Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended. Story title is from lyrics to Amanda Shires' song "Devastate".
Spoilers for the entire season/series of the US version of Life On Mars. Story does include direct quotes from episodes "Everybody Knows It's Windy" and "Life Is A Rock".
Summary: Stream of consciousness thoughts and musings told through Sam's eyes/POV about his relationship with Vic, his reaction to Vic's death, Sam's father-son relationship with Gene and Sam and Annie's friendship/budding romance. Episode Tag to the Series Finale "Life Is A Rock".
Setting: Set in the scene where Vic is about to kill Sam on the dock in Hyde and tag takes place in the parts in between Sam's rescue and the return to the 125.
Main Characters: Sam Tyler, Vic Tyler, Gene Hunt, Annie Norris
Genres: Hurt/Comfort, Drama, Episode Tag/Missing Scene, One Shot
Author's Note: Very recently, I watched my unopened DVD of Life On Mars (US), purchased in 2009 after the series ended. The years 2008-2009 were a huge mess for me, but I decided that I wanted to finally revisit this show, one that I had loved and enjoyed and was sad to see end so abruptly. I was still grateful for the DVD and all the commentaries and insights into episodes and for what was planned for Season 2, and for the creators deciding to "go all out" on the series finale, deciding to do "everything they wanted to see happen". I'm also grateful that they didn't decide that Sam was just in a coma this whole time (no offense at all the UK series of the same name), but I have to say that I'm still weary/unnerved by the way the series ended. I'm still not completely sure if I loved it or liked it; I know I didn't hate it but I still think that it lacked complete "closure".
Anyway. After watching the series finale, "Life Is A Rock" again, a plot bunny started nagging me. I considered it and then pushed it to the back of mind (as I have other WIPs I'm trying to work on), but it refused to leave me alone. So I decided I'd write it and see if the gods of the plot bunnies would be appeased. This is the result.
Reviews, constructive criticism and feedback are welcome and appreciated. Enjoy reading! :)
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You Could Level It All, You Have It In You
A Life On Mars (US) Story
by silverluna
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I'm flat on my back, lying—not when I said I was still afraid of Vic, just lying prone after going head to head with him, beating him as good as he beat me—on a dock in Hyde, New York, a deserted seaside town. Apparently. It's a real place, as real as real is anymore. I inhale shallow breaths, tasting blood on my lips and in my mouth; he's hit me hard enough to loosen some teeth. Vic is on top of me, pinning my legs with his weight and pressing the blade of the knife to my neck. Yet, he's still my father and that's my weakness. Even as I child, I knew without knowing that he was dirty, that he was slippery as an eel, not just for slipping so callously and causally out of our lives, though I repressed the black memory I witnessed in the woods at my fourth birthday party. Even when I caught him nearly murdering Annie—the policewoman in the red dress—even after he held me at gunpoint in that very spot where he had already shed blood. Until I was in the accident and forced to come back. 1973 was the year I lost my innocence.
He was my father—I couldn't ever imagine him actually shooting me. Not once, certainly not twice, in the shoulder and abdomen. Leaving me in the woods to die.
Now, on this boating dock in Hyde, he again has the upper hand. He's going to kill me; cutting my hand caused him no pain.
"I'm your son," I say, holding my breath, feeling my four-year-old face surface just for a moment, that little boy who idolized his father, who loved his special rocket ship toy and the box he imagined was a rocket in space and the illustration on the magazine cover who looked just like Annie. I shiver, letting the pain of our fight—and Vic's little cheat with his knife—come back hard. If this moment is real, I need to be here in it. If this is where all of it was leading, then I need to know for sure.
"I know you are," Vic replies, a dark shadow crossing his face. I watch him grip the blade with both hands, grinning with some ancient, alien wisdom to which I'm obviously not privy. No, I'm still a scared little boy, a confused man, converging inexplicably in 1973. Vic feeds on my fear—naked on my face and in my body language. He's going to kill me and I can't fight back. I have no free will, no innate instinct to survive. I don't even raise my hands to protect myself, instead, tears spring to my eyes; betrayed, I lie still and wait. It will be over soon enough.
The shot rings over the water, scattering noisy nesting gulls, but I hardly hear. Shaking with both relief and regret, I watch Vic—his mouth gurgling hot blood—fall to my right side.
I hear my name shaped from Annie's mouth and struggle to sit up. My new police family, including the Black Sheep, Ray, have all shown up.
