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i-was-bored-so-this-happened · 11 months

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Alexandra's Evolution Chapter Four: Meltdown at Madame Tussaud's - Part One

Fandom: Primeval Wordcount: 4.2k Warnings: Presence of Oliver Leek

Alex, Stephen and Nick adjust to working for the ARC and working with Oliver Leek and Tom Ryan. Connor tries to work his way into the team, but Abby is the one who gets hired.

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Working at the ARC takes some adjusting. It turns out not to be all time portals and dinosaurs. In fact, it’s rather a lot of actual work that’s not entirely dissimilar to her coursework which, overall, Alex doesn’t mind. A lot of theorising, a lot of rationalising, and a lot of trying to keep up with Connor’s ramblings about physics. It was never her strongest science. Her desk is the most cluttered in the hall. Well, not exactly her desk, just the one she’d emptied her backpack onto on the first day and no one else had touched since. She’s never really worked a job that’s given her a desk before. There’s an old desk with locked compartments and a wobbly leg in her room at Nick’s house, it had belonged to Helen’s great-uncle, but this is an entirely different beast. It’s like something from a kitchen, a flat slab of steel. A monitor and keyboard had been set squarely in the middle but Alex has scooted it to the left, a metal pot of mechanical pencils has been thoroughly disturbed and a single A5 notebook has been buried under various notes.

Most of the notes are Helen’s. Alex, Nick and Stephen have been slowly sifting and re-sifting through them in search of clues. The camera had been hers. The pictures from it, including those of Helen herself, have been stuck to a pinboard in one of the shared work areas by the entrance of the hub, and the camera’s on Alex’s desk. Nick hasn’t claimed a workspace yet. Stephen floats around different tables, and every day at lunch and home time someone collects all of his work and deposits it in a box file on Alex’s desk, not that he has much yet. He mostly sticks with Nick.

“You could at least try to make it neat.” Oliver Leek does that a lot. Appearing out of nowhere. He does a lot of sighing too. Her only warning of his imminent approach had been the abrupt murder of the T.Rex song coming from the little radio she’s managed to squeeze under the monitor.

“You wanted scientists,” Alex reminds him, not looking up from her desk. She’s rummaging around for her good green pen, “This is scientists.”

“It’s in your hair.” Leek leans forward and pulls the pen out, releasing the chunk of hair it had been holding up. She thanks him and starts marking paths on the map in front of her. “What…are you doing?”

“We still don’t know where the scutosaurus went. Or Rex, though he’s a lot less noticeable.”

“Rex?”

“The coelurosauravus. The flying lizard. I’ve been tracking their most likely routes, but we haven’t found anything yet.”

“That’s not your assignment, Alex.”

“I swapped with Stephen. The longer we leave it, the more difficult they’re going to be to find. They could wander around the woods for weeks before someone sees them again. I’m headed out to check on the incursion sight. You alright?”

“The microraptors that came through that library on Tuesday, we’ve lost them.”

“They do fly, Oliver, Nick told you that-” Alex is still disinterested, walking a compass across her map. The microraptors had been interesting to try and wrangle - their anomaly had already closed so they had been tranquilised and brought back to the ARC until they could think of something better to do - but Lester had not been pleased with the replacement costs of the books that had been wrecked.

“They’re dead.” This quite effectively catches her attention, and the map is abandoned.

“What? All five of them?”

“The men aren’t used to tranquilisers, they mismeasured the dosage.” Oliver sighs, and Alex does too. Stephen had shown the soldiers exactly what to do and sure, he wasn’t used to darting animals but he knew enough not to kill the things. Arguing with Leek, however, isn’t going to get her anywhere. She’s too new to this gig to jeopardise her position.

“That’s…unfortunate. Right, I’ll find Nick and we can start the autopsies-”

“Alex, the creatures have been incinerated.”

“Oh, he’s not gonna like that. I don’t like it either,” Alex cuts herself off, pauses, and restarts, “You know where we stand on preserving the creature’s lives, Leek. And piles of ash don’t make very good specimens.” Her phone starts to vibrate, taking Helen’s notes from 1993 with it as it buzzes towards her. When she unearths it, Connor’s name is on the screen. Alex stands, taking her jacket with her and shrugging it on, gathering various essentials into her arms, “I’ve got to take this and I’ve got to go,” with her free hand she claps Leek’s shoulder, “Good luck explaining everything to Nick.”

