Fic: 5 Times Gene Wondered What They Were Really Up To in Hyde, green cortina, dakfinv
Title: Five Times Gene Wondered What They Were Really Up To in Hyde
Author: dak
Word Count: 803 words
Rating: green cortina
Pairing: Sam/Gene
A/N: This is the last of my Five Things requests. (I haven't forgotten about your's,
mistress_pol, but I'll have to get to it after the Ficathon.) Thanks to everyone who made a request! I really enjoyed writing these. This is for
karaokegal.
1.
Government experiments.
That had to be it.
They were performing secret government experiments on willing, or maybe unwilling, test subjects and Tyler’s had gone horribly wrong. Why else would Sam scream at the television (when he weren’t watching the sport), or answer phones that weren’t ringing, or cry in the bogs when he thought no one was there? They had done some test on him in Hyde that had mucked up his brain, then shipped him out of the town so as to forget their mistakes.
That had to be it. Which is why Gene felt it was his duty to take Sam out for a stiff drink and a good game of cards on his worst days. It wasn’t the lad’s fault, after all. It was something they had done to him. Besides, the rest of the country couldn’t give a threepenny bit about Manchester. The orphans take whoever they can get to look after them, and Sam was one of those men.
2.
Cookery classes.
That had to be it.
Hyde didn’t actually have a police station. It had a cooking school. All the “officers” were really student chefs. The DCI was Graham Kerr and the Superintendent none other than Fanny Craddock herself. Instead of nabbing the worst blaggards, they learned about the best butters. Interrogations were actually tests on recipe memorization. Instead of new methods of policing, they learned new methods of potato chopping. Instead of weapons training, they had whisk training.
That had to be it. How else could someone other than a woman cook up a three-course meal as delicious as the one Sam had just plopped on the table, while still working full-shifts at the station? It was nigh on impossible. As Gene tucked into his first non-fried meal in days, he was grateful to Hyde for training the lad up so well.
3.
New inventions testing.
That had to be it.
There must have been loads of scientists in Hyde - engineers, physicists, etc. - that tested out all their new inventions there. Maybe there was some college or university in Hyde that Gene had never heard of that specialized in science or something. They probably invented all sorts of contraptions there that maybe the locals could test out or read about in the papers.
That had to be it. That had to be why Tyler mentioned all sorts of junk Gene had never heard of - databases, iPods, mobile phones, DVD, VHS, CD, standard operating systems. Sam must have tried them all back in Hyde and was impatiently waiting for them to be manufactured and mass marketed. In the meantime, Gene would have to roll his eyes, change the subject, and ignore the most obvious cause for Sam’s ramblings. Yes, they had loads of inventors in Hyde. No, Gene Hunt did not have a nutter on his team.
4.
Professional spies.
That had to be it.
Hyde was filled with British spies (and maybe Commie ones, too), that were fighting a covert battle to bring down Soviet Union. Tyler hadn’t been one of the spies in the field. He’d been subjected to desk duty, only knowing what he was allowed to know. He was probably the head desk jockey - in charge of keeping everyone’s files up to date and keeping track of all the paperwork that went into the spy business. He probably had one of them little stampers that said “This Document Does Not Exist,” and all. Then, Sam had stumbled across something he wasn’t meant to see. They’d chucked him out of their secret spy network and forced him to become something as mundane as a copper.
That had to be it. Paperwork probably had to be kept quite meticulously in the spy business - a whole country could fall if it wasn’t - and Sam just wasn’t able to break that habit once he was back to being a regular bloke. That was why he was such a tight-arsed little nancy boy over CID’s filing and form-filling habits.
5.
Gay clubs.
That had to be it.
Hyde must have been littered with gay clubs. It was Northern England’s secret center of poof culture. Uphill gardening was probably such a prominent pastime, blokes could walk hand-in-hand down the street with nary a quip, shout, or punch from a passerby. The coppers all probably condoned it as well. In fact, they probably arrested anyone who wasn’t a queer.
That had to be it. Because where else would Sam have learned to do that and why did he always yell at Gene that there was more between them than just shagging? Why else would Sam be so willing to admit he cared about Gene? Men loving men? That certainly wasn’t Manchester. That certainly wasn’t Gene, as much as he wished it could be.