A/N: Many thanks to mamishka and momentarylapse8 at LJ for beta reading and brit-picking, respectively.
Symbiosis
Commensalism: A symbiotic relationship between two organisms of different species in which one derives some benefit while the other is unaffected.
It had been a… satisfying day. "Satisfying" is the most Sam dares to hope for when it comes to his work here, especially after the debacle with his father. Though, really, had he ever wanted anything more from his work besides a feeling of satisfaction at a case-closed, a life saved, a job well done? That is one thing that remains unchanged.
But then again, if he dwells on it, perhaps he can remember a time when he had wanted more, when it was about easy heroism and glory and finding the sort of happiness that only came with upholding an ideal.
The case had been closed, lives had been saved, and despite the foibles, carelessness, and sheer brutish, bullheaded stupidity that seemed to have spread infectiously through this era like a venereal disease, it had been a job well done.
Sitting in a relatively quiet corner of the Railway Arms, watching them all, he wonders if it is vanity to feel pride in the accomplishments of one's hallucinations.
He shouldn't. He should keep reminding himself, continually, that he exists and they do not. But he can't help noticing the changes. He's certain CID was not running this competently six months ago.
Chris is standing by the bar, laughing at something Ray has just said. Given the accompanying hand motions, Sam is quite glad he's not in hearing distance. Earlier, in a bizarre turn of events, Ray had been the one to dig the pivotal clue out of the Collator's office, sending them in the right direction at last.
Ray claps Chris on the back as the younger man chokes on an errant crisp, unable to control his sniggering long enough to chew properly. But earlier, he had shown uncharacteristic forethought: when he and Ray had tracked down three suspects in the armed robbery, Chris had been the one with the sense to call for backup before they cornered the men in an old warehouse.
Sam looks across the room at Annie, who blushes and averts her eyes, embarrassed to be caught staring. He smiles a little at this. Phyllis notices as well and says something that makes the blush deepen. Then Annie snaps a retort that makes Phyllis laugh like a schoolgirl, which is a strange sight to behold, and Annie leans back and smirks.
He's glad to see her so relaxed now. A few hours ago he'd watched her put a bullet through a man's kneecap without wavering. Chris had shown open admiration for her aim and even Ray couldn't come up with a single nasty remark about birds with guns. Sam had seen her glaring at her own shaking hands when she thought no one was looking. The Guv had let her buy him a drink (high praise, that) and Sam had bought her one in turn. She's sipping it now, and though she doesn't turn her head in his direction again, her ears are still faintly pink.
Annie's aren't the only pair of eyes studying Sam tonight. When he looks across the table, Gene shifts his gaze from Sam to Annie, and he smirks, but does not voice whatever lewd things he is no doubt thinking. Then he returns to watching Sam, with a silent, unreadable expression that always makes Sam far more uncomfortable than the loud, boorish insults or the hands-on approach to professional disagreements.
Gene had listened to him today, and not for the first time, either. As usual, each suggestion had been met with disparagement and snide comments, but in the end Gene had (grudgingly) taken most of his advice and even implemented one of his 'new-fangled' surveillance techniques. Sometimes there is a disconnect between what Gene says he thinks and what Gene actually does, and Sam can't help but wonder if Gene is finally beginning to see the flaws in his own out-dated methodology.
Sam's gaze sweeps the room again. This is my team, he thinks, and he can't remember the last time he thought of his coworkers from 2006 in that way.
Very slowly, they're evolving. Gradually, he is finding little ways to maximize their potential, to make things run with at least a portion of the efficiency he's used to. But it's more than that. He's affecting their world, trying to mold it into something he can work with, and they're adapting to it, albeit resentfully, unwillingly and with insults more colorful than a Quentin Tarantino film.
What if that's the answer he's been searching for? Perhaps their successes are helping him work through whatever it is he needs to work through to get home. Perhaps if he can impose enough of himself on this place to change it, then he can find his way back to his own time.
He will not let this place affect his own integrity, but perhaps he can affect theirs. He may be losing his sanity, but he will not lose his sense of self. Sam can't help feeling that he has held up remarkably well, under the circumstances. He has not completely fallen apart.
He may be changing them, but they are not changing him.
Mutualism: A symbiotic relationship between two organisms of different species in which each member benefits.