***

Alex has not in fact swapped assignments with Stephen. Not exactly. She’d taken his tracking assignment, and he was happy to slack off and explore the ARC with Nick, but her actual assignment is currently in Connor’s hands. He’s found a log to sit on, a calculator balanced on one knee while he scribbles sums in a notebook. He pauses, then copies the sums out onto the ARC watermarked paper Alex had given him. Alex herself is several feet away, drawing a circle in the leaves with a good sturdy stick she’d found.

“The anomaly was here. Roughly…five feet wide. Spherical. Vaguely. Gold in colour, would you say, Connor?”

“Gold.” Connor concurs.

“Rex was over here,” Alex drags the stick behind her as she walks, pulling a line from the anomaly site to the tree Rex had been hiding behind. She drops the stick and makes to climb the tree, jumping up to grab hold of a branch to pull herself up with, “and Rex has been determined to be a coelurosauravus which means he can. Fly. Or at the very least glide, so he’s more difficult to track than the, you know, six-tonne elephantine tortoise.”

“I can’t hear you!” Connor calls.

“Not important!” Alex shouts back. She’s trying to figure out if Rex is likely to sleep in these trees, but if he’s used to a warmer environment - whether that be the Permian era or the little boy’s room - he’s likely to be looking for somewhere indoors to stay, particularly at night. Rex could get away with that, he’s small enough and similar enough to modern day lizards that another child wandering the woods might have picked him up like Ben had. The scutosaurus, however, doesn’t have the advantage of being small and should not have been lost as easily as it was. Alex drops from the tree.

“I don’t get it,” she says to Connor, “I should be able to track the scutosaurus. I mean. It’s huge. It doesn’t have tracks like anything else here, there should be fresh trails, knocked-down trees, dung, something.”

“What if it’s gone to the other side of the forest or something?” Connor asks.

“Nah, Abby was right, it’s a nervous creature. It knows that the anomaly,” Alex gestures towards her drawn circle with the stick she’s retrieved, “is the way home, so it should be staying close by. Someone should have seen something by now.” She returns to the map she’d left at Connor’s feet, pinned down by rocks, and stares at it, tipping her head from one side to the other, her hair falling like a curtain to either side of her head with the movement.

“Andy?”

“‘Scuse me?”

“Thought we could. Uh. Do nicknames-”

“No.”

“Okay. But we’ve got to get goin’ soon, we’ve already been here for a good few hours…” Connor points out. He’s right, they’ve been out in the woods long enough for his nose to be shining red from sneezing. Alex has to commend him for sticking it out for this long. Of course, this isn’t a favour. It’s an exchange.

“Alright, into the car. I’ll tell you about the microraptors. Chippy?”

Alex unlocks Nick’s office when they get back to the university, fingers salty and greasy from chips, to wait for Connor’s lift home to arrive. He’s chosen to sit in Stephen’s chair, whereas Alex had allotted herself a twenty minute break before busying herself with a fresh task.

“You could at least help me with this.” Alex reminds him again. He’s been turning around and around in the chair while she’s been digging around in the corners of the office to unearth any other relevant notes of Helen’s. And her paper on the raptor skull, she needs to turn it in to Nick so he can give it to Stephen to mark but she hasn’t been able to find it since the first anomaly.

“I’m not part of the team, I’m not obligated.” Telling him about the microraptors may have been a mistake. He’s just a little bitter that he missed it.

“Connor.”

“Why’d they let you in and not me?”

“They’d already vetted me, mate, you were a surprise. They’ve got to process your information, yeah?” Alex has been dealing with Connor’s complaints for the last three weeks. She mostly repeats the same thing. Connor’s got similar enough qualifications to hers, he’s proved himself useful. Every time she asks Oliver about hiring Abby or Connor he just walks away.

The door to the office opens and closes, familiar voices muttering to each other. Duncan, Tom. Connor’s friends. She’s learnt their names over the last few weeks as she’s ended up spending more time with Connor.

“Oi, you can’t be in here. Staff only.”

“I’m not staff.”

“Oh shut up, Connor.”

“You ‘ent strictly staff either, though, are you?” Tom asks this question. He’s the tallest of the three, ginger. He doesn’t seem to talk as much as the other two, but she hasn’t been around them long enough to really know. Alex can’t remember what degree he’s supposed to be finishing. Or what Duncan does either, for that matter.

