Fic: Nature Boy (Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes)
As promised...
Title: Nature Boy, Part I
Category: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes crossover. Gen with a fair bit of UST all around.
Rating: PG-13 for now
Word Count: ~7,500 this part
Spoilers: Takes place after A2A 1.08, so everything
Summary: Alex receives some unexpected visitors, or: Save the copper, save the world?
A/N: I desperately want the two shows to coalesce and make sense both emotionally and in my head; hence, I appear to be writing epic-length fic for a fandom in which I’m a total newbie. Oh dear. Many thanks to wychwood and siriaeve for Brit-picking; any remaining mistakes are of course my own.
Nature Boy, Part I
Alex Drake knew about the Kübler-Ross model, of course; she was all-too-familiar with the stages of grief, as she lived in daily fear of reaching number five. To accept her situation would mean she had stopped fighting, and to cease to fight meant death. So she kept herself safe by bouncing around the first four stages like a supercharged pinball, waiting and waiting for her world to tilt itself back into its proper alignment.
Right now she was comfortably ensconced in reliable old No. 2, shouting after DCI Hunt as he walked away from the crime scene, his black coat seemingly deflecting sound as ably as it absorbed light. “I don’t know why I even bother trying to get through to you!” she said, dodging Chris and trying to walk briskly to catch up without looking like she was exerting herself for him. “I might as well be talking to my-”
Gene stopped short, and Alex barely avoided bashing her nose against his shoulder. “Of course, I essentially am talking to myself,” she continued, taking a slight detour to visit Step No. 1, “so the question becomes why I won’t bloody listen-”
“Shut it,” Gene snapped. He half-turned, stepping around her like he was avoiding an inanimate object, a cement piling that had sprung up in the middle of the lane. His face displayed a tumult of emotions, flickering by too quickly for Alex to separate them out and analyze them. “Or at least talk some bleeding sense! Tell me, DC Skelton, what is it about me that attracts the Bethlem Royal’s prematurely released? Why am I always surrounded by nutters?”
Chris glanced down toward his notebook like it might hold the answer. “Don’t know, guv.”
“I believe the question was rhetorical, Chris,” said Alex, expression somewhat tight.
“I’ll show you rhetorical.” Gene stomped off, giving a nasty kick to a dustbin that made the mistake of getting in his way.
Alex’s eyebrow rose. “Not an entirely inaccurate definition,” she mused aloud.
She glanced at Chris, who nodded. “If you say so, ma’am.”
She gifted him with a small smile, then turned on her heel again and walked the few feet back to where Gene had been standing, to where he had stopped dead in his tracks.
It hadn’t been her taunting that had made him halt; never one to shy from confrontation, he would have reeled on her right away if that had been the case. No, he had seen something. It had been on his face when he’d turned: a slight paleness, his features tight and drawn. He’d looked like he had seen a ghost.
He’d looked like Alex knew she must, when she saw…the things she sometimes saw. When one hallucination stopped being enough; oh no, there had to be delusions within the delusion, head trips tripping all over each other in an effort to get out…
Alex shivered, rubbing her hands up and down the sleeves of her white jacket. Feels like real, genuine leather! she thought, and bit her lip to keep the hysterical laughter at bay.
She looked back over her shoulder. Chris and Ray had things under control. It was time to call it a day.
A knock on her door startled Alex awake. She sat up, nearly sliding off the sofa. The TV was still on, grey static casting a hazy light on the bare red wall, on the tangled crumple of paper shoved into the bin in the corner that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away.
Alex ran a hand through her hair, her fingers catching on the curls. I’ll go back to my usual style tomorrow, she told herself for the thousandth time. The knock sounded again, more urgently. She sighed. “I’m coming.” It was probably Gene, she thought, tugging her clothes into a more respectable pattern. She did her best to ignore the little surge of anticipation that rushed through her at the thought.
She had her hand on the knob and the door half-open before she realized that it couldn’t be Gene-Gene would never have let a shout of “I’m coming!” slide by without a smart remark.
Indeed, there were two people standing at her doorstep, and neither of them was Gene. A slim man who was glancing back over his shoulder, down the stairs, and a short, voluptuous woman, who offered Alex a friendly smile that stank ever-so-slightly of professional courtesy. “Alex Drake?”
“I’m not interested,” Alex said hastily. The woman’s smile didn’t falter. Alex’s vague sense of unease grew more tangible. She narrowed her eyes, bracing herself on the doorframe. “Just what are you doing going door to door at this time of night? It’s half one; I should have you-”
The words froze in her throat, the chill spreading out across her entire body. The doorway was suddenly the only thing holding her up.
“You’re dead,” she breathed. “I mean, really dead. In reality. And, and-”
“In 1981?” said Sam Tyler.
He had turned around, was fully facing her now. He looked just as she remembered him, but-but older somehow. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, in 2007, in the real world-
Pull yourself together, Alex thought, which in this place tended to mean, go back to the beginning, go back to Step No. 1.
“You know, I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to make a cameo, Sam Tyler. Sam-do you mind if I call you Sam? Welcome to my hallucination!” she said, ushering them into her flat. “Make yourself at home! After all, it was your hallucination first!”
She practically spat the words, pushing the door closed as she did so. When she turned, she was unsurprised to see the woman nakedly studying her; Tyler, however, seemed much more interested in perusing her sitting room’s contents and décor. “You got a much nicer flat,” he noted, with a hint of a pout.
“Not fair, is it?” agreed his companion.
She was older: late 40s, a hint of grey appearing at her temples. “And just who are you supposed to be?” Alex asked, gesturing broadly. “Cleopatra? Joan of Arc?”
“Angie Jones,” said the woman, holding out a hand. “Formerly Angela Hunt.”
Alex stopped just short of completing the handshake that instinct had moved her into. Like someone who’d narrowly avoided setting their fingers down in a pile of excrement, she withdrew her hand.
“Is this some sort of joke?”
Tyler shook his head. “No joke.”
Her brain frantically tried to process this new abundance of information/insanity. “So I’m hallucinating that...DI Tyler came back from the dead and ran off with DCI Hunt’s wife?”
Tyler and the former Mrs. Hunt (whose physical appearance Alex was in no way weighing up against her own) exchanged a look. “Not quite.”
Alex groped for the sofa and sat heavily. “This can’t be happening.”
“That’s what we said.” There was an undercurrent of amusement to Tyler’s expression, though his eyes just looked tired.
Gene’s bloody ex-wife moved around the coffee table and sat down on the sofa next to Alex. “We want to help you,” she said kindly. “That’s why we’re here.”
If Alex had learned one thing about this place, it was not to trust people who showed up in the middle of the night, claiming to want to help. She still saw that bright red grin every time she closed her eyes-
“Wait,” she said, suddenly opening them wide. “You said we.”
“Yes,” said the ex-Mrs. Hunt. “We both want to help you, Sam and I. And we’re hoping you-”
“No,” Alex interrupted, “I said, ‘This can’t be happening,’ and you said,” she indicated Tyler, “‘That’s what we said.’” She folded her arms across her chest in triumph. “Why would Madam Homewrecker here say that?”
They exchanged another look: a nod, then a shrug. “Because,” said Angie Jones, the aura of falsity finally clearing from her face, “when you die in 2004 only to wake up in a rubbish pile in 1965, it’s somewhat disconcerting, don’t you think?”
Alex opened her mouth, but found she’d been rendered momentarily speechless.
“I think you’d better begin at the beginning,” Sam said into the silence. He helped himself to a perch on edge of the coffee table.
“Yes, I hear it’s a very good place to start,” said Alex, recovering somewhat.
Angie nodded. She licked her lips, and began.
“In January 2004, I was an attending physician at Manchester Royal’s Emergency Department. I’d been a doctor there for just under a year, but I was beginning to find my feet. We received word that there’d been some sort of big dust-up with the police: multiple casualties, both criminals and coppers. When they began wheeling them in, I was directed to work on one of the crims. They always gave the more experienced personnel over to the police.”
As she spoke, she sat with her hands laid out flat on her knees. Her gaze was straightforward, steady. Only Alex’s long experience with interrogating suspects let her see the effort the other woman was putting into holding it together.
“At the time, it was all over too fast for me to understand what had happened. It just felt like I leaned over to work on the patient, and then I was on the floor, in pain, unable to breathe… Later-I used to get flashes, in 1965. My co-workers trying to save me. My parents being informed. My, uh. The autopsy. My funeral.”
She swallowed, her hand lifting, then hovering around her clavicle, then returning firmly to her knee. “One of the men they’d brought in, the one I was directed to work on-he had a knife on him. They’d missed it somehow. He was in pain,” she said, like she was rationalizing it, like that would make it better, “he must have been half-mad with it. When I came over, he must have thought I was trying to attack him. He lashed out, slit my throat.”
Now Alex’s hand did rise to her own neck. She looked from Angie, who continued to sit, impassive, not meeting her gaze, to Sam, who met it head on. “I was on the team that later investigated the incident,” he said.
Just like Alex had been on the team that investigated the giant, snowballing incident that was Sam. She shivered.
“I think we could do with a drink,” she said.
She came back with a bottle of Luigi’s house red and three glasses. “No scotch?” said Sam.
