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Ray took a deep breath and plunged his hands into the icy water. As difficult as it was, he forced himself to take his time as he moved his hands over the rocks, searching for anything that felt wrong. A few times, he found something unusually smooth and shoved it up under the elasticated end of his sleeve, shuddering as the water flooded after it. After what was either ten minutes or half an hour, the rain and the sea had drenched him to the point where he could hardly see, and he was beginning to lose the feeling in the tips of his fingers, he was forced to admit defeat. He pulled his hands out of the water and slowly waded back to shore, where he knelt on the wet sand to check what he’d found.
Some unusually smooth stones. A few fossils, which Ray shoved in one of the pockets of his jacket.
No controller which, if pressed, would send him and Mick back to the Waverider. Zari had even added a little ‘x’ to it so that they couldn’t press the wrong button. And then Ray had dropped it.
“You’re an idiot.”
Ray looked up to find Mick standing to his right, his arms folded across his chest as he glared down at Ray. It would have been more intimidating if the huge, puffy waterproof jacket and the wind weren’t making it difficult for him to keep them there.
“I thought I’d trying to get another search for the controller done before the sun set,” Ray managed before Mick was grabbing his arm and yanking him to his feet. “I managed to search about half of the third section, but I only found fossils.”
“Great, you could’ve drowned for fossils,” Mick snapped. He dropped Ray’s arm and started off away from the beach.
Ray took one last look at the closest section of the beach, just in case the controller had washed up in the last hour or so, before he followed him.
*
Mick didn’t say another word all the way up to the old cottage they’d been staying in since they’d been time scattered. In fact, he was stubbornly silent for hours, even while Ray stood wrapped in blankets and trying to wring out his last set of clothes, hoping that the oldest set would be dry enough to wear soon.
It was dark by the time Mick finally sat down at the scruffy little table and pushed a bowl towards Ray.
“There was some mushy shit left from earlier, you should eat it.”
Ray picked at the oats soaked in milk – thankfully, along with the freshwater spring, the tiny little island they’d found themselves stranded on also had cows – as he watched one of the candles melting down. It wouldn’t be long before they were out of decent candles and on to what they could scavenge from the melted remains. There was still a lot of firewood in the shelter beside the outside toilet, but how long would it be before they had to try and cut some? Ray had cut down some trees as a kid, but he’d never had to cut down enough to keep a fire large enough to heat an entire cottage going indefinitely. And then there was the problem of if they didn’t find the controller, or if it was broken when they found it. They didn’t have any tools. Mick didn’t even have the heat gun, and the suit was back on the Waverider because Ray hadn’t managed to grab it before Zari had been forced to time scatter them.
At least he’d managed to grab the emergency bag that he’d packed after his jaunt to the Cretaceous. They’d been lucky. They’d both managed to grab their bags. They’d both landed in the shallows, rather than deep water. They’d found an empty cottage which, while abandoned, had been left recently enough that there was still everything from food to firewood.
But their luck had glitched when Ray had dropped that controller. And, sooner or later, it was going to run out. One of them would get hurt or sick and, with no way to get back to the Waverider, they’d end up—
“Stop it, Haitcut.” Mick was staring at the flame and, not for the first time, Ray wondered what he was seeing when he did that. “We’re not going to die. You said it yourself, that thing is too heavy to get far, even with the sea being that rough.”
“Maybe I was wrong.” Ray pushed away the bowl and wrapped the blankets tighter around himself. “It’s been a month and we haven’t found it. It could be anywhere. Maybe it even ended up on that island we can see from the cliff. We could—”
“We’re not trying to fix the boat. I told you; I used to fish when I was a kid, I never had to fix a boat first. I don’t know about you, since you’re not even listening to your own rules, but I don’t want to drown out there.” Mick blew out the candle. “I’m going to bed. Try to stay inside and not get yourself killed before I wake up.”
Despite his best attempts not to – although they’d been particularly poor recently – Ray watched Mick leave the little kitchen. He listened to Mick moving around on the other side of the wall for a while, stubbornly refusing to think about how it sounded like Mick was getting changed into a dry set of clothes and how relieved his sigh sounded when he got into bed.
He waited for almost an hour before he blew out the second candle and went to his own bed, still wrapped in his blankets.
*
“Get off!”
Ray glanced over his shoulder and laughed. Mick was trying, and failing, to rid himself of one of the cows, which had wandered over looking for some food. The cow, a huge black thing with a big white stripe around its middle, was trying to shove its nose in one of Mick’s pockets.
“You brought wheat, didn’t you?” Ray asked as he walked back towards Mick. It was always the same thing: Mick brought a snack for while they searched for the controller, and inevitably something tried to steal it. Usually it was the seagulls. “Just give it up, or he’ll follow us all the way to the beach.”