“I’m close enough,” she counters. The relevant staff know who she is by now. And she’d had a copy of Nick’s keycard made during her second year. Tom wanders off as though she hadn’t spoken, and when she turns to follow his path she sees Duncan reaching out to the Smilodon skeleton, “Don’t touch, please,” Connor bats at Duncan’s shoulder and his hand snatches back from the bones, “You here to get him?” Alex asks, gesturing towards Connor.

“Well-”

“Don’t-”

“-Connor says-”

“-I said you could come hang out, I thought you wanted to get to know her-”

“What does Connor say?” Alex cuts in, shifting towards Connor and Duncan to perch on the edge of Nick’s desk.

“He says ‘e managed to get you and the professor out to the Forest of Dean, you know, ‘cause of that newspaper he found about that monster-”

“Yes, Duncan, I remember.”

“Well, he says you did find something.”

“Does he now?” Alex asks over Connor’s groan, “Well, I suppose we did-” the groan cuts off and Connor looks up from his hands, “-find a badly axed lorry covered in fake blood. Like the newspapers said.”

“That’s not what’s on the internet. People are saying a boy died.”

“He didn’t die, I told you that.” Connor interjects.

“Yeah, well, you said you saw a Gorgonopsid an’ all.” Tom scoffs.

“I think I’d have noticed a bloody dinosaur, Tom, I’m not doing this degree for the laughs,” Tom opens his mouth to reply but Alex points a finger at him and adds, “or because my uncle teaches it.”

“Alright, don’t bite me ‘ead off.”

“Connor’s winding you up. He’s lucky to still be on the course, it was a shit move to pull.”

“Because the professor’s wife went missing?”

“Duh, Duncan,” Alex throws an old jammy dodger she’d found on the desk at him before brushing the crumbs off the notebook that had been hidden by it, “Now out, all of you, I’ve got to lock up.”

It takes some shepherding to get the boys out of the office, and they don’t go without several dozen jibes at Connor and questions that Alex denies answers to. She waits until they’re outside and she’s sitting on her motorbike she’d left at the uni before she calls Connor back. Duncan and Tom start catcalling, and she flips them off, refusing to speak until they’ve climbed into Tom’s van. That’s when she turns on Connor.

“I thought you wanted a job at the ARC?”

“I do! Course I do!”

“Then what the fuck are you doing breaking the Official Secrets Act? Do you know how long they could lock you up for?”

“No?”

“Ten years. Ten years because you blabbed to your friends. You know how volatile this is, no one understands it-” A car horn blares behind her. Alex makes another rude gesture.

“I had to tell someone! You don’t know how this feels, being on the outside!”

“Then talk to me about it! Talk to Abby! If you blab to friends and they tell anyone,” Alex sighs, “It’ll get back to Oliver eventually, he’s everywhere.”

“I want in, Andy.”

“Alex. I…I know, Connor, I know you want in, but I don’t know how to make that happen?” her phone starts ringing, the jingle she’d set for calls from the ARC, more precisely from Oliver, “Just don’t tell anyone else, okay? Please? Call me if you hear anything, yeah?” the van horn beeps, and it holds until Connor turns away from Alex and her bike. As he jogs away, Connor twists round to shout,

“Ask ‘em to start measuring magnetic flux!”

Alex gives him a thumbs up in response, pulling the still-ringing phone out of her pocket.

You’re not in the Forest of Dean, are you?

“What, have you got me bugged or something?”

No, Alex, I’m in the car behind you. The car horn goes off again, but this time it filters through the phone and starts an echo between the two devices that forces Alex to pull her own phone away from her ear and shut it off.

“You’re following me again?” Alex clambers off the bike and walks towards the car, shaking her head while Leek steps out of the car, “It’s not cool, Oliver…Have you got me bugged? Seriously?”

“Stephen said you would be coming back here.” Leek shrugs,

“You really don’t need to keep tabs on me like this.”

“It’s kind of my job.”

“Right. Well. Do it quietly,” there’s a rather stiff pause, “So why are you here?”

“We’ve decided to interview Abby Maitland for a job with us. She has more extensive experience with live animals than the rest of you, which comes with a useful skill set.”

“Abby? Why do you need me?”

“I want you to come with me because you were with us at her first anomaly, you’re a witness to her character.”

“What about Connor?”

“Connor?”

“Temple.”

“We don’t need him.”