Alex paused, mid-pour. “You spent too much time with him.”
Sam sipped at his wine and made a face, and did not disagree.
Angie swallowed her first mouthful of wine in a gulp, then held out her glass for more. “So one minute I’m dying on the casualty floor,” she said, as the wine ran red against the glass, “and the next I’m opening my eyes to find myself lying in a pile of rubbish in an alleyway. And I’m wearing a skirt.”
Alex empathized. “At least you didn’t wake up wearing a skirt,” she told Sam.
“You only say that because you haven’t seen my legs.”
His smile was placid, countered by a hint of good-natured mischief in his eyes. And perhaps this was what was unnerving Alex the most: that he seemed sane, seemed normal. So unlike the emotionally and physically drained man who’d come out of the coma, who’d spun his long, ridiculous story and seemed unable to convince himself that it hadn’t all been real, real.
Maybe she’d lost the ability to tell sanity from insanity. Even just accepting his presence here, as someone whose glass she could fill, who she could talk and joke with…did that mean she had sunk too far to ever get out again? Was she so far gone that Molly was forever, finally out of reach?
The moment of levity past, Angie took another deep sip and continued. “I got up and stumbled out onto the main road. It took me a while to realize where I was: I was behind the hospital, where the modern-day emergency ward was. Will be.” They shared an eyeroll of collective tense-confusion. “The extension wasn’t-won’t be-added until 1996.
“So I go in through the main doorway, which is full of people and noise and all the familiar chaos, but all wrong somehow, and almost immediately a man in a lab coat is shouting, ‘Nurse Jones! Nurse Jones!’ and gesturing me over. And I tell him ‘Doctor,’ but he obviously thinks I’m just answering him, because of course I’m not a doctor, I’m even wearing my little nurse’s uniform, only slightly removed of its starch now that it’s been for a roll in the rubbish out back. So he inclines his head toward a man lying on a cot, practically in front of the doorway, and he says, ‘That one just needs a bandage. I think you should be able to handle it.’ Utterly condescending, of course, and I want to tell him to shove it, but then I notice that there’s something very wrong with the man on the cot, something that a bandage is certainly not going to fix. Skin cool and moist, abdomen bruised and swollen… ”
She looked up, as if she’d suddenly remembered her audience. “Basically, he was going into hypovolemic shock because he was bleeding internally. Besides the shallow stab wound, which was really barely more than a scrape, a punch or a kick or even the hilt of the knife had fractured a rib, which had punctured something-the hospital was clearly understaffed, and he’d only been given a cursory check. I rolled him over onto his side and started loosening and pulling off as much as I could of his clothing. I think it was the buttons flying everywhere that finally made the doctor notice what was going on, what I was doing… What followed were about ten of the most nerve-wracking minutes of my life as I tried to convince my new superiors that my diagnosis-the diagnosis of a newly-transferred nurse-was correct, and that the patient badly needed surgery, needed plasma… It was more than just instinct, more than just my oath that made me so desperate to save him. I think I thought, at least on a subconscious level, that if I saved him, I could save myself.”
She set the wine glass down on the table by Sam’s leg. “I had the first of the flashes then, of them trying to revive me. And failing.”
She straightened up then, her jaw set like steel. “But Gene lived.”
“Wait…Gene?”
Sam smiled the smile of someone who’d heard this story before, who knew how it ended. But he just nodded to Angie, let her continue.
“DI Hunt,” she said with an answering nod. “He was injured off-duty, breaking up a pub brawl. No special treatment from the hospital-they just assumed he was one of the brawlers.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was.
“I went and visited him in recovery. I’d spent the last several days wandering around as if I was in a dream. I thought I was going mad. One of the other girls at the hospital tried to take me under her wing: showed me around the place, took me to the boarding house where I apparently lived-at least you had a flat,” she said to Sam. “All my freedom was suddenly gone, along with my family, my friends, the position I had worked so hard for. People’s respect… Anyway.” Just a slight motion as she shook herself. “Going to visit him…that was the only part of my day that seemed to make sense. And of course he flirted shamelessly.” She couldn’t hide her smile. “Called me his guardian angel. I don’t think he could believe that someone like me-a woman-had saved his life, but at the same time the idea amused him. And he was oddly gentle with me. He was like that more, in those days. Not quite so hard. At least not on the surface.”
Alex felt like she had lost the story somewhat-she couldn’t quite picture Gene being anything other than what he was now, or existing in any other time but this fantastical, fantasy version of the present. Even Sam’s 1973 seemed foreign and far away.
“I think I married him,” Angie Jones said, “because I wanted to escape what my life had become. Because he made 1965 seem real. Made me feel real, and not…not six feet under, with the dirt heaped on top of me. I used to wake him up sometimes, screaming, because I was dreaming I was in my coffin… I’m not sure if he ever really knew what to make of me.” Her mouth twisted down. “I’m not really sure why he married me.”
“He loved you,” Sam said into the silence, voice soft, surprising Alex, surprising them both. “He told me. More than once.”
Angie rubbed at the side of her neck. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Even when things were good…our whole marriage was based on a lie.”
Alex had questions. Lots and lots of questions. But there was one she kept coming back to: “So you lit off with Tyler?” It infuriated her, somehow: the idea of Gene as a cuckold.
“It’s really not like that,” Sam said solemnly.
“Then what is it like?” Alex demanded. “I still don’t understand why you’re here, let alone why you’re telling me this. If it’s supposed to make me feel less alone-my head could fill itself with enough constructs to pack Wembley Stadium and it still wouldn’t be enough to build me a way home…”
“Constructs?” said Angie.
“I suppose I deserve that.” Sam’s expression was quietly pensive; Alex found it deeply frustrating. “I said the same thing, essentially.”
“I never did.” Angie shrugged. “I just accepted things. Gave up.” There was a worrying dullness to her tone-worrying, and Alex didn’t even know her, or particularly want to. “Bad habit.”
“Are you here to tell me how to get home?” Alex pressed, instead of delving into the little black hole of despair Angie suddenly seemed to represent. The wall stretched crimson and blank in front of her. “What am I supposed to be doing?”
Sam and Angie exchanged another look, which Alex was beginning to find very annoying. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Sam said.
“How I can get home?” Her chest felt tight from such hard-held breath.
“No,” said Sam, “I already know how you could do that.”
She stared at him.
“You have to betray him.” There was a darkness in Sam’s eyes, she now saw, darker and deeper than anything she had sensed in Angie. “Not just defy him-that I’d recommend on a daily basis. But betray him-kiss his cheek and leave him kneeling on the ground. I’m sure you’d find yourself back in the 21st Century in no time.” He didn’t blink. “I did.”
Alex’s mouth felt dry, but she left her wine on the table. “Then you threw yourself off a building.”
Sam nodded. “I was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Got a second chance, didn’t I?”
Alex hugged herself: anything to stop the shivering. “I have a daughter,” she said. “I have a daughter.”
Angie was silent beside her. Sam rubbed at his forehead, his chin.
Alex forced herself to stand; she couldn’t take this sitting down. “All right. Tell me this grand theory of yours. You obviously have one. I’m not necessarily accepting anything you have to say-or even your being here-but. Tell me.”
“We don’t know much,” Angie said, after another shared look. Her hands were back on her knees. “I didn’t even know that Sam was…like me for,” she paused, “five years? I only found out by accident, and then I couldn’t believe it.”
“And then you didn’t bother saying anything to me about it for another two years,” Sam said with some annoyance.
Angie started to mumble some sort of embarrassed explanation, but Alex rode over her. “Wait a minute. How do you know about me?”
“You rant about everything being imaginary in the middle of the street,” Sam pointed out.
“We know the signs pretty well by now,” Angie said. “And we’ve been watching.”
“That was you!” Alex said suddenly, feeling that wonderful click in her mind. “Earlier today-at the murder scene. Gene saw you.”
Angie turned to Sam. “Oh, did he?”
“That’s impossible,” Sam started, “I took every precaution…”
“And you surveil people professionally, too!” Any genuine disappointment or anger she might have been feeling was apparently being throttled by pure, malicious glee. Alex got the feeling that the two of them had been forced to spend rather too much time together lately.
“Well, he couldn’t have seen me for very long, or even have been certain that he’d seen me, or else he would have come found me and punched me in the stomach.”
“He kicked a bin,” Alex recalled. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, she thought, remembering his face again. The horrible look on his face.
She turned to Sam, looked at him hard. “Why fake your own death? I’m assuming you must have done-I should have copped to it the moment Ray said they never found a body. But why-” Why do that to him? The question hung in the air, unspoken. Why do that to all of them, but especially-
Sam hesitated. “I couldn’t-” He stopped, rubbed the back of his neck, started again. “I couldn’t investigate Gene while he was still my DCI. And I couldn’t just quit. And there were-there were other-”
He let out a little snort of annoyance. “Look, I still don’t fully believe this myself. Sometimes I still think this all makes more sense if I’m mad, or dead. Because at my core I’m a copper, and I was trained to believe in fact, in what’s rational. And this isn’t. This isn’t rational, or scientific, or anything natural that can be labeled and quantified, or broken down and analyzed like I want it to be…”
“But do break it down,” interrupted Angie. “Examine the symptoms of our shared condition. What’s the common factor?”
