AN: Two years ago, (eek! Another anniversary passed!) I wrote my fifth fanfiction story. It was also my fifth LWD story since that's all I've ever "published". The story was "Uncle Derek".

It is basic and short, and frankly not the best piece of fiction in the world, but I still love it because the two characters are world weary. They've had the corners knocked from them – but together they've survived – because of each other rather than in spite of each other.

When I wrote it, my knowledge of LWD was still very limited but like all of my stories I tried to make it as factual as possible – which was difficult because it was set so far into the future. The two massive facts I used to base the story on were the fact that Casey loves the written word and Derek loves visuals. More than one episode of LWD has Derek wielding a video camera, in fact I counted three episodes without even trying.

So in "Uncle Derek" I made them both journalists: Casey providing the words, Derek providing the pictures. A match made at Reuters!

I used the same idea again for "Matri-moan-al Blisters" because I like it so much, but in that case it was incidental to the story.

For a long time, I've wished I'd had the idea for Uncle Derek later on when my writing had become more confident. Instead, I've started to write this. Everything is the same as Uncle Derek – except the plot! (I think you'll understand what I mean!)

[Yes this does mean I'm now working on two stories at the same time- despite my house move. I'm a mug!]

Incidentally, I wrote this before the events in London last week and this first chapter refers to no particular country, religion or political belief.

January 2019

It was supposed to be cold in the desert at night: Cold, peaceful and dark. He'd heard tales of water bottles developing ice and a darkness so deep people had dropped hundreds of feet because they couldn't see the cliff edge in front of them.

"Yeah…right!" thought Derek, raising his arm in front of his face to protect it from the blinding light and raw heat of the scene in front of him.

Of course, he wasn't actually in the desert. That started about quarter of a mile down the rough asphalt road with its crumbling edges, and garbage-choked gullies. It was night-time, however, and if he looked directly upwards, he supposed he could see some dark sky: a small slither of velvet black untouched by the red, yellow and white light and heat before him.

It might not be dark and it wasn't peaceful either, because he was far from alone. In front of him the street was filled with the sound of angry cries, shouts and the roaring crackle of flames; the terrifying crash of metal on metal and breaking glass.

It wasn't the biggest riot he'd ever seen, but in view of the total lawlessness of the region, it was right up there with the most frightening.

Not for the first time, he cursed his job.

"We move." Derek's companion said with urgency and Derek could see the panic in the guy's face.

"Two minutes!" Derek insisted. "I just need this shot framed."

"Now!" His companion urged. "These men. They bad. They no like foreigners. They really no like click-click."

Derek frowned in confusion. The Arab man made a gesture like a camera click and then Derek understood what he meant. Photographers. They don't like photographers.

Derek sighed in irritation and reached across to his right arm and ripped the "Press" armband from his sleeve then he did likewise with the sign across his heart. He curved an emotionless smile at A'waan.

"Now I'm not photographer, just a man with a camera." He said confidently, hoping his confidence would rub off on the man beside him. A'waan was his lifeline. Without him, Derek was up the proverbial creek without a flat wooden thing. He needed to do this and he needed to do it soon.

He lifted his camera to his eye-line and cued up the shot. People think that behaviour in a riot is unpredictable but they are wrong – and Derek had been around enough riots over the years to know that they follow a pattern. People are people after all. He knew the shot that he wanted, and experience taught him that at some point it would happen.

It was sad, but he knew enough of this sort of mob behaviour to recognise the signs that it wouldn't be too long before it occurred.

In front of Derek, within his eye-line, he saw a young man raise his hand to throw something. It looked innocuous, a glass bottle of some description, but Derek knew that the contents within would bring agony and torture to every living thing in its path. The guy looked very young and Derek saw the burn of an ideal in the man's eyes, though Derek knew this fight had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with opportunity. Religion got the worst of the blame, but at the seat of it all was poverty, boredom and someone somewhere making a fast buck.

The young guy threw his bottle and it hit a by-stander. The attacker grinned and his comrades slapped him on the back.

And in the midst of it all, Derek clicked the shutter.

He'd got the money shot.

Relieved, Derek looked up. "Right. Let's go!" he said turning to A'waan.

Who was nowhere to be seen.

The streets ahead were getting frantic. Derek didn't stop to count but a quick estimate put the participants at more than three hundred men. Derek knew there were fewer men in the tiny village, meaning someone had brought in extras. He knew enough about the political situation in the region to guess who.

A'waan's disappearance was…inconvenient.

Derek cursed loudly, although it was a whisper against the noise on the streets. He gathered his belongings, which consisted of a camera bag containing his lens and then he scrambled for the rendezvous point where A'waan had left their jeep.

Behind him, he could hear the crowd every bit as loud as they had been in his previous position – and he knew that they were moving his way. Their numbers were growing.

Derek turned down an alleyway between two stone buildings. He'd remembered this bit of a route because of a small girl who he had spotted when they came through in daylight. She was young enough not to wear the traditional dress of the older females so he could see her face. It reminded him of Marti and the scene was set in his mind. He knew that he would see her in his dreams for the rest of his life; assuming he lived that long.

He crossed a small junction and headed for the patch of waste-ground where his escape lay in the form of A'waan's vehicle. The noise followed him as if he was a magnet and it took every bit of the strength his hockey hobby brought with it to last the distance.

But when he finally reached the clearing, there was nothing. No A'waan, no jeep and no escape.

A'waan hadn't waited. The princely sum of fifty American dollars had been enough to persuade him to take the mad American into the village, and if Derek had left when A'waan told him to, he would have helped him leave. But A'waan wasn't stupid and he wasn't hanging around to lose his life the way the American was.