They're running. Sam is in the lead. No matter who he's with, he can always pull out ahead of the others. He's faster because everyone else lives on meat-products fried in butter and gyms seem to be completely non-existent in this decade.
It's not about winning; it's about catching a suspect. But running flat-out, as fast as he can, with someone trailing behind him, panting, sometimes it makes him feel like a kid racing his mates. When he slams into a petty thief and tackles him to the ground, any pride should be focused on that, not about getting there first.
And it's not as though everything is about one-upping Gene Hunt.
The man they're chasing today, Lester Loewe, disappears into an abandoned building. He's responsible for three armed blags that they know of, and he's the primary suspect in the kidnapping of his ex-partner's teenage daughter. Sam opens the door cautiously, listening for footsteps inside or out, either from Loewe or from Gene and Ray, who should be close behind him. He casts a swift glance over his shoulder. They're not. Maybe next time they'll listen when he explains that lard is not a food group.
He should wait. He needs backup. God only knows what Loewe has waiting for him in there. He could have friends, ammo, a collection of Tissue Compression Eliminators… But Sam suspects he doesn't. Loewe is a trapped animal, a cat treeing itself to escape a persistent hound. The building is just an opportunistic choice of momentary cover, not a favorite hide-out. But he might be able to break though a window or door on the other side and escape if Sam doesn't follow him immediately.
It's a step into the unknown. He doesn't have a gun. He should wait for backup.
Sam doesn't take more than a second to make his decision, and the ancient door is left swinging creakily in his wake.
When Ray turns up, huffing a little as he ascends the last rickety step to the top floor, Sam already has Loewe in handcuffs.
"Where's the Guv?" he asks, steering Loewe towards the stairs with a hand on his collar. Ray shrugs and pops his gum loudly. Sam is so sick of his bloody insubordinate obstinacy that as he passes by he 'accidentally' bumps Ray's shoulder hard enough to make him drop his cigarette in surprise. Loewe is a noisy, smelly bugger, stinking like manure and yammering the whole damn way, threatening assault with knives and guns as well as lawsuits and lawyers. Sam is sorely tempted to push him down the stairs.
The Guv, as it turns out, is waiting for them just outside. He's throwing the radio back into the Cortina when Sam steps out under the murky grey sky, and a moment later Loewe is being shoved into the car. Gene makes sure the man bangs his head on the doorframe as he's pushed in, and slams the door with a level of force that tells Sam that whatever delayed him is not good news. So Sam asks him, without a trace of sarcasm, what kept him.
"Found his car, didn't we? And since you were acting like a real copper for a change, I decided to have a look for some of that evidence you're always banging on about."
"What did you find?" asks Sam, his heart sinking at the grim expression on Gene's face.
"Duct tape in the boot. And this," he says, tossing Sam a small plastic bag. Inside is a single, tiny rhinestone earring.
"Jenny Rodgers."
Gene nods. "Filth on the accelerator. Interior smells like shit."
Sam rubs his temples, thinking. "He's already demanding counsel. Seems to think he's been mistreated." He laughs hollowly.
"They'll have to invent a new definition of that word when I'm finished with him," Gene snarls. "I don't care if he's bleating for his lawyer, the super or his mum, what he's getting is ten minutes alone with me in Lost and Found. He's going to tell us where that girl is."
"Yeah, great, bang his head against a wall, see if that jogs his memory."
"Nice to see you're finally getting it."
They glare at each other. Sam pinches the bridge of his nose, wishing that there would be a better reward for their troubles than a fresh corpse, and hating the part of himself that wants to join Gene in the head-bashing. It might not get results, it might not make him feel any better in the long run, but it might at least bring him some temporary satisfaction.
That's not justice, he reminds himself. It's just retribution.
Then his mind backtracks, replaying, searching for something they've missed.
"Hang on, when you said that the inside of the car smells like shit, did you mean literally or figuratively?"
He wishes immediately that he had phrased that differently, because Gene is giving him that look, and he knows that Gene is going to bark out something like, 'Is this really the time for an English lesson, you sodding, nancy boy tosser.'
But he doesn't. Instead, Gene narrows his eyes and says, "Literally." The look he's giving Sam isn't irritated, it's searching. It's like he can see Sam's train of thought chugging along before him, and he's almost found the ideal spot to hop on.
"Loewe's uncle runs a slaughterhouse. Chris and Ray interviewed him a month ago on suspicion of co-conspiracy, but there wasn't enough evidence to nail him on anything."
