Title: Zipper Trouts and Friendships
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't even own the euphemisms.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The path to friendship and beyond can be a little twisty sometimes.
AN: So . . . yeah, I'd been looking to use that website (which I linked to in the middle of the fic) for a while. Just because. As for the title, I really have no idea what to call this, so I'm calling it something. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Stephen had never really thought about Connor at all. He was there, he'd been sort of appended to the group on the strength of his dinosaur database, but other than that, he wasn't really much worth the thought. It all started to change one day when Connor came racing into his office space, demanding with wide eyes, "You haven't checked your email yet, have you?"

Raising an eyebrow, he said, "No," and started to do so.

"Don't!" exclaimed Connor. "Listen. Some friends of mine hacked my account and they've started sending prank emails on my behalf. Can you give me just a minute to find it? I really don't want to be publicly humiliated just because Tom thinks he's funny."

Stephen said, "I suppose," figuring that he didn't need to see whatever idiotic thing was going on anyhow, and was about to sign in, when Connor pushed him aside and did . . . something . . . bypassing the login screen entirely, diving straight into his email. "What . . . how?"

"You've got your passwords saved to the computer, Stephen," he said absently. "I hardly need to worry about you signing in properly, do I?"

"You know my passwords?" Stephen said, appalled.

"No," Connor said, sounding rather like Cutter when he was forced to explain evolutionary theory to a first year student. "They're already in your computer. I don't need to know them to punch them in from the cookies and what-all."

Several screens flashed by, including his Met U account and his personal Hotmail account. "That's not-"

"You didn't think they'd stop with the ARC's system, did you?" Connor asked, clearly rhetorically. Then he proceeded to zip through Stephen's old Leeds University account from when he'dbeen in undergrad and hadn't quite got around to getting rid of and an AOL account he hadn't thought of in years.

Then Connor seemed to do something in the guts of the programming and cleared out in a flourish, leaving Stephen's computer looking as though nothing had happened at all in the last few minutes.

"Connor!" Abby shouted from down the hall.

The geek's head whipped around. "Dammit, I thought I had more time to get to Abby's," he muttered. "Can you talk to Cutter? Just tell him to ignore any emails he sees from me until I've a chance to fix it?"

"What did you just do?" Stephen demanded.

Connor was already heading out the door as he shouted, "Blocked Tom and Duncan from your emails, all of them, amped up your firewall, and put in a few redirects so things'll go straight to trash that aren't supposed to be in your mail. It's Tom and Duncan-specific, I promise."

Then he was out the door and making appeasing noises at Abby. It clearly wasn't working, and as the occasional word drifted to Stephen's door, "Sexy!?" he thought perhaps he should do as Connor asked, "Chocolate sauce!" and let Cutter know, "Handcuffs!?" that he should ignore emails from Connor, "Thrusting spear!?" until further notice. Which he duly did.

"Ow! Abby!"

Then he shut his door and put on headphones with the Stones blasting at full volume.

After that, though, his curiosity got the better of him and he started watching his trash folders. Eventually an email cropped up in it, ostensibly from Connor. It clearly wasn't, since Connor was an ungrammatical writer at best, and the whole of it seemed to have been cribbed partly from a Harlequin romance and partly from third-rate erotica and partly from the imaginations of two geeks who'd googled "euphemisms for penis" and gone completely mad.

In spite of himself, he read the whole thing and began laughing. It was patently ridiculous, both that Connor would even think such a thing and partly that the kid was that lovelorn that he'd try it. "Something amusing, Stephen?" Cutter asked, poking his head in.

Mostly because it was pretty clear that Connor had nothing to do with this and he wouldn't have wanted his friends doing that to him, Stephen shut it down and said, "It'd take too long to explain. You needed anything, Nick?"

Once Nick had left, Stephen forwarded the thing to Connor, warning him that Duncan and Tom were clearly at it again. Moments later, Connor was at his door. "You readit?" he asked, eyes wide.

"Funniest thing I've seen all week," he said, struggling not to laugh. He looked at the screen. "'Grabthar's hammer'?"

"I hate my friends," Connor muttered.

"Love truncheon?"

Connor stared. "Are you going to read every euphemism in that thing?"

"Nebuchadnezzar?"

"Oh, my God, you are," Connor said.

Stephen was laughing again by this point. "What did they do? Google it?"

"There's a website," Connor said, giving in with a shrug. "And Tom writes fanfiction. It's useful for him when he decides he doesn't want to reuse the same three words over and over again."

