Disclaimer: I own nix. If I did, Ashes to Ashes probably wouldn't exist and we'd be on the fourth series of Life on Mars by now. But I don't and we aren't and it's very, very sad.
What the lawman saw
Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy. Oh man! wonder if he'll ever know he's in the best selling show. Is there life on Mars?
He's never sure what colour Sam's eyes are.
The first time he saw him – standing in the doorway, looking like a boy on his first day at a new school where the bigger kids cornered you outside the toilets and made remarks about your new clothes – he'd have said brown.
Brown as mud.
'Don't ever waltz into my kingdom acting king of the jungle.'
Later, in the stuffy cool of Lost and Found, where the dust danced the hokey cokey in the dim light, he thought they changed. They sparked when he spoke to that mouthy bird who just wouldn't shut up, a head full of her own importance. Sparked like flint hitting iron, and he thought they looked grey. Grey and bleak; and he did that thing with his hands, dragging them through that ridiculous short hair of his.
And after that he was never quite sure.
After they pulled Kramer in, his hair even more idiotic than Sam's, the station parting before them as though they were both that bloke in the Bible who went through the sea. After they drank together in the stale and smoky air of the Railway Arms, with Nelson polishing glasses behind the bar, with the satisfaction of a shut case sitting warm and comfortable like a cat in his lap, after they raised their glasses, and the alcohol reflected warm and light in Sam's eyes.
He supposes he could ask Annie if he were really curious. She should know, all the time she spends coddling up to the conscientious whatsit. That time he caught them kissing by the lockers; the look on their faces when they sprang apart. Her, flushed and embarrassed, one hand patting her hair where Tyler had touched it; and him, still smiling, meeting the outraged gaze directed at him, his chin raised almost defiantly, showing that long white neck of his.
A girl's neck, that.
'You great soft, sissy, girly, nancy, French, bender, Man United supporting poof…'
His eyes were almost green, with that hard, hurt grey around the centre. They always looked like that when he was watching something he didn't like: Ray ogling a bird's chest, Chris dropping crumbs on a crime scene, Phyllis refusing to nanny a mugger and have the shit in Cell Number Four cleaned up. Or when he came back from talking on the telephone and looked around the department as though he was realising for the first time that he wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Only now he thinks they're dark.
Not shadowy like before, but dark and flickering, like the light in a glass of beer.
'Tyler! Put that soppy plonk down and get in. Blag on in Archer Lane, shots fired – lovely…'
And he slides into the car, fiddles with the radio as though it's actually important, as though there aren't thugs with honking great guns walking around in his city. David Bowie moans in the background about mice and workers going on strike, and he smiles as though it makes sense.
'What are you on about, Tyler? I am the law!'
And Sam's eyes are brown, brown as that glass of Cognac he had on the missus' last birthday; memories blowing through his mind like tumbleweeds across the dust in the sheriff's town.
This grew out of reading conflicting fanfics and an unhealthy obsession with the show. Like, unhealthy to the extreme that I watched some of the US version. Which was weird. And I read one fic that said Sam's eyes were green, and I'd never thought they were green before. In the opening credits they don't look brown, but at other times they do. So.