***

Alex rolls over in her bed, trying to get away from the warm yellow light that’s crept in through the gaps around the curtains. Everything’s soft and warm and fuzzy and she refuses to look at her clock, but her peace is threatened by the muffled sound of McFly moving closer and closer to her bedroom door. The first verse of Star Girl gets less and less funny each time it restarts, and judging by the barely-distinct insult from Stephen as he opens the door and throws the phone in, it’s played all its entertaining features out. The phone lands about halfway up her back, hitting her spine rather uncomfortably and continuing to buzz, sliding further down with each fresh rendition of the verse. There’s a muffled shout through her door,

“Answer the fucking phone, you’re about to miss breakfast.”

“Piss off.” Alex says into her pillow. Stephen returns the sentiment. She wriggles to try and dislodge the phone that feels more and more like a brick as time passes. The buzzing stops for a blessed moment before it starts again and resumes its march down her back. The smell of smoke wafts through the still-open door, “The toast is burning.” It’s a mental challenge for Alex to make herself sit up, keeping her eyes shut as long as possible until she can’t find her phone and has little choice but to brave the morning - which proves to be afternoon - sun and push the mobile to her ear,

“Who, what and where?”

Tom Ryan, incursion, Marylebone Street.

“Good morning to you too.”

It’s three in the afternoon, Alex Hart.

“It’s a Saturday. I’m a student-” she breaks off to yawn.

Jesus Christ. You do also have a job you are required to turn up for in order to get paid, a job that you are currently doing a trial run of, so if you want to keep it I suggest you get yourself over here before Leek.

“That’s a whole lotta words, Tom Ryan.”

Get your arse to Madame Tussauds, Hart

“Oh hey, I used to work there.”

Really?

“No.” Accepting the fact that she has to wake up, Alex stands, pushing her hair back. Keeping the phone by her ear with a hitched-up shoulder, she picks up her water glass and the various everyday trinkets that sit on her nightstand before kicking the door to the kitchen open. On her way past the radio she tweaks the volume down, “Steve, we’ve got to get moving.”

“I’ve been awake for hours, Al, you’re the one who missed breakfast,” As Stephen turns he takes the paraphernalia off her hands, “Who’s on the phone?”

“Tom Ryan, he’s got a job for us,” Alex breezes past her uncle and towards the kitchen table, “Why is Art on the table?” she asks, scooping up the ferret that’s trying to give himself a bath in a plate of scrambled eggs.

Art?

“Ferret.” Alex explains, moving towards the playpen to feed Art into his favourite twisty tunnel.

Ferret?

“Yeah, I have ferrets.” She finds slightly-burned toast on a plate in the corner and takes it. Stephen calls from his room that they’ll be staying at Nick’s tonight, that Lenny from next door will be in to check on the ferrets.

Ferrets multiple?

“Ferrets multiple, Art and Paul.”

Simon and Garfunkel?

“Yeah.”

I’ve just remembered, I don’t actually give a shit. Tussauds on Maryleborne, now.

“Yeah, I think we’re going to work great together.” Alex grins. There’s a loud sigh on the other end of the line before the click that indicates he’s hung up on her. Alex retreats back to her room in search of a pair of jeans, turning her head to yell, “Stephen?”

“Don’t shout, you’ll have Mrs Ariti up our arses again…what?”

“When’s the next train to Waterloo?” Her foot gets stuck in the trouser leg and she has to take the jeans off and start all over again.

“In fifteen minutes, you think we can make that?” Stephen finds his niece sitting on the floor simultaneously trying to push her feet into trainers and change her shirt. He steps forward to help her find the neckhole of the shirt before she does herself an injury, “Where are we headed?”

“Marylebone Street, Tussaud’s,” Alex answers, lifting a foot to save the back of her shoe from being squashed under heel. She jogs on the spot once her shoes are fixed, grinning again, “Race you to the station?”

***

Neither of the Harts have ever seen either Baker or Marylebone Street so empty. Alex needs to call Ryan to meet them at the Underground station so that the overenthusiastic soldiers waiting at the doors will actually let them through.

“You should give us badges or something.” Alex tells him as she ducks under the yellow tape he’s holding up for her. It’s like the area’s been cordoned off as a film set, people and tape covering every gap. Tape wouldn’t stop any of the creatures Alex has encountered thus far, but Lester’s a big believer in it. Even the crepe and waffle vans are empty, and that takes an emergency.

“You should get here quicker.” Ryan mutters, pulling Alex’s attention from the cut-off alleyways back to him.

“Delays on Piccadilly and Victoria,” Stephen explains, “some rare insect or other got onto the trains so they’ve stopped ‘em.”