Once he got himself under control again, he said, "I assume you're going to talk to those two about this? You can't want them in your email doing this."

His teammate sighed heavily. "I'd hoped they were over this," he grumbled. "I'll talk to them. Again."

As Connor left, Stephen called after him, "The Solicitor General?"

"Shut up!"

It was like their friendship turned a corner that day, though. Mostly because Stephen started to take note of Connor. Not stalk him or anything, but to pay attention to what the younger man was saying instead of letting it all roll off his back. It was how he noticed that Connor, on his feet all day, travelling from car to anomaly, to base camp to car and back again, would always do it at a speedy run or an easy lope, never dropping to a walk.

"Did you ever consider taking up running?" he asked as he dropped back to where Connor was juggling the equipment Nick and Abby had dumped on him with never a by-your-leave. He relieved Connor of a few things, getting a grateful smile in return.

Then Connor snorted. "I'm on the track team," he replied. "Honestly, with all this," he gestured at the SFs and everything, "I'm going to have to quit. I keep missing practices and all." He sighed. "I'll miss it. It was the one thing that kept the bloody rugby team off me in high school, that I was 'one of them'." Stephen could hear the air quotes around the words.

"I run in the mornings," Stephen heard himself offering, "I wouldn't mind the company." To be honest, he wouldn't, but he hadn't had anyone along for a long time who'd either keep up, or shut up and run. The last thing he had patience for was someone plodding along, slowing him up and whinging the whole way.

"I prefer being on the track in the evening," Connor admitted. "It lets me wind down and I don't have to think like I would if I were on the street looking out for cracks on the pavement and such."

Two days later, Stephen joined him that evening, arguing the whole time about how right Connor's aliens theory wasconsidering that it was anomalies not aliens. Connor took the stance that since something science-fictiony had been the cause of the evolutionary trouble, he'd been more right than not that it was temporal displacement, while Stephen felt that since the cause was simply wrong, Connor's theory was wrong, so it didn't matter if all he needed to do was replace, 'alien' with 'anomaly' to make it work.

The Monday after, Connor came out with him in the morning, claiming, "Mondays are already awful, I might as well make it more awful by being up before humans are supposed to be awake." He'd struggled some with the run, more because he wasn't used to being off a track and having to watch where he was going as much, but by the end of the half hour he'd hit his stride and Stephen had been able to stop watching out of the corner of his eye to catch him when he tripped.

When Tom and Duncan were idiots and Tom got himself killed, Stephen sighed in irritation at Nick and picked up the pieces. Because while Nick knew what to say to get Connor not to quit just as he'd gained the respect of the team and begun to find his place there, he just let Connor wander off, grieving and confused, as though a few words could make up for the loss of a close friend. "Connor!"

"Oh, Stephen, hey," Connor said as he curled into a recess in a wall.

Stephen sat next to him, commenting idly. "You know, Nick can be a bit of an idiot about people."

That got Connor's attention. "What do you mean?"

"He thinks sometimes that everyone like to bury themselves in their work like he did after Helen . . . left." Stephen shook off the memories of her, because this wasn't about him or Helen. "Do you need to talk? Or get drunk off your arse, or something?" he asked. "I know you're still in shock right now. But I just want you to know, if you need something, I'm here for you, and so's Abby. I don't advise talking to Nick, only because he's-"

"A bit of an idiot about people," Connor said with a small smile. "I get it. Thanks. I think right now though, I'd best see to Duncan. I'm not . . . really sure how he's handling it, you know?"

Stephen nodded and let him go. "What was that about?" Nick asked as he joined the professor in directing the cleanup.

"The fact that you have no idea, Nick, just goes to show that you live in a special sort of headspace where you think everyone's like you if you like them," Stephen said. Sometimes it was amazing to him that Helen had married Nick at all. Then he shook it off, set to work and hoped Connor wouldn't give in to grief in some unfortunate way. For all that they were friends now, he just couldn't be sure.

He'd been sitting at home, thinking about the fact that Claudia had just told Nick that Helen had saved her from those little flying menaces, and couldn't help but wonder what Helen was doing, what she wanted and why, when someone knocked on his door. It was Connor. And he looked terrible.

