I hate intro posts. The next one will be better! 1/?
The day was certainly one for the record books. It felt to Becker as though he had lived five lives today and it hadn't even gone seven o clock yet. It had only been this morning that he was testing out the new EMDs in the armoury and yet it felt like a lifetime ago. When the anomaly detector had gone off, he had kitted up and went out expecting this to be another routine drill: find the creature, get it back, close the anomaly, go home.
But it hadn’t been just another anomaly.
Becker’s eyes slid around the room, taking in the people gathered in Lester’s office. Matt and Jess were there, of course, but his focus wasn’t on them, because just left of Jess stood Connor Temple, next to him stood Abby Maitland and leaning casually against the doorway was Danny Quinn.
They’d made it back. A year after they had gone missing; a year of worry and saddness and guilt and they had finally made it back. Their return had lifted a weight from his shoulders, a burden he had started carrying the second Danny, Connor and Abby had stepped through that anomaly without him. A burden that had grown heavier the longer he had to carry it. For the past twelve months he had been stumbling along in the dark without them. Sarah was killed, the missions were shut down, the ARC sold to some bigwig from Prospero. A lot had happened in a year.
Becker had begun to think that all he was destined for was failure. He had resigned and only Lester’s urging had bought him back; back to a new ARC and a new team and with a new resolve to set things right. He had to do this job. He knew just how dangerous this job could be, he knew the risks, he knew what was at stake: that everyone who went out with him into the field could be coming home, or none of them. He couldn’t control everything - and after Sarah had died, god, he had tried. He scrambled frantically for any semblance of control he had left and got out of there with what was left of his sanity before this project could take that, too.
But in the end he came back, because he knew it was the right thing to do. He was the only one who could do this.
If he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again (it was the closest thing to preventing this from happening at all, which he couldn’t do. A fact of which he was reminded every night before he closed his eyes.) he had to be there to do it. He could be there to protect this new team and try and ease some of the guilt that had been building over the last twelve months.
The new team had been something unexpected. Jess seemed a bit young, but she was keen to help and efficient at what she did. (He hated himself for thinking, the moment he walked into the ARC and saw that light in her eyes that this job would steal it away soon enough. He'd seen it happen too many times not to think it, but it didn’t stop him from hating himself for it.) Matt had seemed like an arrogant man on paper, but in person he was charming and so far stuck to his word that the team’s safety was his top priority.
The important part was that neither of them had been willing to accept the government's findings and live with the fact that Connor Temple, Abby Maitland and Danny Quinn were dead and gone. Becker never intended to stop looking for his friends, even if he couldn’t do it quite so actively as he had in the past, and their cooperation certainly helped ease the strain.
And those twelves months of waiting and worry had paid off. They had gone out today to investigate an anomaly and Becker had arrived to find his men clustered around three battered but familiar forms laying face-down on the ground. His heart had nearly stopped in his chest and he hadn’t dared to believe it until he was actually there in front of them and pulling them to their feet. Abby had hugged him tightly and he’d returned the gesture with feeling, pulling Connor in with her. God, it just felt so good to have them in his arms, to know they were alive.