heart racing again, and suddenly he didn't want to be there anymore. He wanted to be with the real thing, the Sarah he knew.

He threw a tenner on the table and grabbed his jacket, making his way to the exit and then, once out in the cool night air, stopping to consider his options. If he showed up at Sarah's door, she'd likely think he was just looking to pull, which was tempting but would do him no good in the end. Besides, he'd tried that before and she'd just ended up angry with him. He wanted to see her, but he didn't want to upset her.

But he didn't want to keep treating her like a bloody stranger anymore, either. They knew each other. She knew him maybe better than anyone else at this point. She could look at him and see the thing he wasn't saying, wasn't letting anyone else see. And even in his worst moods, she could usually find the thing to fix it. Usually, she could be the thing to fix it. She knew him.

As he started down the street towards his own flat, he tried to think if he knew her as well as that. He knew how to make her laugh, how to coax a smile or make her eyes go dark with wanting, but did he know what really made her happy? He wasn't sure, and that realization came with a feeling like he'd swallowed a stone and it was sitting heavy in the pit of his stomach.

The only thing to do, he decided as he turned into his building and took the stairs two at a time, was to learn. He wanted this woman, that much he knew on a fundamental, possibly primal level. He wanted her in his life and in his bed and in ways he didn't quite want to name yet, and that was enough to make a few things very, very clear. She'd accused him of play-acting, of using her as a distraction until the world righted itself again. Except the world wasn't going to right itself. But according to Claudia, he was what wasn't right in Sarah's world. He was the anomaly. So he needed to be the one to bend.

He threw himself onto his couch, considering, skimming through their text conversations. She hadn't answered any of the texts he'd sent right after their row-all apologizing for being pissed and ornery and asking her to give them another go, telling her she was reading the wrong things into his moods and to please stop being ridiculous-and after a while he'd just given up. She texted him once last week, letting him know about an anomaly, but otherwise nothing. He wasn't one to give up easily, but he also refused to beg. But he had to start somewhere, didn't he?

Without giving himself too much time to think, he composed a text and sent it.

What's your favorite Christmas movie?

Immediately he wanted to pull it back, feeling like a prat for choosing such a stupid ice breaker. Why the hell would he ask that? And why the hell would she answer? The information was completely useless and impertinent to anything they'd ever discussed. It wasn't even bleeding Christmastime. What on earth had possessed him?

A minute later, the indicator changed, letting him know she'd read his message, and he felt stupid again for the way his heartbeat kicked up a little. Another minute passed, and he let go of the breath he'd been holding, disappointment and embarrassment washing over him in equal measure while he simultaneously told himself that he hadn't actually expected her to answer. It was such a stupid question, and she hadn't replied to his texts in weeks. He tossed the phone towards his feet with a sigh.

Well, at least he'd tried.

The chirp of an incoming text message had him moving faster than he thought possible at his age, scrambling and cursing when the phone fell between two cushions. Another chirp, and he felt his palms go slick with sweat like a ruddy teenager asking a girl out for the first time. He would have laughed at himself if the damned phone hadn't slipped out of his hands again. Still, after a moment's fumbling and bumbling, he had the thing up and perched between his hands, elbows on knees.

It's a Wonderful Life, she'd said.

And then, What's yours?

Danny stared at it, his breath escaping in a shaky, uneven sigh bordering on a laugh. Well, he supposed it was a good enough starting point as any.