What is it about me, Gene asked Chris. Why am I always surrounded…?
Alex lowered herself carefully back down to the sofa, her hand pressed to her lips. “I asked him the same question, my first day here…but then my parents, my mother…”
Sam nodded. “I made the same mistake. Thought it was all about my dad, all about me-”
“It was never about us,” said Angie.
“Another boost to his ego.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Just what we need.”
“I don’t understand this,” Alex said. “What exactly are we concluding? It’s Gene Hunt’s world, we just hallucinate it? What are we doing here? If this is a puzzle, then it has to have a solution! I can’t believe that time travel exists to-well, to start with I can’t believe time travel exists, full stop, but I especially can’t believe that it exists purely so that Gene bloody Hunt can have someone who’ll get all fluttery at the sight of his big guns and flash car and cowboy boots!” She let out a stuttery laugh. “The universe does not revolve around one person! It just doesn’t!”
“Do you want to know what I’ve been doing since I’ve been dead?” Sam asked, fixing her with a steady gaze. “I-”
“We,” said Angie.
“We,” Sam acknowledged, “have been finding out everything there is to know about Gene Hunt. Did you know that he had a primary school teacher who went mad and had to be sectioned? Kept raving that she was from the future. Scared the kiddies.”
Alex realized she was shaking her head in disbelief and made herself stop.
“One of his friends growing up,” Sam continued, “maybe his best friend-an orphan. Found crying in the middle of Princess Street in 1936. Four years old.”
Alex didn’t want to, but her mind filled itself with thoughts of Molly, of Molls at four; and then she imagined her just vanished-
“And the real kicker,” Sam said, “the one that I really want to believe is just a crazy coincidence-” He licked his lips. “Do you remember-did I talk to you at all about Harry Woolf?”
Her instinct was to say, “I’ll have to check my notes,” but while that was of course an impossibility, she was surprised to find it didn’t matter. She did remember him mentioning Harry Woolf, even if it had been just that, the slightest mention: Surely you can see that that’s the name of a villainous “character” you’ve constructed, she thought she must have told him. Gene Hunt’s traitorous mentor, the Big Bad Woolf…
She nodded, then shook her head. “He couldn’t have been. From what you told me-”
“He transferred to Manchester CID in 1957. From Hyde.” Sam’s lips formed a thin, flat line. “And before that, his history is…fuzzy.”
She was doing it again, back and forth, back and forth. “No, no, this doesn’t make sense. All these pieces…what do they add up to? To Gene- Is Gene…” She felt her stomach drop. Your presence is required here a little bit longer…by me. “You think he’s…doing this somehow?”
Sam started to shake his head, but Angie interrupted. “He’s doing something.”
Sam rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to make a protest Angie had clearly heard before. “I don’t think intentionally, but Sam, I told you-”
“What,” asked Alex, “what did you tell him?”
Angie scratched a nail along her thigh. “It seems silly.”
“Angie, the topic at hand is time travel.” There was an edge of superiority creeping into Sam’s tone. “We’re all discussing the various ways a man who calls himself the Gene Genie may be our ‘density.’ I don’t think you have to worry about being the one to push this over the edge into silliness.”
“You weren’t there, Sam,” Angie replied. Her voice had an edge of its own. “You had him when he was on the job, and you know that on the job he would have done anything to keep himself from looking vulnerable-”
“You think I never saw him vulnerable?” Sam was leaning forward now, and there was a disturbing hint of menace in his skinny frame. Like a coiled snake. “You think I never saw him stripped down and bare and-”
“Whoa!” interrupted Alex. “Let’s not…even my depraved brain has limits.” She looked back and forth between them, raising an eyebrow. “Calm down, girls, you’re both pretty. And I’m sure he’d be tickled pink to know you were fighting over him.”
Angie laughed, unpleasantly. “I think you may be the coal scuttle calling the pot and kettle black.”
Alex’s hand rose to her chest to better display her offense. “Excuse me?”
“You know what I-”
“Okay, all right,” Sam said, “this isn’t helping. Angie, tell Alex what happened. See if she can make any sodding sense of what it might mean.”
“How ’bout some more wine?” Angie suggested, holding out her glass.
Alex fetched another bottle. “He’ll make alcoholics of us all,” she said.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, will?”
Angie seemed to be trying to inhale her glass, and not like someone who wanted to comment on the vintage’s nose, either. “It was a couple years after we were married. ’67 or ’68, not long after he made DCI.” She swallowed. “He came home late. It was because of a case, and he’d called to tell me, so I wasn’t waiting up. But I’ve always been a light sleeper, so I heard him when he came in the door, felt it when he crawled into bed with me.
“He was shaking. Making the springs creak. I reached out for him and when I touched his shoulder I realized that he was still wearing his coat. Shoes, too. He’d climbed into bed fully dressed.
“I moved to turn on the lamp, but he saw me and said, ‘No,’ very rough and low. He said, ‘Ange, there’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong. It’s not right.’ So quiet I could barely make it out. And I took his hands-they were shaking worst of all, and I took them and it was as if he was on fire. As if something inside was trying to burn through his skin. I thought: he’s feverish, he needs to go to hospital. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept clutching at me, shaking his head when I tried to shift him, or get up to fetch some water or a cold compress. And then after a while he rolled me over onto my back, started kissing my neck. Even his mouth felt like a furnace.”
Angie looked like she could feel some of that heat now; she was blushing like a girl thirty years younger. Sam, too, had a faint scarlet hue detectable around his throat and ears. Alex kept her breathing level and shallow.
“I was scared for him, but I gave him what he needed. Even though I-because I couldn’t understand it. He kept saying, ‘What am I, Ange?’ And I didn’t know- Eventually I said, ‘You’re my husband. You’re my man.’ And he seemed to like that.
“Afterward I felt-” And even though Alex was leaning eagerly forward, even though she was finally entirely interested in what Angie was saying, in what afterward, she felt, Angie chose this moment to cut herself off and stop talking.
“And now Sam will say, ‘He was bent, Angie, he told me about it, how it ate him up inside, being on the take. Like an animal, he told me, and it just happened to bite a little deeper that night.’”
“That is pretty much what I said, yeah,” Sam admitted.
“But it happened other times,” Angie pressed. “After you transferred from Hyde. After he wasn’t bent anymore. Never again like that, but he would come home with a look in his eyes sometimes, and I knew.”
“Knew what?” Alex demanded. “Because as far as I can see, Gene Hunt isn’t doing anything besides his job, a lot of heavy drinking, and his best to drive me around the bend. I mean,” her lips smacked slightly as she finished off her wine, “I can see how some might consider him to be possessed of certain charms, but what makes him so bloody special?”
“If,” Sam said, “and believe me, I seriously question my already tenuous sanity every time I articulate this theory aloud, but if he’s drawing people to him through time like a magnet, then there has to be a reason for it. Something of this magnitude can’t be random.”
Angie nodded her agreement. Alex glanced back and forth between them, looking frankly flabbergasted. “Let me get this straight: you’ve been at this for a year, and all you have is that Gene Hunt may or may not be an occasionally overheating great big time-sucky magnet?” She threw up her arms in disgust. “Quick, call Doctor Who!”
Sam seemed to opt for mostly ignoring this outburst, calmly shaking his head. “No, that’s not all. Because there are other people-seemingly a whole group of other people. We’re not sure how or if they’re organized, because we haven’t been able to infiltrate their ranks. They know who we are,” he said, lifting a significant brow. “And they want him. For some reason, they want to get to him. They want to bring him down.”
Alex mentally flicked through everything Sam had told her-last year, decades in the future. “Frank Morgan,” she said.
Sam’s expression darkened. “Yes.”
Alex bit her lip. “Do you think-Arthur Layton?”
She could see Sam doing the same thing, running through notes in his head, sorting, organizing. “The man who murdered your parents?”
Yes, leave it at that. The man who had killed her parents, both of them. Sam had been watching, but he didn’t know; Evan and Gene had kept that secret well.
She nodded. Sam let out a breath. “I don’t know. It may all be connected. There’s something essential we’re missing, I know it. But that’s the thing-we’re too deep in it, we can’t get the right perspective. We need to see the forest, but we are the trees.”
The three wine glasses were all in a cluster on the table, empty. Alex reached out a finger to hers, ran it around the rim. The glass hummed slightly, clear as a bell.
“These people, these supposed conspirators. You know who some of them are? Where they are?”
Sam nodded. “There’s one we’ve been tracking, yeah. Surveiling professionally.” He shot a look at Angie, who rolled her eyes.
Alex nodded. She’d weighed everything in her mind and she’d come to a decision.
“Well,” she said, decisively slapping her knees. “As much as it pains me to say it, I think we have to ask ourselves...What would Gene Hunt do?”
“I’m not hitting a woman,” said Sam.
The sex of the…suspect was an unexpected twist. Though it shouldn’t have been, thought Alex, scolding herself for her societally-ingrained sexism.
