--
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first-----"
{through the looking glass, and what alice found there: lewis carroll.}
--
Just for once, Alex thinks she'd like a lovely spot of undercover work in a nunnery, or perhaps a library. Somewhere indoors. With proper heating. Where she gets to wear more than her undies and a pair of wicked red stilettos.
She says as much to Gene on assignment on a bitterly cold night in December, ducking into the Quattro for a few moments of warmth and a spot of coffee. It's not that she minds the catcalls, exactly, or even the leering; she's slipping into this antiquated mindset that is as utterly liberating as it is oppressive. Alex of 2008 dressed professionally, to be taken seriously, not objectified—never went to the shops with her mum as a teen, did she, just with Evan who was lovely but whose wardrobe, after all, consisted mostly of sober well-cut suits—but here in her head where it doesn't matter anyway she may as well take credit for what she's got.
It's just that it's three in the morning and it's bloody freezing outside and she doesn't see Ray or Chris or Gene standing on a street corner in their knickers, does she?
Derisively, Gene tells her, "If you're ever tipped about a drug ring run by a set of primary school teachers you let me know, but till then I'm afraid it's the streets for you, Bolly;" when she rolls her eyes, though, and leans toward the window to check her lipstick, he takes his coat off (somewhat clumsily and with an abundance of swearing) and drapes it around her shoulders.
Alex doesn't thank him. That's not how they work. Instead, she'll pretend not to notice how his eyes follow her hands as she adjusts her suspenders and smoothes her sheer black stockings, the lace a dark web of flowers on white; she tenses, waiting for some vulgar comment or another, but it doesn't come and he looks away, rubbing a finger across his chin in feigned distraction.
She lifts the coffee to her lips and shifts in her seat, silk slipping against her skin.
--
Lying awake, tangled in crisp red sheets, Alex remembers:
The acrid stink of gas and smoke and burnt flesh, and the sunlight in her eyes. The way Evan stands by, devastated and useless, and how Gene wordlessly cradles her (little lady), her head close against the warmth of his chest with her arms clinging around his neck. Gene, always Gene, protecting her and pulling her away from the edge (though if she thought about it closely enough she might be worried about her subconscious unhealthily attaching and attracting itself to her childhood heroes and father figures—but she won't think about it, she tells herself, pressing a hand hard to her forehead, she won't).
She grasps at this truth, clutches to it with scrabbling fingers as it slips away like beads of rain running down a windshield. Does it make him real? This whole fantasy, any of it: not just something Sam's id spewed up and she latched onto, but a living, breathing, person from her past? And if that's true, and she can no longer persuade herself that what she's living through is just a convincing fiction—
In the morning, she'll forget, will cross her arms and call them all constructs once more. But while it lasts, that moment, that heady livelong moment of something approaching clarity, is sublime.
(And when she's filing paperwork and her mind presents her with a searing picture of Gene backing her up against a desk with her lower lip caught in his teeth, his gloved hands sliding hard and dangerously high up her thighs, she'll just dismiss it as the misfiring of her dying brain. It's not like she really wants him, this coarse figment of her imagination.)
--
These days, Alex is drinking wine like it's water.
It's a luxury she hasn't been able to afford in a long time. She'd regularly gotten sloshed when she first went off to university—lashing out at the demons of her past, peer pressure, whatever you want to call it—but as a single mum raising a little girl, she hasn't had more than the odd glass of Chardonnay with dinner in years. Here, though, toeing the line between life and death, in this limbo where she wears blue eyeliner unironically and is only accountable for herself and her own cock-ups, she's going to damn well get completely plastered if she wants to and she won't apologise for it.
She is delicately running her finger over the rim of her empty wineglass, trying to keep the image of a looming clown from pulsing like lightning behind her eyes, when suddenly Gene is beside her, leaning against the bar and regarding her with twisted lips. "C'mon, Bollyknickers," he says, tapping the back of his knuckles lightly against her elbow. "Time for bed. Let's get you upstairs."
Alex twists her arm away. "Your chivalry is noted, but misplaced, DCI Hunt," she says, enunciating carefully. "'M not like you. I can stop whenever I want to."
"I've yet to see the proof of that," Gene says, sliding her glass out of her reach. She frowns at him, blinking.
"No, I mean it. See, this isn't real. I'm not really drunk. If I wanted to sober up—" She snaps her fingers. "Like that. S'all in my head, after all."
"You know what, love," he says, moving in close enough for his breath to stir her curls. She tries to prop up her face on her hand, and misses. "You are bloody pissed. I'm cutting you off."
"No," she says crossly, feeling wobbly and uncertain though she's sitting firmly on her stool. "I want to pour one out for Sam Tyler, poor man. He put up with you for six years? Seven years? Must've had the patience of a saint. Even if was all in his head."
She doesn't know whether it's because of her or the mention of Sam, but right now Gene's face is blank and distant and it leaves her feeling hollowly cold and ashamed at her outburst (but he's not real, Alex, he doesn't have feelings to hurt). His lips tighten; he says "Get some sleep, Drake," and turns his back on her.
On the radio, David Bowie tells Alex to knock knock knock on wood, baby. She slumps against the bar and rests her hot cheek on her arms, peeking a look at Gene as he walks to his chair in the corner.
--
The thing is, the man can still be an absolute bastard.
When he wants to, he can be a boorish, offensive, narrow-minded dinosaur; he provokes her constantly, he calls her a bitch and a cow and a tart and belittles her in ways that would warrant a lawsuit in 2008. But a primal flickering in the back of her mind tells her that his harsh, childish words are just shorthand for something else he can't express—because that's not all he is, she knows that, has seen the infinite depths of gentle kindness hiding behind the thorny exterior. And still she can't catalogue him, can't file his characteristics away in one category or another and have done with him, can never predict what he'll do. The Gene Genie (I'm everywhere, Bolly: I was needed, and I was there), he calls himself; Alex remembers watching Aladdin with Molly, Robin Williams hamming it up as a shifty trickster with a thousand faces, and she wonders: who are you, Gene Hunt?
"DI Drake," Gene says, thumping her desk as he walks by. "Sorry to interrupt your stargazing, sweetheart, but we've got a bit of a hostage situation to deal with—"
He's out the door before he finishes the sentence and through the glass she can see him raise his hand and jangle his keys in the air. Alex shrugs her jacket on, turns up the collar with unsteady hands as she stands to follow him.
It won't do to linger on these things, she tells herself, but she's selfishly unwilling to close her eyes for fear that when she opens them this will all blow away like ashes on the wind.