"I just . . . I can't right now," he said, almost as though he was starting a conversation in the middle. "I just . . . Tom's gone and half the stuff I have he helped me get," Connor continued. "Not just the Playstation, but the clothes and everything. And the photo that I put up next to the telly, it's stupid but sometimes I feel like he's looking at me and . . ." he looked desperately at Stephen. "Can I stay here? Just . . . a few hours, just a break, something, please?"

It drove all thoughts of Helen out of his mind at once, and Stephen put an arm around Connor's shoulders, guiding his friend over to the sofa. "I'm not saying that you need to go, Connor, but what's Abby-"

"She just said I should take down the picture if it's bothering me, and maybe I should get new clothes while I'm at it." Connor shook his head. "I mean, she didn't say it the way I made it sound, but it's more like she's sort of pressing me to make a clean break or something. Move on faster." His eyes met Stephen's. "I'm not ready to do that yet. I just . . . Tom's . . . he's too important, to me, to just . . ." he waved a hand, "Move on."

A thought crossed Stephen's mind, harkening back to weird emails with even weirder euphemisms. "Were you and Tom . . . dating?" he finished.

"Me and . . . no," Connor said with a slight smile. "Not at all. Tom was as straight as they come, but I got here, got to uni with pretty much nothing but scholarships and the shirt on my back. After Dad threw me out, he didn't even let me back in for my things. Tom pretty much saved my arse when I got to London."

Stephen stared. This was new. "Threw you out?"

"He'd caught me with my boyfriend, snogging in the garage. He wasn't best pleased." Connor sighed. "He got pretty awful and I scraped my hands up something fierce when I hit the ground. It's when I started wearing the gloves, you know," he said. "It meant people didn't see the bandages, didn't ask, because it was just a sort of fashion statement."

"Christ," Stephen said. There wasn't much else he could say. Connor was brilliant and his father had tossed him out with nothing over a sexual preference. Suddenly he frowned. "But you're always on about Abby?" he asked.

A shrug. "I go both ways," Connor explained. "And Abby's brilliant. Just . . ." he trailed off, sighing. "She doesn't want to hear about Tom. Not the good things," his voice started to crack. "Not about how he let me stay at his flat even though we didn't even know each other, that he bought me clothes at a used clothing shop and got me a spot at the Staples technical help desk." Connor started to shake and tears started to spill from his eyes. "He just . . . it's my fault he's dead and I might as well have lost the only family I've still got."

Stephen wasn't the greatest people person, but even he could see what Connor needed right then. He pulled the younger man over and felt Connor start to shake apart as Stephen gave him the shoulder to cry on he needed. "I know it doesn't feel like it now," he said, "But it'll get better. It'll hurt a little less eventually."

"I just wish it had been me," Connor came out with between harsh sobs. "He was . . . better than me. It should have been me."

"Don't ever say that," Stephen snapped. A chill raced up his spine with those words. "Don't ever even think that, Connor."

Pulling back, his face still wet, Connor told him stubbornly, "I'mthe one in the anomaly program, I'm the one what's taken on the risks, knowing that there's risks. Tom didn't get to make that choice and I did."

"And I'm glad it wasn't you," Stephen told him. "We'd all miss youif anything happened to you, Connor."

He locked eyes with Connor for a moment, trying to convey his concern for his friend. That was when the unexpected happened. Because Connor suddenly leant in and kissed him. He'd thought Connor was dead gone on Abby, but those damned emails went rocketing through his mind. Had Tom and Duncan known something Stephen didn't? Maybe even that Connor hadn't? Gently, because Connor certainly didn't deserve to be dumped onto the floor in the upsurge of Stephen's bafflement and a few other emotions he couldn't quite put a finger on, he pulled away and pushed Connor back. "Connor . . ." he said, then stopped. Because he had no clue what to say after that.

Connor's eyes were wide. "I'm sorry," he started to ramble. "I mean, I'm always doing that. Tom always said I had the worst gaydar in the history of Western society." He scrambled to his feet. "You're not angry are you? We can both totally forget it happened, or I'll stay out of your way or . . . you're not angry?" he pleaded.

"No," Stephen hastened to tell him. "But for one thing, Connor, you're grieving right now, and I don't think it's really the best time for you to start . . . anything." Then he took a deep breath and said carefully, "And while I'm flattered, I'm not sure . . ."

"Right." Connor nodded sharply. "I'm sorry. I just . . . nevermind."

Rattled enough not to want to know right then, Stephen nodded. "Look, if you still want to hang around, or maybe go for a run, that's fine."