“Well, then,” she stretched out her arms. “I’ll do it.” Part of her brain still could not believe that it mattered-this wasn’t real, so there weren’t any consequences. It was all a mad game, and something like, say, stealing a pink tank and running over an old friend’s car was a perfectly legitimate move. “With your logic, there’s nothing wrong with a woman beating up another woman, is there?”
“An elderly woman.”
“You didn’t say she was elderly!”
“Well, you hadn’t given me a chance yet, had you?”
Alex sighed. What kind of conversation was this to be having at four o’clock in the morning? It all felt like a mad dream.
“All right, we’ll bring her in, then.”
“In where? To CID?” Sam seemed to have an annoying tendency to press close when he argued, to get in her face; Alex wondered if he’d got it from Gene, or if Gene had got it from him. “Setting aside the little issue of Angie and me not being able to get anywhere near there, what’ll be your charge? Conspiracy to commit time fraud?”
“It’s your idiotic ‘theory,’” Alex said, waggling her fingers in his face.
“Which we need real evidence to support! Something to make it tangible, to make it real!”
“You know, I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’m beginning to see his point if you really are this much of a pain in the arse to-where are you going?”
Angie had got shakily to her feet and was heading toward the bedroom.
“Having a kip.” She gave them a wry look. “Not as young as I once was, am I?”
Alex realized belatedly that both she and Sam were rolling their eyes. “Well, we’ll try to keep it down, shall we?” Sam said, a hint of acid in his voice.
Angie shrugged them off. “You kids have fun.”
The door shut behind her with a click. Alex and Sam stood for a moment in silence; Alex reeled a little as she tried not to let the sudden wave of tiredness overtake her, too. She picked up the wine glasses and headed toward the kitchen. Sam followed behind her, carrying the empty bottles.
“Look,” he said, “we’re both live wires. This investigation is maddening-like shooting black cats in the dark, and yes you can thank Gene for that colorful analogy. But it’s been a year of one step forward, two strides back, with no one for us to trust, no one to confide in except each other. Which is tough,” he gave her a rueful look, “with neither of us, I’m sure you can tell, exactly being the other’s favorite person. And then you come along…”
“Oh yes, and then I come along.” The glasses clanged together as Alex set them in the sink. “And you think, ‘Hurrah! Another poor sod to join our batty little club?’ You must be so desperate-”
“We are desperate!” said Sam, and darn it, he did do earnest well. “Listen, this is building to something. For nearly seven years, they basically left us alone. Since I…came back, I mean, they mostly let us go about our business. There were a few incidents. I didn’t even really recognize them as such at the time, but one or twice, there were people who took a bit too much interest in things. Trying to make the guv look bad. Trying to sully him. Nothing I-nothing we couldn’t handle, though.
“Then a little over a year ago…” Sam leaned against the counter, looking across at her with those dark, earnest eyes. “They changed tacks. Started in on me. Angie, too, though more subtly, and I didn’t know it at the time. I think they were trying to do to us what they must have done with Woolf. Eat away at the guv’s support system, and then, with us gone-”
“What?” said Alex. “With you gone, they’d do what? I know he thinks he is, but is Gene Hunt really such a big fish that he’s worth all this effort to try to fry?” She blinked. “Oh, now I’m doing it.”
Sam smiled. He looked like an entirely different man when he smiled like that, open and honest. “Hazard of the job. And I don’t know, but this has been going on for years. It must be something-” He opened his arms. “Something enormous, Alex.”
Alex frowned. “Well, all right. Say it is something big. Say you’re right, and Gene Hunt is in some way essential to the future of humanity. We’re from ‘the future,’ DCI Tyler-don’t you think we’d have heard of it? Heard of him?”
“Not necess-”
“But we haven’t! He’s nothing, he’s no one, except possibly the mental manifestation of your issues with your father and your conflicted ideas about your own masculinity that you somehow infected me with!” She poked him soundly in the chest. “Have I had the chance to offer you my sincerest thanks, Sam Tyler?”
“Not necessarily,” Sam pressed on, ignoring her, “because for all we know, it could be something seemingly insignificant, too small to register. The littlest things can make a big difference, surely you’ve figured that out.”
She glared at him rather than acknowledge the point.
“Or maybe,” continued Sam. “Maybe we know nothing about it because we lost and they won. Because he never got-never will get-his chance. Because they stopped him.”
Her brain tried to order this neatly and failed. She rubbed at her skull. “This is all…horribly circular, you know that, right?”
Sam smirked. “Now you see why we’ve not got anywhere in nearly a year.”
“Well, that has to change. You might not have had a thing to go back to, but I have Molly, and don’t intend to miss one single more of her birthdays. Sorry,” she said, when she saw the shadow that had fallen back across his face. Though she wasn’t, really.
“None of us signed up for this,” Sam said firmly. “But seeing as it’s the situation in which we’ve all found ourselves, together, I think it’s our duty to see it through.”
She looked him over: clenched fists at the ends of skinny wrists. “And is that all this is to you? Duty?”
He had opened his mouth to respond, but whatever he might have said was drowned out by the sound of a pounding on the door. “Bolly! Open ’em up!”
Sam shot her a look that contained just a tad too much amused smugness, even as he muttered, “Shit.”
“Um,” said Alex, clearly thinking fast on her feet, “hide.”
“It’s like I’ve wandered into an episode of Man About the House,” said Sam, slinking toward the bedroom.
Alex waited until she saw the bedroom door shut, then took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and pulled the front door wide.
Gene was leaning against the doorframe, smelling of whisky and cigarette smoke. His clothing was rumpled and his hair disheveled-floating all about him like a blond halo, like someone had been rubbing it with a staticky balloon. “Drake, you tease,” he slurred. “Took you long enough.”
Alex looked at him, long and hard. Then, “They’re both mad,” she pronounced. “Or maybe I am.”
“Well, you’re right on one out of three, anyway.” Gene staggered/slouched his way into the flat without being asked. “Who’s they?”
“No one,” said Alex, a little too quickly. The rings of moisture on the coffee table from the trio of wine glasses suddenly seemed hugely apparent to her; thank god she’d disposed of the rest of the evidence.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning, Gene,” she said, deciding to put him on the defensive. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure?”
“Was visiting Shaz,” he said, somewhat tangentially, flopping down on the sofa in the spot his ex-wife had recently occupied. “Bloody girl won’t stop glowing at me. Can see my fingerprints all over her.”
Alex tried to process this and failed. “You’re pissed,” was the best conclusion she could offer.
The statement inspired a vigorous bout of nodding. Gene pulled one of his many flasks out of one of his many pockets and waved it at her proudly. “Nipped down to the Thames. Here, try some.” He uncapped it and shoved it, rather clumsily, at her nose. “Just like single malt, if I do say so myself.”
“No, thanks,” said Alex, wrinkling her nostrils. “Gene-”
“Suit yourself.” He took another swig.
“Gene.” She reached for his arm to stay it. Her fingers closed around his wrist and she gasped. “Jesus, you’re burning up!”
His eyes snapped to hers, deep and blue. “Been told I have a-a tendency-to-to that.”
She was almost grateful when his eyes fluttered closed and he slumped back against the seat. “What kind of world is this, DI Drake?”
“No doubt one that feels like it’s spinning,” Alex said, eyeing with distaste the flask he’d let fall against his thigh.
One eye flicked open, bright as a searchlight. “It is, though. Can feel it moving. And the waves rolling and the grass growing and the-” He burped. “-The ruddy little birds in their ruddy little eggs, hatching.”
Alex realized she was staring at him as if hypnotized and hastily looked away. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this particular metaphor, Gene.”
He let out a soft huff of a breath. “You and Tyler and your bloody metaphors,” he said distantly, tiredly. “Sometimes a thing just is what it is.”
“What are you, then?” Alex asked.
But by then he was asleep, snoring. Alex tilted her head, examined the evidence in front of her. There on her sofa she saw a drunk, exhausted man nearing fifty-one badly in need of a wife, or better yet, a mother. She saw a man who’d been working himself to death, caring a little too much. Not an ordinary man-not by any definition she felt willing to acknowledge-but a man all the same. Just a man.
Sighing, she went to go release Sam and Angie from their little French farce, and to tell them she thought their conclusions were incredibly off-base. But her bedroom was empty, the curtains blowing softly before the open window. Alex flopped down on the bed; both she and the mattress groaned. She had to be at work in just a few hours, her boss was drunk and unconscious in her living room, it was still 1981, and she was now apparently seeing conspiracy theory-spouting dead people. “This can’t be happening to me,” she muttered. “It can’t.”
She rolled over on her side. A flash of white caught her eye: a piece of paper, folded on her bedside table. She reached out and snagged it, pulling it toward herself across the sheets. Margaret Hamilton, it said, then an address and a postscript in writing Alex recognized as Sam’s neat printing. I’d advise you use your official status to talk to her. And while I’m sure you’ve been impressed by the fine example Gene sets, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
Alex crumpled the piece of paper in her hand and rolled back onto her back. “Very funny,” she told the ceiling. “I’m sure you think you’re terribly amusing, but the joke’s gonna be on you, mister…”
When she finally slept, it was, for once, without dreaming.
Part II
Comments and criticism would be greatly appreciated! Scary new fandom, eek!
