1/2; i'll get better as we go along, i'm rusty!
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months. Each was the same as the last. Time was no longer something that existed on a digital watch and corresponded only to what time to show up for work that morning. Time had turned primitive, no longer an invention of the human race he was three million years away from knowing. Danny knew light and dark, and these were his ways of telling time.
Everything held a different meaning when one lived in solitude.
He learned quickly. No anomaly meant no way home. More than that, it meant that he couldn’t get back to the cretaceous, couldn’t get back to Abby and Connor and do his bloody job as their leader. He had no ability to protect them from here, except to do what Abby had told him when he’d left her with an unconscious Connor – to finish it.
And he had.
But now he was stuck. He couldn’t be there with them, didn’t even know if they were still alive.
He couldn’t get back to loved ones.
On his best days, he managed not to think about that. There were plenty of ways to divert his attention, plenty of reasons why he didn’t have time to think about the things that bothered him the most.
Food was something precious. A good day meant he gathered enough for two square meals and still had enough time to maintain a shelter and do something that didn’t involve trying to maintain his life. A rare day was finding enough for the next two days – but he didn’t like to do that.
He didn’t want to have time to think. Those days where he had nothing to do but stare at the sky were some of his worst. Those were some of the days where he thought endlessly about the people he’d left behind, the reasons why life really wasn’t something worth living anymore.
Those were the days he wondered, idly, if Becker had moved on. Because if there was something that made you realise you didn’t know how good things were until you didn’t have them anymore, it was a year in the African Rift Valley.
He’d stuck close to the site of the anomaly, unwilling to go too far. The day that he did would be the day that he officially knew he wasn’t going back, and he refused to admit to thinking that way. Water had been one of his biggest problems. It wasn’t exactly smart to drink from a river that a psychotic Helen Cutter had poisoned. It had taken him days to find a river without going out of a mile radius.
Even that single mile was stretching how far he was ever willing to be from the anomaly site.
By the time he’d found the river, he was almost dead from dehydration.
He had nobody to talk to. Nobody but the hominids. He’d named one of them Tim, the youngest of the group closest to his campsite. Danny made a point of never interfering when he hid in an alcove and watched their interactions. He knew why he was watching them in every free second he had, and it made him a bit of a masochist.
It reminded him of what he was missing. People, interaction. He quickly became a solitary man, slept with one eye open. He’d seen something like a predatory cat around that had him on edge for months until he’d managed to kill it. The ex-copper found that he was turning at the slightest sound, jumping onto his feet at the slightest feeling of being watched.
Danny Quinn knew what it was like to be prey.
But he found, in being back, that he’d forgotten what it was like to simply exist.
He jumped at things that had no meaning. Cars and human voices and the air was so polluted that he’d turned and vomited in a bush.
However the anomaly in the Rift Valley had opened, he’d jumped through and ran like he hadn’t since the day he’d chased down Helen. And he’d kept running, until he came upon the site of another anomaly, and a carnivorous dinosaur he didn’t like the looks of, but followed through anyway.
He hardly had time for greetings after that – or for worry, or for shock.
But it was setting in now as they stood in Lester’s office, Danny leaning against a wall, covered in dirt and grime and weighing ¾ of what he used to.
But they were back. All of them.
Danny just didn’t know why that didn’t make him feel secure.