Eyes closed for a moment, Stephen watched as Connor recentred himself, then said, "You know what? That's probably a good idea. I'll head back to the flat now."

"And I'll meet you at the track," Stephen told him.

Connor's head whipped up and he stared. Then a smile broke out on his face. "Thanks," he said sincerely.

Much later that evening, Stephen lay in bed, staring blindly at the ceiling and thinking about that kiss. He'd never thought of himself as anything but straight. He'd had a fling or two when he was in his first year or two at uni and just figuring out who he was. It had been flattering then that both sexes thought he was good-looking, and the experiment had been interesting, but he'd never felt any particular pull toward men.

But that kiss from Connor had left him a little off-centre. Because part of him felt guilty for pushing Connor away when he'd been looking for comfort, and part of him felt a little panicked over the sudden change in direction the moment had taken. Part of him had reminded him that Connor was his friend now, a mate, someone you went out for a beer at the pub with, and one last part had rather stridently wanted to kiss back. Even now, he was feeling conflicted, everything from worry that Connor thought he was being utterly rejected to a desire to call Connor up, ask him over and try what the geek would no doubt call, 'the kissing thing', again.

The next couple weeks kept him from getting a handle on how he felt about things, though. First it was Helen with her predators from the future and telling Nick about the affair, then it was Nick's obsession with the imaginary Claudia Brown and Jenny Lewis, who was a bit of a harpy from what Stephen could tell, and just one thing after another. What wound up bringing everything into focus for him was listening to Abby complain about Caroline Steele. Because apparently Connor was dating this girl, whoever she was, and Abby was fairly certain Connor was letting his low self-esteem keep him in the relationship out of a misguided belief that no one else would have him.

What with Valerie and the mess that had been wrought by not telling the bloody truth about things, Stephen chose to go at it bluntly as he and Connor sat on the sofa together, watching the game and having a beer. "Abby thinks you're dating this Caroline girl because of low self-esteem."

Connor turned to stare at him. "That's . . . Abby's been talking about it with you?" He hastily shook his head. "One mistake, and I'm sure Caroline didn't mean to lock Rex in the fridge-"

"She locked a lizard in the fridge?" Stephen asked incredulously.

"It was a mistake," Connor defended. A little feebly Stephen thought.

"How do you do that by mistake?" he asked Connor.

"She . . . I . . ." Connor sank back. "It's not low self-esteem if it's true," he mumbled. "So she gets a little condescending," he said. "At least she wants me. Who else'll have me?" The question came out despondently.

Subtlety was not Stephen's strong point, so he rarely bothered trying. "I would," he admitted, leaning over and kissing Connor, who promptly stiffened in shock, then just as abruptly melted into the kiss, pressing himself into Stephen with something a little like desperation.

"God," Connor said when they finally broke apart. The word was half gasp and half moan. "That was brilliant." It really had been, and the second was, and so was the third. By that time, Stephen had Connor under him, lying on the sofa. But just as he started to explore a little further, Connor carefully pushed him off. "Just a sec, Stephen."

He sat up at once. "What is it?"

Connor took in a deep breath and said, "Okay, I clearly have to break up with Caroline. So . . . maybe we can put this off for two days? I just need to catch her. I just don't want to do it over the phone."

Having been down the road of an affair with someone who was already taken, Stephen agreed. Last thing he needed was to give the universe any more ammunition to fuck him over with. He didn't have to wait long either, because the next evening, Connor dropped by again, saying, "If I didn't know better, I'd think she was being paid to date me or something. She got really weird when I tried to break up with her. Sort of desperate-sounding."

"Maybe she has trouble getting a boyfriend herself," Stephen suggested.

"Maybe," Connor said.

There was a long pause as they just sat there, neither one making a move. Then Connor sort of flung himself between them, and Stephen let the other sort of bowl him over onto the sofa. Connor was actually quite talented at kissing, and Stephen groaned as the space between them shrank, their lips now barely pulling apart with each kiss, the two of them pressed together and Connor's hands finding their way to the point where his shirt had begun to ride up. The contrast between the gloves and the smooth and sensitive fingertips stroking at his back was fantastic.

When he tentatively arched his hips up, he was greeted by a responding press downward and the sight of Connor flinging his head back. "Oh, God!" Because Connor was moving against him now, hard and urgent, and although Stephen hadn't been in too much of a rush, the fact that Connor was so eager sent Stephen's blood spiralling downward and his hands to find Connor's arse and get a better grip.