Title: Nature Boy, Part I
Category: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes crossover. Gen with a fair bit of UST all around.
Rating: PG-13 for now
Word Count: ~7,500 this part
Spoilers: Takes place after A2A 1.08, so everything
Summary: Alex receives some unexpected visitors, or: Save the copper, save the world?
A/N: I desperately want the two shows to coalesce and make sense both emotionally and in my head; hence, I appear to be writing epic-length fic for a fandom in which I’m a total newbie. Oh dear. Many thanks to wychwood and siriaeve for Brit-picking; any remaining mistakes are of course my own.
Nature Boy, Part I
Alex Drake knew about the Kübler-Ross model, of course; she was all-too-familiar with the stages of grief, as she lived in daily fear of reaching number five. To accept her situation would mean she had stopped fighting, and to cease to fight meant death. So she kept herself safe by bouncing around the first four stages like a supercharged pinball, waiting and waiting for her world to tilt itself back into its proper alignment.
Right now she was comfortably ensconced in reliable old No. 2, shouting after DCI Hunt as he walked away from the crime scene, his black coat seemingly deflecting sound as ably as it absorbed light. “I don’t know why I even bother trying to get through to you!” she said, dodging Chris and trying to walk briskly to catch up without looking like she was exerting herself for him. “I might as well be talking to my-”
Gene stopped short, and Alex barely avoided bashing her nose against his shoulder. “Of course, I essentially am talking to myself,” she continued, taking a slight detour to visit Step No. 1, “so the question becomes why I won’t bloody listen-”
“Shut it,” Gene snapped. He half-turned, stepping around her like he was avoiding an inanimate object, a cement piling that had sprung up in the middle of the lane. His face displayed a tumult of emotions, flickering by too quickly for Alex to separate them out and analyze them. “Or at least talk some bleeding sense! Tell me, DC Skelton, what is it about me that attracts the Bethlem Royal’s prematurely released? Why am I always surrounded by nutters?”
Chris glanced down toward his notebook like it might hold the answer. “Don’t know, guv.”
“I believe the question was rhetorical, Chris,” said Alex, expression somewhat tight.
“I’ll show you rhetorical.” Gene stomped off, giving a nasty kick to a dustbin that made the mistake of getting in his way.
Alex’s eyebrow rose. “Not an entirely inaccurate definition,” she mused aloud.
She glanced at Chris, who nodded. “If you say so, ma’am.”
She gifted him with a small smile, then turned on her heel again and walked the few feet back to where Gene had been standing, to where he had stopped dead in his tracks.
It hadn’t been her taunting that had made him halt; never one to shy from confrontation, he would have reeled on her right away if that had been the case. No, he had seen something. It had been on his face when he’d turned: a slight paleness, his features tight and drawn. He’d looked like he had seen a ghost.
He’d looked like Alex knew she must, when she saw…the things she sometimes saw. When one hallucination stopped being enough; oh no, there had to be delusions within the delusion, head trips tripping all over each other in an effort to get out…
Alex shivered, rubbing her hands up and down the sleeves of her white jacket. Feels like real, genuine leather! she thought, and bit her lip to keep the hysterical laughter at bay.
She looked back over her shoulder. Chris and Ray had things under control. It was time to call it a day.
A knock on her door startled Alex awake. She sat up, nearly sliding off the sofa. The TV was still on, grey static casting a hazy light on the bare red wall, on the tangled crumple of paper shoved into the bin in the corner that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away.
Alex ran a hand through her hair, her fingers catching on the curls. I’ll go back to my usual style tomorrow, she told herself for the thousandth time. The knock sounded again, more urgently. She sighed. “I’m coming.” It was probably Gene, she thought, tugging her clothes into a more respectable pattern. She did her best to ignore the little surge of anticipation that rushed through her at the thought.
She had her hand on the knob and the door half-open before she realized that it couldn’t be Gene-Gene would never have let a shout of “I’m coming!” slide by without a smart remark.
Indeed, there were two people standing at her doorstep, and neither of them was Gene. A slim man who was glancing back over his shoulder, down the stairs, and a short, voluptuous woman, who offered Alex a friendly smile that stank ever-so-slightly of professional courtesy. “Alex Drake?”
“I’m not interested,” Alex said hastily. The woman’s smile didn’t falter. Alex’s vague sense of unease grew more tangible. She narrowed her eyes, bracing herself on the doorframe. “Just what are you doing going door to door at this time of night? It’s half one; I should have you-”
The words froze in her throat, the chill spreading out across her entire body. The doorway was suddenly the only thing holding her up.
“You’re dead,” she breathed. “I mean, really dead. In reality. And, and-”
“In 1981?” said Sam Tyler.
He had turned around, was fully facing her now. He looked just as she remembered him, but-but older somehow. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, in 2007, in the real world-
Pull yourself together, Alex thought, which in this place tended to mean, go back to the beginning, go back to Step No. 1.
“You know, I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to make a cameo, Sam Tyler. Sam-do you mind if I call you Sam? Welcome to my hallucination!” she said, ushering them into her flat. “Make yourself at home! After all, it was your hallucination first!”
She practically spat the words, pushing the door closed as she did so. When she turned, she was unsurprised to see the woman nakedly studying her; Tyler, however, seemed much more interested in perusing her sitting room’s contents and décor. “You got a much nicer flat,” he noted, with a hint of a pout.
“Not fair, is it?” agreed his companion.
She was older: late 40s, a hint of grey appearing at her temples. “And just who are you supposed to be?” Alex asked, gesturing broadly. “Cleopatra? Joan of Arc?”
“Angie Jones,” said the woman, holding out a hand. “Formerly Angela Hunt.”
Alex stopped just short of completing the handshake that instinct had moved her into. Like someone who’d narrowly avoided setting their fingers down in a pile of excrement, she withdrew her hand.
“Is this some sort of joke?”
Tyler shook his head. “No joke.”
Her brain frantically tried to process this new abundance of information/insanity. “So I’m hallucinating that...DI Tyler came back from the dead and ran off with DCI Hunt’s wife?”
Tyler and the former Mrs. Hunt (whose physical appearance Alex was in no way weighing up against her own) exchanged a look. “Not quite.”
Alex groped for the sofa and sat heavily. “This can’t be happening.”
“That’s what we said.” There was an undercurrent of amusement to Tyler’s expression, though his eyes just looked tired.
Gene’s bloody ex-wife moved around the coffee table and sat down on the sofa next to Alex. “We want to help you,” she said kindly. “That’s why we’re here.”
If Alex had learned one thing about this place, it was not to trust people who showed up in the middle of the night, claiming to want to help. She still saw that bright red grin every time she closed her eyes-
“Wait,” she said, suddenly opening them wide. “You said we.”
“Yes,” said the ex-Mrs. Hunt. “We both want to help you, Sam and I. And we’re hoping you-”
“No,” Alex interrupted, “I said, ‘This can’t be happening,’ and you said,” she indicated Tyler, “‘That’s what we said.’” She folded her arms across her chest in triumph. “Why would Madam Homewrecker here say that?”
They exchanged another look: a nod, then a shrug. “Because,” said Angie Jones, the aura of falsity finally clearing from her face, “when you die in 2004 only to wake up in a rubbish pile in 1965, it’s somewhat disconcerting, don’t you think?”
Alex opened her mouth, but found she’d been rendered momentarily speechless.
“I think you’d better begin at the beginning,” Sam said into the silence. He helped himself to a perch on edge of the coffee table.
“Yes, I hear it’s a very good place to start,” said Alex, recovering somewhat.
Angie nodded. She licked her lips, and began.
“In January 2004, I was an attending physician at Manchester Royal’s Emergency Department. I’d been a doctor there for just under a year, but I was beginning to find my feet. We received word that there’d been some sort of big dust-up with the police: multiple casualties, both criminals and coppers. When they began wheeling them in, I was directed to work on one of the crims. They always gave the more experienced personnel over to the police.”
As she spoke, she sat with her hands laid out flat on her knees. Her gaze was straightforward, steady. Only Alex’s long experience with interrogating suspects let her see the effort the other woman was putting into holding it together.
“At the time, it was all over too fast for me to understand what had happened. It just felt like I leaned over to work on the patient, and then I was on the floor, in pain, unable to breathe… Later-I used to get flashes, in 1965. My co-workers trying to save me. My parents being informed. My, uh. The autopsy. My funeral.”
She swallowed, her hand lifting, then hovering around her clavicle, then returning firmly to her knee. “One of the men they’d brought in, the one I was directed to work on-he had a knife on him. They’d missed it somehow. He was in pain,” she said, like she was rationalizing it, like that would make it better, “he must have been half-mad with it. When I came over, he must have thought I was trying to attack him. He lashed out, slit my throat.”
Now Alex’s hand did rise to her own neck. She looked from Angie, who continued to sit, impassive, not meeting her gaze, to Sam, who met it head on. “I was on the team that later investigated the incident,” he said.
Just like Alex had been on the team that investigated the giant, snowballing incident that was Sam. She shivered.
“I think we could do with a drink,” she said.
She came back with a bottle of Luigi’s house red and three glasses. “No scotch?” said Sam.
