1/2
Becker locked eyes with Lester as he dismissed them, offering the bureaucrat a silent thank you for understanding. They didn't need to deal with all the particulars now; what Danny, Connor and Abby needed right now was some hot food and someplace to sleep. They could worry about the particulars tomorrow.
As it was, Lester interrupted him before he could get the words out, and Becker couldn't help but wondering if maybe he was offering Becker a way out. A reason to leave that cramped space, out of the eyes and ears of Matt and Jess and the rest of the staff for a little while to catch up with his friends somewhere a little more private. Everyone knew how the past year had worn him down; he tried to hide it, but it was no secret that he did a shoddy job of it. Hopefully they would respect his feelings enough to give him a feel moments with them alone.
Connor caught up with him first, in the middle of the floor and Becker nodded towards a more secluded spot out of the way of the main foot traffic.
"Becker, mate! What are you talking about? Have things...changed?" The soldier blinked, staring uncomprehendingly at Connor for a moment while he processed his words and then tried to make sense of them. Had things changed? Of course they had. They'd moved to a new ARC, with new staff under a public-private ownership. They'd ordered in new weapons and refaced the ADD; they had new kit in the fields that was more efficient, a more effect way of keeping track of one another while investigating an anomaly. He and Abby and Danny had been lost for a year in the past, and they'd lost people, good people, trying to get them back. There were new guidelines, there were new rules. Everything had changed.
But Connor and the others knew most of that. And something in his voice gave away that the question he was asking wasn't quite so simple as it sounded.
"Are you still...you?" Connor continued and Becker's brow furrowed, brown eyes meeting brown first in shock and then in continued confusion. What was that supposed to mean? Of course he was still him! Who else would he be? Who exactly was Connor expecting? He still looked the same, didn't he?
He was about to open his mouth to tell Connor this when Danny cut in and Becker glanced at him in surprise, before the look in his eyes melted into gratitude.
"Of course he's him. And if he wasn’t him, how do you suppose he’d know?"
Becker narrowed his eyes, intending to comment, but Connor interjected, sounding suddenly a lot more serious than he had before. He sounded so sure of his answer than Becker found himself wondering what exactly had happened on the other side of the anomaly, to put all of this into such a perspective for him. He saw Connor glance at Abby and caught the sense of something missing, something he wasn't privvy to that made sense of all that Connor was trying to say.
When he mentioned Cutter, it clicked. Of course. He hadn't been on the best terms with the Professor himself, but he'd heard the rumours, gossip from the others about the mysterious woman named Claudia Brown. Sarah had shown him the picture once, after Cutter died. The woman who looked the spitting image of Jenny Lewis but was in fact a woman named Claudia Brown. He didn't know all of the details, but he knew that it had something to do with the Professor going through an anomaly and coming out the other side to find everything the same but one person.
Is that what Connor was thinking of here? That the same thing had happened when he'd come through that anomaly home?
"No," Becker's brown eyes widened and he shook his head, hoping to ease Connor's irrational worry. "Nothing like that. I'm still me, Lester is still Lester. We've just moved house while you three were away and implemented some new rules. That's not what I meant."
Becker fell quiet, his thoughts growing sombre. He knew where this conversation was headed, knew it the moment he opened his mouth and spoke those words. And as much as he didn't want to bring it up, he knew he had to. They had to hear it from him, not from some sympathetic ear or idle gossip. It was his fault, his burden to bear and he had to be the one to break it to them.