Derek had never got around to explaining the difference between American and Canadian to his interpreter.

A'waan had leapt into the ancient jeep, fought to fire the engine and then coughed his way out of the village; the air full of gas fumes and churned up desert sand. As he swung noisily onto the main "highway", he didn't look back. He had fifty greenbacks in his pocket and he still owned his life.

The journey along the road was quiet, uneventful. The people who had joined the trouble in the village had arrived in a large group: there was no trickle of reinforcements. Likewise, no one else would voluntarily approach the village, lit up as it was with its fiery glow.

There was no one and nothing - except the chug-chug of a solitary rundown truck which made him pulled over to one side as he passed. A'waan avoided looking into the cab as it passed on its way into the village. You didn't look too closely in this region. Everyone was too scared about seeing something they shouldn't – and paying the consequences.

He needn't have worried. Outside of the village the darkness once again lowered to the ground, and the person inside the truck was hidden from view.

Derek looked around frantically. The longer he stood there, watching the approaching mob, the more he realised that they were searching for something.

Or rather searching for someone.

As he sprinted for an abandoned shell of a house and made his way up the external stairs he began to realise with horror what that thing was. They were searching for him. Someone must have spotted him taking the picture.

The flat roof gave him a vantage point, but it also left him exposed. They could see where he was now and were beginning to encircle the building. Derek understood why they were chasing him. He was a trophy of the kind that got stuck to the front of a truck and driven through hundreds of miles of crap. They would capture him and then parade him, first in the neighbouring village, then the larger towns and finally when they reached somewhere with a satellite network they would show his face on a station like Al-Jazeera: Derek Venturi infidel reporter - the face of the West. He frowned with concentration trying to work out how he was going to get out of this – or maybe if was a better way of putting it. Not for the first time today, his thoughts turned to his partner's face, except now it was to wonder if he would ever see her again.

He regretted how they had left things, but part of him was also relieved. Because their arguments meant she wasn't here beside him where she normally would be. She at least was safe, but he wondered if he would ever speak to her again. If he would ever tell her…

Derek looked across the village. The waste-ground was full now: full of more than a hundred faces consumed by anger. Whoever was orchestrating this had clearly done a good job of psyching up the crowd. If he showed his face right now, Derek knew he wouldn't last more than a few minutes. He slipped down below the edge of the building and waited for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, heralding the approaching mob.

They never came.

Before the advance party could begin their ascent, there was a roar of an aged engine and a cloud of black smoke billowed up into the air. Derek screwed up his brow and peeked over the plastered edge of the building. He wondered if a leader had arrived to oversee his execution: a tribal chief or warlord. Or maybe just the local "wide" boy.

He snorted at the truck. It looked old and decrepit – and he wondered how the guy within it could hold his head up in pride. Even by local standards, this was hardly a luxury car. Derek doubted that it could last long in the desert.

Then something strange happened. The window in the driver's door opened and a hand emerged from within. It was pale– almost white – and in an area populated by mostly men, it looked surprising feminine.

Then he noticed something else: it was waving a white and red scrap of fabric.

And Derek was fairly sure he could spot the pointed edges of a red maple leaf.

He thought quickly. It could be a trap, but he was trapped up here come what may. If the truck was a trap at least it might have more in the way of an escape route than this prize perch.

Derek didn't even wait to finish his thought process. Grabbing his camera bag, he launched himself from the roof onto the flat bed of the truck below with a loud crash, and rolled onto his side.

Almost immediately, the driver gunned the truck and it kicked up a large cloud of dust and sand as it left the crowd behind.

Derek waited for a couple of miles: until the village was far behind, the hardy souls who had been following him gave up and the darkness was starting to cloak him. Then he scrambled across the truck bed, grasped the rim around the top of the cab and opened its door.

The driver swerved in surprise but recovered quickly. Derek swung himself inside.

He glanced across at the driver, unsure what he would do if the guy turned out to be hostile – kidnapping Derek for their own purpose. And then his eyes widened as he saw the formless shape in black.

His rescuer was a woman.

"Shukran, Habib!" He shouted over the noise of the struggling engine. Thank you, friend.

"Your Arabic stinks. And so do you." A familiar voice said, and the driver turned towards him again, this time a flash of moonlight caught her eyes and confirmed Derek's fears. He took a deep breath trying to ignore the flip of his heart.

"You're supposed to be in Canada." He said turning to look at the scenery that wasn't flashing past as quickly as he'd like, now that he knew his driver's identity.

"So are you." She pointed out. "You gave me a heart attack when I realised where you were. You're a moron, Derek! How could you put yourself at risk like this?"

Derek shrugged. "A reporter follows the story." He said glibly.

"So what would I have told Marti when you didn't make it home?"
Derek said nothing.

"You don't have an answer for that, do you?" She pointed out. "You were so busy getting pissed at me that…"
"It had nothing to do with you."

His companion snorted. "Yeah. Right. You're seriously telling me that you didn't think about me when you made the decision to go back in there."
"McDonald. Not everything thing in this world revolves around you."

"Hey, I'm not the one with the ego. That's you buster! Mr "Superman who throws himself into dangerous situations for the sake of a stupid fucking picture"."

Derek narrowed his eyes at her. "Not so long ago, that was you too. Back when you were a true journalist."

"I'M A JOURNALIST NOW!" She screeched at him. "And I'd rather concentrate on the story rather than my need to go into a hot situation just to pull my dumm-ass partner out of trouble."
"Ex-partner!" Derek shot back.

Casey was quiet as the word hit her, hard.