Alex paused, mid-pour. “You spent too much time with him.”
Sam sipped at his wine and made a face, and did not disagree.
Angie swallowed her first mouthful of wine in a gulp, then held out her glass for more. “So one minute I’m dying on the casualty floor,” she said, as the wine ran red against the glass, “and the next I’m opening my eyes to find myself lying in a pile of rubbish in an alleyway. And I’m wearing a skirt.”
Alex empathized. “At least you didn’t wake up wearing a skirt,” she told Sam.
“You only say that because you haven’t seen my legs.”
His smile was placid, countered by a hint of good-natured mischief in his eyes. And perhaps this was what was unnerving Alex the most: that he seemed sane, seemed normal. So unlike the emotionally and physically drained man who’d come out of the coma, who’d spun his long, ridiculous story and seemed unable to convince himself that it hadn’t all been real, real.
Maybe she’d lost the ability to tell sanity from insanity. Even just accepting his presence here, as someone whose glass she could fill, who she could talk and joke with…did that mean she had sunk too far to ever get out again? Was she so far gone that Molly was forever, finally out of reach?
The moment of levity past, Angie took another deep sip and continued. “I got up and stumbled out onto the main road. It took me a while to realize where I was: I was behind the hospital, where the modern-day emergency ward was. Will be.” They shared an eyeroll of collective tense-confusion. “The extension wasn’t-won’t be-added until 1996.
“So I go in through the main doorway, which is full of people and noise and all the familiar chaos, but all wrong somehow, and almost immediately a man in a lab coat is shouting, ‘Nurse Jones! Nurse Jones!’ and gesturing me over. And I tell him ‘Doctor,’ but he obviously thinks I’m just answering him, because of course I’m not a doctor, I’m even wearing my little nurse’s uniform, only slightly removed of its starch now that it’s been for a roll in the rubbish out back. So he inclines his head toward a man lying on a cot, practically in front of the doorway, and he says, ‘That one just needs a bandage. I think you should be able to handle it.’ Utterly condescending, of course, and I want to tell him to shove it, but then I notice that there’s something very wrong with the man on the cot, something that a bandage is certainly not going to fix. Skin cool and moist, abdomen bruised and swollen… ”
She looked up, as if she’d suddenly remembered her audience. “Basically, he was going into hypovolemic shock because he was bleeding internally. Besides the shallow stab wound, which was really barely more than a scrape, a punch or a kick or even the hilt of the knife had fractured a rib, which had punctured something-the hospital was clearly understaffed, and he’d only been given a cursory check. I rolled him over onto his side and started loosening and pulling off as much as I could of his clothing. I think it was the buttons flying everywhere that finally made the doctor notice what was going on, what I was doing… What followed were about ten of the most nerve-wracking minutes of my life as I tried to convince my new superiors that my diagnosis-the diagnosis of a newly-transferred nurse-was correct, and that the patient badly needed surgery, needed plasma… It was more than just instinct, more than just my oath that made me so desperate to save him. I think I thought, at least on a subconscious level, that if I saved him, I could save myself.”
She set the wine glass down on the table by Sam’s leg. “I had the first of the flashes then, of them trying to revive me. And failing.”
She straightened up then, her jaw set like steel. “But Gene lived.”
“Wait…Gene?”
Sam smiled the smile of someone who’d heard this story before, who knew how it ended. But he just nodded to Angie, let her continue.
“DI Hunt,” she said with an answering nod. “He was injured off-duty, breaking up a pub brawl. No special treatment from the hospital-they just assumed he was one of the brawlers.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was.
“I went and visited him in recovery. I’d spent the last several days wandering around as if I was in a dream. I thought I was going mad. One of the other girls at the hospital tried to take me under her wing: showed me around the place, took me to the boarding house where I apparently lived-at least you had a flat,” she said to Sam. “All my freedom was suddenly gone, along with my family, my friends, the position I had worked so hard for. People’s respect… Anyway.” Just a slight motion as she shook herself. “Going to visit him…that was the only part of my day that seemed to make sense. And of course he flirted shamelessly.” She couldn’t hide her smile. “Called me his guardian angel. I don’t think he could believe that someone like me-a woman-had saved his life, but at the same time the idea amused him. And he was oddly gentle with me. He was like that more, in those days. Not quite so hard. At least not on the surface.”
Alex felt like she had lost the story somewhat-she couldn’t quite picture Gene being anything other than what he was now, or existing in any other time but this fantastical, fantasy version of the present. Even Sam’s 1973 seemed foreign and far away.
“I think I married him,” Angie Jones said, “because I wanted to escape what my life had become. Because he made 1965 seem real. Made me feel real, and not…not six feet under, with the dirt heaped on top of me. I used to wake him up sometimes, screaming, because I was dreaming I was in my coffin… I’m not sure if he ever really knew what to make of me.” Her mouth twisted down. “I’m not really sure why he married me.”
“He loved you,” Sam said into the silence, voice soft, surprising Alex, surprising them both. “He told me. More than once.”
Angie rubbed at the side of her neck. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Even when things were good…our whole marriage was based on a lie.”
Alex had questions. Lots and lots of questions. But there was one she kept coming back to: “So you lit off with Tyler?” It infuriated her, somehow: the idea of Gene as a cuckold.
“It’s really not like that,” Sam said solemnly.
“Then what is it like?” Alex demanded. “I still don’t understand why you’re here, let alone why you’re telling me this. If it’s supposed to make me feel less alone-my head could fill itself with enough constructs to pack Wembley Stadium and it still wouldn’t be enough to build me a way home…”
“Constructs?” said Angie.
“I suppose I deserve that.” Sam’s expression was quietly pensive; Alex found it deeply frustrating. “I said the same thing, essentially.”
“I never did.” Angie shrugged. “I just accepted things. Gave up.” There was a worrying dullness to her tone-worrying, and Alex didn’t even know her, or particularly want to. “Bad habit.”
“Are you here to tell me how to get home?” Alex pressed, instead of delving into the little black hole of despair Angie suddenly seemed to represent. The wall stretched crimson and blank in front of her. “What am I supposed to be doing?”
Sam and Angie exchanged another look, which Alex was beginning to find very annoying. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Sam said.
“How I can get home?” Her chest felt tight from such hard-held breath.
“No,” said Sam, “I already know how you could do that.”
She stared at him.
“You have to betray him.” There was a darkness in Sam’s eyes, she now saw, darker and deeper than anything she had sensed in Angie. “Not just defy him-that I’d recommend on a daily basis. But betray him-kiss his cheek and leave him kneeling on the ground. I’m sure you’d find yourself back in the 21st Century in no time.” He didn’t blink. “I did.”
Alex’s mouth felt dry, but she left her wine on the table. “Then you threw yourself off a building.”
Sam nodded. “I was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Got a second chance, didn’t I?”
Alex hugged herself: anything to stop the shivering. “I have a daughter,” she said. “I have a daughter.”
Angie was silent beside her. Sam rubbed at his forehead, his chin.
Alex forced herself to stand; she couldn’t take this sitting down. “All right. Tell me this grand theory of yours. You obviously have one. I’m not necessarily accepting anything you have to say-or even your being here-but. Tell me.”
“We don’t know much,” Angie said, after another shared look. Her hands were back on her knees. “I didn’t even know that Sam was…like me for,” she paused, “five years? I only found out by accident, and then I couldn’t believe it.”
“And then you didn’t bother saying anything to me about it for another two years,” Sam said with some annoyance.
Angie started to mumble some sort of embarrassed explanation, but Alex rode over her. “Wait a minute. How do you know about me?”
“You rant about everything being imaginary in the middle of the street,” Sam pointed out.
“We know the signs pretty well by now,” Angie said. “And we’ve been watching.”
“That was you!” Alex said suddenly, feeling that wonderful click in her mind. “Earlier today-at the murder scene. Gene saw you.”
Angie turned to Sam. “Oh, did he?”
“That’s impossible,” Sam started, “I took every precaution…”
“And you surveil people professionally, too!” Any genuine disappointment or anger she might have been feeling was apparently being throttled by pure, malicious glee. Alex got the feeling that the two of them had been forced to spend rather too much time together lately.
“Well, he couldn’t have seen me for very long, or even have been certain that he’d seen me, or else he would have come found me and punched me in the stomach.”
“He kicked a bin,” Alex recalled. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, she thought, remembering his face again. The horrible look on his face.
She turned to Sam, looked at him hard. “Why fake your own death? I’m assuming you must have done-I should have copped to it the moment Ray said they never found a body. But why-” Why do that to him? The question hung in the air, unspoken. Why do that to all of them, but especially-
Sam hesitated. “I couldn’t-” He stopped, rubbed the back of his neck, started again. “I couldn’t investigate Gene while he was still my DCI. And I couldn’t just quit. And there were-there were other-”
He let out a little snort of annoyance. “Look, I still don’t fully believe this myself. Sometimes I still think this all makes more sense if I’m mad, or dead. Because at my core I’m a copper, and I was trained to believe in fact, in what’s rational. And this isn’t. This isn’t rational, or scientific, or anything natural that can be labeled and quantified, or broken down and analyzed like I want it to be…”
“But do break it down,” interrupted Angie. “Examine the symptoms of our shared condition. What’s the common factor?”