“Well, you didn’t really need to stop at Gregg’s, did you?” Tom Ryan points out, noticing Alex rustling around inside a plastic bag covered in the logo. She brings out something wrapped in paper,

“What if we brought you a sausage roll?” she asks, wiggling the steaming paper in front of his nose.

“It’s not going to change the fact that Leek got here twenty minutes ago with the new girl.” Ryan answers with that same vague irritation his voice always carries, but he takes the bribe of food. Alex takes another out of the plastic bag to eat herself before she gives the bag to her uncle.

“New girl?”

“The zookeeper.”

“Abby’s here?” Stephen asks. Alex swallows quickly, unchewed sausage roll threatening to clog her throat, in her effort to answer before the soldier does,

“They hired Abby. Leek took me with him for her interview, didn’t he tell you? Picked me up from uni.”

“No, he didn’t tell me any of that.”

“Must have slipped his mind. He’s got a lot to keep up with.” Ryan reasons, squinting into the distance and waving at the ring of black uniforms around the wax museum. The only breaks in this new perimeter are a pinstriped suit, an old army jacket and a bright pink t-shirt. Oliver, Nick, Abby. Stephen smiles at Nick as though he hadn’t seen him yesterday, taking him by the hand and leading him away from the group to start their own conversation.

“Hi.” Abby Maitland still looks a little surprised to be here, watching Nick and Stephen as they move further up the abandoned street, leaving her with Alex, who smiles back.

“How’s our magnetic flux?” Alex asks, tucking her hands in her pockets.

“Our what?” Oliver asks.

“Magnetic flux? One of the only things we know about these portals is that they create their own magnetic fields, we should have some equipment to measure that magnetism, yeah?”

“Why?”

“Because that’s one of the only leads we have…” Alex tells him hesitantly, voice rising as though asking a question. She digs her keys out of her pockets and jangles them, “The only way we’ve been managing to track ‘em is by waving keys around until they start floating.” A voice crackles over Ryan’s headset and he passes Alex the rest of his sausage roll to split from the group and answer it.

“So, uh…what are we doing?” Abby asks, fiddling with a pin on her jacket.

“We kind of do what we did in the forest. Wander about until we find something weird.”

“Weird like a dinosaur or weird like the spinny thing?”

“Both,” this is Ryan coming back to them, “As long as you stay behind us and stick to the plan.”

“I stay out here.” Oliver points out, giving one of his strange little smiles before he turns to go to his car. Alex gives Ryan his sausage roll back before addressing Abby,

“You’ll be fine. Since we met, only two of the reports I’ve been called out to have actually been anomalies. Or dinosaurs, come to think of it. A lot of calls about big cats, stuff like that, that’s where you’ll come in handy.”

“And seeing as both of you are still here on a trial-basis, you’re still classed as civilians rather than employees, you’re our priority if things go sideways, as long as none of you make yourselves bait. Again.”

“Again,” Alex nods, “I promise I will not start a wild goose chase again.”

“You’d better not, if you get kicked out the professor and your uncle go too,” Ryan remarks before raising his voice, “Speaking of, they better get over here so we can actually get this job done, yeah?” Nick and Stephen had been moving slowly back in their direction, but they pick up the pace a little after Ryan’s shout.

“Abby has more experience with darting animals, is she going to get a gun?”

“No one gets a gun.”

“We dart the creatures?” Abby asks.

“Yeah, knock ‘em out. If the anomaly’s open we can get them back home.” Alex answers.

“We knock them out before they can hurt anyone.” Ryan corrects.

“That too,” Alex continues, “But the soldiers have been having some issues with dosage, we’ve lost a couple creatures.”

“We have?” Ryan asks. Abby nudges Alex and taps her chin.

“Last week’s microraptors, remember?” Alex wipes pastry crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand, making sure to thank Abby while Ryan nods. Nick and Stephen have caught up to them now, hovering behind Alex.

“What’s the plan, captain?” Nick asks. Ryan signals to one of the soldiers, who joins the group holding out blueprints for Madame Tussauds.

“We’ll go in the main entrance and make our way to this room where they keep the musicians, that’s where the creature was seen, but it could be anywhere in the building now. All the fire exits are covered, so what we want you to do is locate the anomaly, then the creature, then flush it out.”

“Sounds simple enough.” Stephen says. “Keep it that way, would you? This was a pretty simple operation before you lot came along. No complications. None.” Ryan’s voice is firm. Nick smothers a scoff. Alex and Stephen mock-salute.

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