Mick glared at Ray (nowhere near as threatening as it could have been, as the cow was still trying to push him over as it tried to get to the food) before he dug down into one pocket and brought out a small bag of milk-soaked wheat. He emptied the bag out into one hand and held it out to the cow.
“Stupid thing,” he said fondly as the cow ate from his hand. He glanced at Ray as if daring him to say something before he rubbed the side of the cow’s neck with his free hand.
Ray sat on the edge of one of the rocks, not even trying to smile as he watched them. More than once over the last month, he’d wished that he’d packed a camera in his ‘in case of time scattering’ kit. As cold, wet, and windy as the island was (and thankfully uninhabited), it was picturesque, and he’d almost enjoyed a lot of his time here. Even if he was getting sick of eating wheat and fish.
“You’ve got another bag, haven’t you?” Ray asked once the cow had decided that there was no more food to found and wandered off to graze nearby. He wasn’t entirely sure how it managed to survive on the scrappy grass, but it didn’t look like it needed any more food. He’d never seen such a big cow.
“You think I’m stupid enough to only bring one? I’ve got two more.” Mick patted the top pocket on his jacket. “Gotta bring lunch if we’re going to be out here for a while.”
*
They took the fastest route down to the beach, which meant making their way down a steep slope which was getting muddier by the day. Logically, Ray knew that if they stayed much longer, they’d have to either find another way or do something to make sure that they didn’t fall on their backsides on the way up and down. Possible injuries aside, they didn’t have the time or inclination to heat enough water to wash their clothes that often.
“We’ll do the section beside the rocks today.” He’d managed to map out the area pretty well over their first few days, and it had been easy enough to find a path across the large flat rocks to the bottom of the cliff that jutted out into the sea. When he’d stood at the edge, Ray had felt like there was nothing behind him, just the sea stretching out before him, the shape of an island barely visible in the distance. “Do you want to go first?”
“Might as well, since you were stupid enough to come out here alone yesterday.”
Mick didn’t give Ray any time to argue or defend himself before he was wading into the water. If the cold bothered him, he didn’t show it; Ray had no idea how, since he was trying not to shiver harder just from watching him. He kept going until the water was halfway up his thighs, Ray following across the top of the rocks and trying to stay level with Mick.
“I was thinking about trying to cook something something with those nettles I found the other day,” Ray said, sitting down on one of the rocks to watch Mick work. “I know they’re not the tastiest thing in the world, but it’s a change from what we’ve been eating recently. I can’t identify anything else around here, so I don’t think we’re on the North American continent. Temperature rules out the South American one, so I think we’re somewhere near Europe. I can’t read those books, so whoever lived here didn’t write in English, even if they spoke it. I don’t recognise the language either.”
It was simple enough work. Mick waited until the waves had eased, dropped down until his head was just above the water, felt around to see if he could feel anything unusual, and brought anything that felt like it didn’t belong up to the surface. There was hardly any wind today, especially compared to the gales that had blown in over the past week, and it meant that it was quiet enough for Ray to talk and expect Mick to hear him, even if Mick didn’t reply very often.
“Another fossil for Pretty’s collection,” Mick said the tenth time he straightened up, throwing it at Ray. “It’s uglier than the others.”
Ray turned it over in his hands as he watched Mick work.
“Maybe we’ll discover something new. You could even have it named after you.”
Mick laughed at that. “A criminal record longer than my arm, an appearance with the president, a statue, and a critter named after me. Now that’d confuse people.” He threw a few smooth but apparently uninteresting rocks towards the beach and waded over to Ray. “Okay, I’m taking a break for lunch now, and we’re going back to the cottage early. It’s fucking freezing in here today.”
“At least it’s not raining.” Ray held out his hand to help Mick up and was a little surprised when Mick took it. Mick’s hand was freezing cold, and Ray couldn’t help but hold on a little tighter than he really needed to and for a few seconds longer than he really had to. Mick didn’t complain, though, just dropped down beside Ray like he belonged there.
Ray spared a second to wonder how Mick managed it, sitting down like nothing was wrong or uncomfortable about spending hours in clothes that were soaked right up to his thighs in freezing cold water, but pushed that away as soon as he remembered the look Mick had given him the only time he’d ever dared to bring that up. It had been his I’ve had worse look, and that usually meant that the worse thing was from before or during his time as Chronos.
“And you’re not trying to get yourself killed out there at night.” Mick dug into one of the pockets and brought out a couple of bags of the wheat mush, handing one over to Ray.
They ate in silence for a while, watching the waves lapping at the beach and the edge of the rocks. It was a beautiful place, really, if Ray looked past the whole stranded-with-no-way-home-and-no-idea-when part. The island itself was all sharp angles and hidden corners, with the sprawling beach at one end a great contrast to the treacherous cliffs that seemed to surround every other side. While people had obviously lived there up until a month or two before Ray and Mick had arrived, the only life on the island right now seemed to be some forgotten cows, as well as some rabbits that Ray had been unable to kill for food.