What is it about me, Gene asked Chris. Why am I always surrounded…?
Alex lowered herself carefully back down to the sofa, her hand pressed to her lips. “I asked him the same question, my first day here…but then my parents, my mother…”
Sam nodded. “I made the same mistake. Thought it was all about my dad, all about me-”
“It was never about us,” said Angie.
“Another boost to his ego.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Just what we need.”
“I don’t understand this,” Alex said. “What exactly are we concluding? It’s Gene Hunt’s world, we just hallucinate it? What are we doing here? If this is a puzzle, then it has to have a solution! I can’t believe that time travel exists to-well, to start with I can’t believe time travel exists, full stop, but I especially can’t believe that it exists purely so that Gene bloody Hunt can have someone who’ll get all fluttery at the sight of his big guns and flash car and cowboy boots!” She let out a stuttery laugh. “The universe does not revolve around one person! It just doesn’t!”
“Do you want to know what I’ve been doing since I’ve been dead?” Sam asked, fixing her with a steady gaze. “I-”
“We,” said Angie.
“We,” Sam acknowledged, “have been finding out everything there is to know about Gene Hunt. Did you know that he had a primary school teacher who went mad and had to be sectioned? Kept raving that she was from the future. Scared the kiddies.”
Alex realized she was shaking her head in disbelief and made herself stop.
“One of his friends growing up,” Sam continued, “maybe his best friend-an orphan. Found crying in the middle of Princess Street in 1936. Four years old.”
Alex didn’t want to, but her mind filled itself with thoughts of Molly, of Molls at four; and then she imagined her just vanished-
“And the real kicker,” Sam said, “the one that I really want to believe is just a crazy coincidence-” He licked his lips. “Do you remember-did I talk to you at all about Harry Woolf?”
Her instinct was to say, “I’ll have to check my notes,” but while that was of course an impossibility, she was surprised to find it didn’t matter. She did remember him mentioning Harry Woolf, even if it had been just that, the slightest mention: Surely you can see that that’s the name of a villainous “character” you’ve constructed, she thought she must have told him. Gene Hunt’s traitorous mentor, the Big Bad Woolf…
She nodded, then shook her head. “He couldn’t have been. From what you told me-”
“He transferred to Manchester CID in 1957. From Hyde.” Sam’s lips formed a thin, flat line. “And before that, his history is…fuzzy.”
She was doing it again, back and forth, back and forth. “No, no, this doesn’t make sense. All these pieces…what do they add up to? To Gene- Is Gene…” She felt her stomach drop. Your presence is required here a little bit longer…by me. “You think he’s…doing this somehow?”
Sam started to shake his head, but Angie interrupted. “He’s doing something.”
Sam rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to make a protest Angie had clearly heard before. “I don’t think intentionally, but Sam, I told you-”
“What,” asked Alex, “what did you tell him?”
Angie scratched a nail along her thigh. “It seems silly.”
“Angie, the topic at hand is time travel.” There was an edge of superiority creeping into Sam’s tone. “We’re all discussing the various ways a man who calls himself the Gene Genie may be our ‘density.’ I don’t think you have to worry about being the one to push this over the edge into silliness.”
“You weren’t there, Sam,” Angie replied. Her voice had an edge of its own. “You had him when he was on the job, and you know that on the job he would have done anything to keep himself from looking vulnerable-”
“You think I never saw him vulnerable?” Sam was leaning forward now, and there was a disturbing hint of menace in his skinny frame. Like a coiled snake. “You think I never saw him stripped down and bare and-”
“Whoa!” interrupted Alex. “Let’s not…even my depraved brain has limits.” She looked back and forth between them, raising an eyebrow. “Calm down, girls, you’re both pretty. And I’m sure he’d be tickled pink to know you were fighting over him.”
Angie laughed, unpleasantly. “I think you may be the coal scuttle calling the pot and kettle black.”
Alex’s hand rose to her chest to better display her offense. “Excuse me?”
“You know what I-”
“Okay, all right,” Sam said, “this isn’t helping. Angie, tell Alex what happened. See if she can make any sodding sense of what it might mean.”
“How ’bout some more wine?” Angie suggested, holding out her glass.
Alex fetched another bottle. “He’ll make alcoholics of us all,” she said.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, will?”
Angie seemed to be trying to inhale her glass, and not like someone who wanted to comment on the vintage’s nose, either. “It was a couple years after we were married. ’67 or ’68, not long after he made DCI.” She swallowed. “He came home late. It was because of a case, and he’d called to tell me, so I wasn’t waiting up. But I’ve always been a light sleeper, so I heard him when he came in the door, felt it when he crawled into bed with me.
“He was shaking. Making the springs creak. I reached out for him and when I touched his shoulder I realized that he was still wearing his coat. Shoes, too. He’d climbed into bed fully dressed.
“I moved to turn on the lamp, but he saw me and said, ‘No,’ very rough and low. He said, ‘Ange, there’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong. It’s not right.’ So quiet I could barely make it out. And I took his hands-they were shaking worst of all, and I took them and it was as if he was on fire. As if something inside was trying to burn through his skin. I thought: he’s feverish, he needs to go to hospital. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept clutching at me, shaking his head when I tried to shift him, or get up to fetch some water or a cold compress. And then after a while he rolled me over onto my back, started kissing my neck. Even his mouth felt like a furnace.”
Angie looked like she could feel some of that heat now; she was blushing like a girl thirty years younger. Sam, too, had a faint scarlet hue detectable around his throat and ears. Alex kept her breathing level and shallow.
“I was scared for him, but I gave him what he needed. Even though I-because I couldn’t understand it. He kept saying, ‘What am I, Ange?’ And I didn’t know- Eventually I said, ‘You’re my husband. You’re my man.’ And he seemed to like that.
“Afterward I felt-” And even though Alex was leaning eagerly forward, even though she was finally entirely interested in what Angie was saying, in what afterward, she felt, Angie chose this moment to cut herself off and stop talking.
“And now Sam will say, ‘He was bent, Angie, he told me about it, how it ate him up inside, being on the take. Like an animal, he told me, and it just happened to bite a little deeper that night.’”
“That is pretty much what I said, yeah,” Sam admitted.
“But it happened other times,” Angie pressed. “After you transferred from Hyde. After he wasn’t bent anymore. Never again like that, but he would come home with a look in his eyes sometimes, and I knew.”
“Knew what?” Alex demanded. “Because as far as I can see, Gene Hunt isn’t doing anything besides his job, a lot of heavy drinking, and his best to drive me around the bend. I mean,” her lips smacked slightly as she finished off her wine, “I can see how some might consider him to be possessed of certain charms, but what makes him so bloody special?”
“If,” Sam said, “and believe me, I seriously question my already tenuous sanity every time I articulate this theory aloud, but if he’s drawing people to him through time like a magnet, then there has to be a reason for it. Something of this magnitude can’t be random.”
Angie nodded her agreement. Alex glanced back and forth between them, looking frankly flabbergasted. “Let me get this straight: you’ve been at this for a year, and all you have is that Gene Hunt may or may not be an occasionally overheating great big time-sucky magnet?” She threw up her arms in disgust. “Quick, call Doctor Who!”
Sam seemed to opt for mostly ignoring this outburst, calmly shaking his head. “No, that’s not all. Because there are other people-seemingly a whole group of other people. We’re not sure how or if they’re organized, because we haven’t been able to infiltrate their ranks. They know who we are,” he said, lifting a significant brow. “And they want him. For some reason, they want to get to him. They want to bring him down.”
Alex mentally flicked through everything Sam had told her-last year, decades in the future. “Frank Morgan,” she said.
Sam’s expression darkened. “Yes.”
Alex bit her lip. “Do you think-Arthur Layton?”
She could see Sam doing the same thing, running through notes in his head, sorting, organizing. “The man who murdered your parents?”
Yes, leave it at that. The man who had killed her parents, both of them. Sam had been watching, but he didn’t know; Evan and Gene had kept that secret well.
She nodded. Sam let out a breath. “I don’t know. It may all be connected. There’s something essential we’re missing, I know it. But that’s the thing-we’re too deep in it, we can’t get the right perspective. We need to see the forest, but we are the trees.”
The three wine glasses were all in a cluster on the table, empty. Alex reached out a finger to hers, ran it around the rim. The glass hummed slightly, clear as a bell.
“These people, these supposed conspirators. You know who some of them are? Where they are?”
Sam nodded. “There’s one we’ve been tracking, yeah. Surveiling professionally.” He shot a look at Angie, who rolled her eyes.
Alex nodded. She’d weighed everything in her mind and she’d come to a decision.
“Well,” she said, decisively slapping her knees. “As much as it pains me to say it, I think we have to ask ourselves...What would Gene Hunt do?”
“I’m not hitting a woman,” said Sam.
The sex of the…suspect was an unexpected twist. Though it shouldn’t have been, thought Alex, scolding herself for her societally-ingrained sexism.