"And the car reeks of manure."
They share a look, and then they're both in the Cortina and the car is peeling out so fast that Sam doesn't remember opening the door. They find Jenny Rodgers, tied-up and terrified but alive. Her father, a hardened criminal who no doubt paid for her education in bank robberies, is weeping when they bring her to him, trying to embrace her through cell bars. He'll testify against Loewe. Once again, it's a case closed, a life saved, and a job well done.
Once again, here they are at the Railway Arms.
Gene is in the next seat over, staring at him through a cloud of smoke. Sam notices him doing that more often now, scrutinizing him as if Sam was a puzzle he hadn't yet solved. Sam can stare with the best of them and scrutinizes right back. But now he's worked out why it unsettles him. Gene can be entirely predicable, but he is also an enigma, and that is… worrying. When he finds himself wondering what Gene is thinking, he tries to remind himself that figments of your imagination can not think. He meets that inscrutable gaze with one of his own, his mind swirling in circles of confusion.
And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Where did that come from? He doesn't know whether to shudder or laugh, so he scorches his throat with whiskey instead. Each day it gets harder to deny that he too is changing.
That was instinct, what led you into that building. You were right to trust it. They're his thoughts, but he hears them in Gene's voice.
"Oi, stop your day-dreaming, Dinah. It's your round!"
Gene is in an odd mood tonight, distant and brooding. He has to testify tomorrow for the Haslan case. Sam knows that he hates this part of the job. It's the part the public sees, the place where they get examined and found wanting; it's the part they affect but can't control. Sam has never been fond of courtrooms either, but he's grown so used to being scrutinized by everyone, by boards and press and bureaucrats, that they don't faze him any more.
Gene hasn't asked Sam to come, and Sam hasn't offered, but he'll be there anyway, and Gene knows it.
With a sweeping glance he takes it all in, the Guv, the Arms, the team, their team… Today it was another case closed, another life saved, another job well done, and when he thinks about it his grip on his glass of scotch clenches until his knuckles whiten. It terrifies him that he doesn't know whether their successes are helping him to get home, or whether they're tying him here, another knot for each solved murder. It scares him even more that sometimes he wonders whether he really wants freedom from this place; sometimes he thinks that freedom is this place, and that it's the escape that will lead him back into a prison.
Parasitism: A symbiotic relationship between two organisms of different species in which one benefits at the expense of the other.
The tumor is growing. He can't believe it went unnoticed it for so long.
Since they finally discovered it, it's grown at an alarming rate. It hasn't metastasized, but he doesn't doubt its malignancy. It is the best explanation they have for Tyler's prolonged coma. It fits, and Dr. Morgan wishes that someone had referred this patient to him earlier; they might have saved the man and his poor mother a lot of suffering. They might have caught it when the odds were better. Conditions are not very favorable right now. It has been too long, and the man is growing weaker by the day. But if they don't act quickly, it will be too late.
He tells the mother the truth.
"We fear that if his condition continues the way it has been, he could slip into a persistent vegetative state from which he might never recover."
"But if he isn't strong enough for the operation," said Mrs. Tyler slowly, "will it kill him?"
"That is a possibility." A beat. He thinks, But is this, whatever he's living now, really life? Then he says,"But if we don't operate, there is every chance that his brain will be forfeit. He will continue to breathe, but it will be an illusion of life. We have a chance to save him, Mrs. Tyler, before the tumor can overtake his mind."
Patients like Tyler are worse than the vegetables in some ways. When the brain shuts down, all hope goes with it. It's easier, knowing that there's nothing left to be done, that the patient is essentially dead, an empty shell, devoid of pain or fear, blissfully unaware of their miserable condition. Tyler is not in that state. His brain still functions. No one knows what he is aware of, but he is aware.
Again, he finds himself wondering when the tumor first materialized. How long had it been lurking there, feeding on Tyler's brain, keeping him in this state while they all watched him grow steadily weaker, oblivious to an enemy concealed?
He stops, because he realizes that he is beginning to anthropomorphize a neoplastic swelling. There's something about this patient, though he's not sure what. He is not a superstitious man, but something he senses about Tyler unnerves him.
The sooner they deal with this the better. He will be quite relieved when the surgery is over, whatever the outcome.
Though he hopes for the best, he does not expect it.
Finis