“I think we’re in Scotland.”
Ray turned his head far enough to get a better look at Mick, who didn’t look away from the waves.
“Oh.” It did fit, he supposed. It was cold enough, and he knew there were a lot of small Scottish islands, and that not all of them were inhabited in the future. It made sense that it would be similar in the past. “Not to sound like a sceptic, but is there any reason why you think we’re in Scotland specifically?”
“The cows.”
“What?”
“They’re Galloway cows,” Mick said, as if it was something everyone knew. Which, well, wasn’t exactly strange when it came to Mick, since Ray had learned over the last few years that Mick had some pretty unusual interests for a guy Ray had originally written off as a criminal.
But cows were a new one.
“How do you know about cows? Especially rare ones.”
“What? My mom had a calendar with cows on it when I was a kid. It’s not like I’ve cared about them since then.” Mick shrugged. “That one reminded me of an Oreo. She grew up on a farm, so every year my uncle gave her a calendar with cows on it. He got the one with that cow on it when he was on vacation.” He hesitated for a split-second, as if he wasn’t sure that he wanted to continue, something Ray thought he wouldn’t have noticed at one point. “She used to read the descriptions to me when I was a kid, and I remembered those ones because my grandparents’ farm had them. She told me they were only in Scotland ‘til…” He waved his hand vaguely. “Anyway, we’re too far back to be anywhere else and still see the cows. I had a whole shoebox full of the pictures from those calendars.”
Until they burned, was left unsaid.
“I was chased by a cow when we went on a school trip to a farm.” It hadn’t even been the worst part of the trip. That had come when Ray had suffered an allergic reaction to the sheepdogs. He balled up the plastic bag and pushed it into one of the pockets on Mick’s jacket. “I don’t think it was a Scottish one.”
Scowling as he stored his own empty bag, Mick muttered, “If you try to get me to work which type it was, I’m going to push you in,” but he didn’t sound annoyed at all. More amused, and maybe a little fond if Ray was reading his tone correctly.
But that was a road that Ray wouldn’t let his mind go too far down. After all, they’d spent so long building up this tentative friendship, from Mick not even wanting anything to do with him, to the point where they did laundry together and had been together when Zari had time scattered them in pairs, that Ray was terrified of endangering it.
The waves were getting rougher, Ray realised with a sinking feeling. Too rough to continue searching tonight. They were going to have to leave their search for another day.
“Do you think they’ll find us if we don’t find our way back?” he asked quietly. It was something he’d been avoiding bringing up for the last month, either out of fear of what the answer would be, or that Mick would reveal some kind of plan for if they weren’t found. And, if Ray was honest, he was more than a little afraid that Mick’s long-term plan involved fixing up that old boat and leaving Ray behind.
“’Course they will. Pretty’s done it before, and the boss’s girlfriend’ll never let her hear the end of it if she loses us in time. ‘Sides, Zari won’t leave us here if she thinks for a second that her little gizmo stranded us.”
That was true. Ray wasn’t even sure that Zari would need the Waverider to find them if she thought it was her fault that they couldn’t get back.
“And if they’re dead? If they didn’t get back to the Waverider?”
Mick sighed. “If they’re dead, then we’re stuck here. We’ll either get back eventually or live here with the cows.”
“You’d live here? With me?”
“Not got anywhere else to go.”
Ray swallowed. Of course. They were stuck on an island, which only had a single cottage built on it, unless he counted some unsettling caves that flooded when the tide came in. Of course Mick was stuck with him. Of course he’d leave if he had another option.
“You’re a real idiot sometimes, you know that?” Mick was staring at him, but he didn’t look pissed off like he had the night before, or even angry. More frustrated although Ray had no idea why.
At least until Mick leaned forward, grabbing at the collar of Ray’s coat to keep him in place, and kissed him, far more gently than Ray had ever expected (imagined) him to. His cold fingers brushed against Ray’s throat as he let go, and he was already turning away by the time that Ray’s brain caught up with the world and he grabbed Mick’s sleeve.
“Don’t go,” he said, and he wasn’t entirely sure if he was telling Mick not to leave right now, not to leave the island, or not to leave him ever. Ray leaned in until he was almost close enough to kiss Mick, until he was kneeling beside him. “Please. Just… just stay.”
“Not going anywhere, Haircut.” Mick slid his fingers through Ray’s hair, his other hand returning to the collar of Ray’s coat, and Ray leaned forward.
“I hate to interrupt,” someone said before Ray could kiss him, “but I don’t think the two of you are supposed to be here.”
Mick glared over Ray’s shoulder, and Ray winced as he turned around.
“Director Sharpe,” he managed weakly, letting himself slump back against Mick, unsure if he wanted to laugh or cry. “You found us.”