“Well, then,” she stretched out her arms. “I’ll do it.” Part of her brain still could not believe that it mattered-this wasn’t real, so there weren’t any consequences. It was all a mad game, and something like, say, stealing a pink tank and running over an old friend’s car was a perfectly legitimate move. “With your logic, there’s nothing wrong with a woman beating up another woman, is there?”
“An elderly woman.”
“You didn’t say she was elderly!”
“Well, you hadn’t given me a chance yet, had you?”
Alex sighed. What kind of conversation was this to be having at four o’clock in the morning? It all felt like a mad dream.
“All right, we’ll bring her in, then.”
“In where? To CID?” Sam seemed to have an annoying tendency to press close when he argued, to get in her face; Alex wondered if he’d got it from Gene, or if Gene had got it from him. “Setting aside the little issue of Angie and me not being able to get anywhere near there, what’ll be your charge? Conspiracy to commit time fraud?”
“It’s your idiotic ‘theory,’” Alex said, waggling her fingers in his face.
“Which we need real evidence to support! Something to make it tangible, to make it real!”
“You know, I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’m beginning to see his point if you really are this much of a pain in the arse to-where are you going?”
Angie had got shakily to her feet and was heading toward the bedroom.
“Having a kip.” She gave them a wry look. “Not as young as I once was, am I?”
Alex realized belatedly that both she and Sam were rolling their eyes. “Well, we’ll try to keep it down, shall we?” Sam said, a hint of acid in his voice.
Angie shrugged them off. “You kids have fun.”
The door shut behind her with a click. Alex and Sam stood for a moment in silence; Alex reeled a little as she tried not to let the sudden wave of tiredness overtake her, too. She picked up the wine glasses and headed toward the kitchen. Sam followed behind her, carrying the empty bottles.
“Look,” he said, “we’re both live wires. This investigation is maddening-like shooting black cats in the dark, and yes you can thank Gene for that colorful analogy. But it’s been a year of one step forward, two strides back, with no one for us to trust, no one to confide in except each other. Which is tough,” he gave her a rueful look, “with neither of us, I’m sure you can tell, exactly being the other’s favorite person. And then you come along…”
“Oh yes, and then I come along.” The glasses clanged together as Alex set them in the sink. “And you think, ‘Hurrah! Another poor sod to join our batty little club?’ You must be so desperate-”
“We are desperate!” said Sam, and darn it, he did do earnest well. “Listen, this is building to something. For nearly seven years, they basically left us alone. Since I…came back, I mean, they mostly let us go about our business. There were a few incidents. I didn’t even really recognize them as such at the time, but one or twice, there were people who took a bit too much interest in things. Trying to make the guv look bad. Trying to sully him. Nothing I-nothing we couldn’t handle, though.
“Then a little over a year ago…” Sam leaned against the counter, looking across at her with those dark, earnest eyes. “They changed tacks. Started in on me. Angie, too, though more subtly, and I didn’t know it at the time. I think they were trying to do to us what they must have done with Woolf. Eat away at the guv’s support system, and then, with us gone-”
“What?” said Alex. “With you gone, they’d do what? I know he thinks he is, but is Gene Hunt really such a big fish that he’s worth all this effort to try to fry?” She blinked. “Oh, now I’m doing it.”
Sam smiled. He looked like an entirely different man when he smiled like that, open and honest. “Hazard of the job. And I don’t know, but this has been going on for years. It must be something-” He opened his arms. “Something enormous, Alex.”
Alex frowned. “Well, all right. Say it is something big. Say you’re right, and Gene Hunt is in some way essential to the future of humanity. We’re from ‘the future,’ DCI Tyler-don’t you think we’d have heard of it? Heard of him?”
“Not necess-”
“But we haven’t! He’s nothing, he’s no one, except possibly the mental manifestation of your issues with your father and your conflicted ideas about your own masculinity that you somehow infected me with!” She poked him soundly in the chest. “Have I had the chance to offer you my sincerest thanks, Sam Tyler?”
“Not necessarily,” Sam pressed on, ignoring her, “because for all we know, it could be something seemingly insignificant, too small to register. The littlest things can make a big difference, surely you’ve figured that out.”
She glared at him rather than acknowledge the point.
“Or maybe,” continued Sam. “Maybe we know nothing about it because we lost and they won. Because he never got-never will get-his chance. Because they stopped him.”
Her brain tried to order this neatly and failed. She rubbed at her skull. “This is all…horribly circular, you know that, right?”
Sam smirked. “Now you see why we’ve not got anywhere in nearly a year.”
“Well, that has to change. You might not have had a thing to go back to, but I have Molly, and don’t intend to miss one single more of her birthdays. Sorry,” she said, when she saw the shadow that had fallen back across his face. Though she wasn’t, really.
“None of us signed up for this,” Sam said firmly. “But seeing as it’s the situation in which we’ve all found ourselves, together, I think it’s our duty to see it through.”
She looked him over: clenched fists at the ends of skinny wrists. “And is that all this is to you? Duty?”
He had opened his mouth to respond, but whatever he might have said was drowned out by the sound of a pounding on the door. “Bolly! Open ’em up!”
Sam shot her a look that contained just a tad too much amused smugness, even as he muttered, “Shit.”
“Um,” said Alex, clearly thinking fast on her feet, “hide.”
“It’s like I’ve wandered into an episode of Man About the House,” said Sam, slinking toward the bedroom.
Alex waited until she saw the bedroom door shut, then took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and pulled the front door wide.
Gene was leaning against the doorframe, smelling of whisky and cigarette smoke. His clothing was rumpled and his hair disheveled-floating all about him like a blond halo, like someone had been rubbing it with a staticky balloon. “Drake, you tease,” he slurred. “Took you long enough.”
Alex looked at him, long and hard. Then, “They’re both mad,” she pronounced. “Or maybe I am.”
“Well, you’re right on one out of three, anyway.” Gene staggered/slouched his way into the flat without being asked. “Who’s they?”
“No one,” said Alex, a little too quickly. The rings of moisture on the coffee table from the trio of wine glasses suddenly seemed hugely apparent to her; thank god she’d disposed of the rest of the evidence.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning, Gene,” she said, deciding to put him on the defensive. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure?”
“Was visiting Shaz,” he said, somewhat tangentially, flopping down on the sofa in the spot his ex-wife had recently occupied. “Bloody girl won’t stop glowing at me. Can see my fingerprints all over her.”
Alex tried to process this and failed. “You’re pissed,” was the best conclusion she could offer.
The statement inspired a vigorous bout of nodding. Gene pulled one of his many flasks out of one of his many pockets and waved it at her proudly. “Nipped down to the Thames. Here, try some.” He uncapped it and shoved it, rather clumsily, at her nose. “Just like single malt, if I do say so myself.”
“No, thanks,” said Alex, wrinkling her nostrils. “Gene-”
“Suit yourself.” He took another swig.
“Gene.” She reached for his arm to stay it. Her fingers closed around his wrist and she gasped. “Jesus, you’re burning up!”
His eyes snapped to hers, deep and blue. “Been told I have a-a tendency-to-to that.”
She was almost grateful when his eyes fluttered closed and he slumped back against the seat. “What kind of world is this, DI Drake?”
“No doubt one that feels like it’s spinning,” Alex said, eyeing with distaste the flask he’d let fall against his thigh.
One eye flicked open, bright as a searchlight. “It is, though. Can feel it moving. And the waves rolling and the grass growing and the-” He burped. “-The ruddy little birds in their ruddy little eggs, hatching.”
Alex realized she was staring at him as if hypnotized and hastily looked away. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this particular metaphor, Gene.”
He let out a soft huff of a breath. “You and Tyler and your bloody metaphors,” he said distantly, tiredly. “Sometimes a thing just is what it is.”
“What are you, then?” Alex asked.
But by then he was asleep, snoring. Alex tilted her head, examined the evidence in front of her. There on her sofa she saw a drunk, exhausted man nearing fifty-one badly in need of a wife, or better yet, a mother. She saw a man who’d been working himself to death, caring a little too much. Not an ordinary man-not by any definition she felt willing to acknowledge-but a man all the same. Just a man.
Sighing, she went to go release Sam and Angie from their little French farce, and to tell them she thought their conclusions were incredibly off-base. But her bedroom was empty, the curtains blowing softly before the open window. Alex flopped down on the bed; both she and the mattress groaned. She had to be at work in just a few hours, her boss was drunk and unconscious in her living room, it was still 1981, and she was now apparently seeing conspiracy theory-spouting dead people. “This can’t be happening to me,” she muttered. “It can’t.”
She rolled over on her side. A flash of white caught her eye: a piece of paper, folded on her bedside table. She reached out and snagged it, pulling it toward herself across the sheets. Margaret Hamilton, it said, then an address and a postscript in writing Alex recognized as Sam’s neat printing. I’d advise you use your official status to talk to her. And while I’m sure you’ve been impressed by the fine example Gene sets, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
Alex crumpled the piece of paper in her hand and rolled back onto her back. “Very funny,” she told the ceiling. “I’m sure you think you’re terribly amusing, but the joke’s gonna be on you, mister…”
When she finally slept, it was, for once, without dreaming.
Part II
Comments and criticism would be greatly appreciated! Scary new fandom, eek!