They'd just found the most delicious rhythm when they fell off.

Connor had promptly rolled off him to the side, and they both turned to stare at the sofa next to them in shambles. The cushions from it all over the floor, the pair of them having managed to simply slide right off when they forgot where they were. On the telly, a roar went up as Arsenal scored against Manchester, and they looked at each other and burst into laughter. Stephen rolled to his feet, wincing a little as the movement pressed his still-hard cock in a slightly uncomfortable way, and gave Connor a hand up.

Together they put the couch back together, and Connor asked as Stephen flicked the game off, "What made you . . . I mean, I'm not complaining, but the last time we kissed-"

"The last time we kissed you were grieving and it wouldn't have been right," Stephen said. "But I was a little thrown," he admitted. "I've never . . ." He looked for the right words, then bulled ahead, because he wasn't going to say it right anyhow. "I experimented a little, in the first couple years at uni, in undergrad, but I've pretty much always thought of myself as straight. I was a little . . ."

"Thrown," Connor repeated back at him. "It does get a little weird, doesn't it? I mean, people get so either-or about it, and then I found it didn't matter to me at all and I started to wonder if something wasn't a little wrong with me that I didn't care." He sighed. "Or if the way Dad always acted had damaged me so that I didn't have any critical faculty about people or something." Then he shook off the melancholy. "But I mostly got over that."

"Tom?"

"Tom."

There was another pause, because there wasn't anything else to say, and then Connor reached over, putting the last cushion down and coming close enough for Stephen pull him in and kiss him again. Maybe it wasn't some sort of emotional talk, but it seemed to get them both moving again in adirection and they nearly wound up back on the couch before Connor gasped, "Bed?" as his head tilted to the side to let Stephen get his mouth on the pulse point.

"Oh, God, yes," he groaned, as they staggered through the flat, tripping and falling onto the bed on an angle, but it didn't matter because there was space to spread out, and the chance to get Connor's zip tugged down and the boxers with their silly Star Wars print out of the way. He hadn't much experience with other men, but he knew what he liked when he got himself off, so he tried it on Connor.

Connor immediately bucked upwards, a litany of half-formed words pouring out of his mouth and something that might have been Stephen's name. They shortly settled into a rhythm, Stephen watching, testing little different things, getting to see what Connor liked more or less, judging by the volume of the sounds he made whenever Stephen shifted his grip a little, tightening or twisting. With a desperate sort of lunge, Connor pulled him into a kiss, shouting into Stephen's mouth as he came, relaxing after into what looked like a pretty happy puddle.

He was acutely aware of how hard he was, but he didn't want to shatter the moment by demanding some sort of satisfaction. The reward for that bit of patience came when Connor sat up and rolled Stephen onto his back, then popped open Stephen's trousers and smoothly sank his mouth down over the throbbing erection inside.

It was brilliant. Hot and wet and Connor managed to create a tight suction, playing his tongue along the underside, tempting Stephen into short thrusts, because he had to move. He couldn't keep still. He was vaguely aware it was his turn to speak in gibberish, but that didn't matter because his orgasm was rushing up on him, that mouth that was so talented at kissing was possibly even better at this, although Stephen might be biased at that moment because he was fairly sure all his nerve endings had somehow transitioned to be focused down where that mouth was doing thingsto him.

Then the tension snapped, releasing and Stephen gave a strangled shout as he rode the waves of pleasure until it all finally wound down and he felt rather like his bones had been turned to jelly. Connor lay down next to him, looking a tad smug.

"When the hell did you learn to do that?" Stephen asked.

A dimpled grin and, "Here and there," he answered. "I have to say, though. I'm amazed that Tom called this."

"You mean those emails?" Stephen asked.

Connor laughed a little. "He really was trying to be helpful. He said that if the person reading didn't find them funny, they weren't worth my time."

He couldn't help it. "Or your thrusting spear?"

"I deleted that!"

"Abby wasn't exactly quiet about it." He paused, then said, "How about The War Hammer?"

"You found the website," Connor said flatly. He sounded unamused, but his lips were twitching.

It had been a very . . . different read. "I was intrigued by Three Inch Punisher," Stephen admitted.

"Oh my God," Connor groaned.

"Well, you certainly have more than three inches," he told the theatrically groaning Connor. "More of a handgun."

"I should never have mentioned the website."

"Winky the milk spitting tunnel ferret?"

Connor kissed him to shut him up. Stephen chose not to complain.