"Tyler, are you all right?" Gene's voice, gruff yet sincere, and I notice he's holding the smoking gun. He came here to spare my life. To save me.
"How did you find me?" I ask as they surround me. Absently, I lean over Vic, touching his hair gently. Tears sting my eyes; if I ever gave it any serious thought in my whole life, I could have come to the conclusion that Vic died on the day of my fourth birthday party. Maybe not physically, but after that day he was never my father again. He was no more than a ghost, haunting me well into adulthood.
I swallow hard, trying to breathe. Gene holding the smoking gun, taking the kill shot. Gene, telling me to get off that ledge before I got hurt, covering my body and Annie's with his on that Tuesday I was certain I was supposed to die. Gene, who threatened to kill Mike for roughing me up and putting the bomb on Annie and who sent the entire NYPD out to catch Jimmy McManus after he shot Chris and Ray point blank.
"No-Nuts is becoming a regular Columbo," Gene says, answering my question. Sort of. He takes a tissue from his pocket and presses it to my injured hand.
My chest tightens as if there's a phantom hand around my throat, putting the squeeze on. I risk a glance at Annie, even though I squint as if her face is as bright as the sun. I can spare her a broken smile, for a moment. She looks at me with a faint curiosity, tamed only by the relief in her eyes.
"Dad," I whisper inaudibly, still absently stroking Vic's hair. I can't let myself imagine what any of them might think of my current behavior—they already know I'm off-kilter, comparably, emotional and irrational and strange, an alien to them. None of them, besides Annie with her degree in psychology, would immediately think "Stockholm Syndrome"; not even I would, but then, I'm too close. Vic did abduct me—steal me away in broad daylight, both as a child and as a man. My mother, Rose, couldn't stop him and neither could Gene.
Until . . . until now. It's over.
Color slips from my face and I lean back on my arms, wincing when I put too much weight on my injured hand. Before I can get my bearings, bearings rooted in any kind of time, space or reality, Gene and Chris yank me to my feet. Too unsteady, for both words and standing, I sag in their grasp.
"Sammy," I say, gesturing towards the boat. Annie, without waiting for orders, goes to him—to me. Already, I picture her smiling face, leaning down to put a gentle hand on his head. Telling him it's time to go home.
I think I pass out. I wake up to Gene slapping my face, gripping my chin hard when he sees the focus start to reemerge in my eyes. "Tyler, don't you dare do that again," he growls. I remember his hand on my shoulder after Mike had hit me over and over and I was bleeding and fighting to stay conscious. I remember Gene telling me he should have let me stay South of the Slot alone, let Mike use my body for target practice, without much real conviction. How he threatened to rip my guts out after I offered myself up as a hostage to that maniac.
A sharp slap brings me back. "Ow," I mutter. I must have been drifting. Vic still lies next to me, oozing blood.
"You can't do this, Vic."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm your son."
"I know you are."
I shake my head and close my eyes but my mind still replays our last conversation. Our last words. His last breaths. Vic still lies. I twist out of Gene's grasp and turn my head to vomit, though nothing comes up but blood and spittle. I lie on my side, away from Vic and Gene, my stomach clenching, dry heaving.
"Tyler! Tyler!" I wait for violence that never comes—another slap, a squeeze on the back of my neck, a harsh grip to my hair, a punch to my gut. Instead, an arm wraps around my shoulders and pulls me up, not into an embrace but just as a brace. My bruised ribs protest and my concussed head shrills. I'm not sure when I started shaking but now I can't stop.
"Get to a pay phone, get a goddamned ambulance here yesterday!" Gene barks at Chris.
I can't help myself—much like the shaking—I start to laugh.
"Jesus," I hear Ray hiss, edging away from me as if I'm toxic. I can hear what sounds like Chris's receding footsteps, a brisk run, a head start. Gene's arm tightens, his hand clamping down on my shoulder, as if that could get me to stop. I can't, of course, articulate the words, the meaning of the just the word "yesterday", so I crane my head to get another look at Vic. He's muttering death oaths under his breath, but I'm not sure if they're for me or someone else.
Not Vic. Gene. Vic is dead.
The fight, whatever was left, seeps out of me. Still laughing softly, I lean against Gene, not fighting unconsciousness, not even wholly aware that I'm bleeding or that Vic's blood is on my clothes.
"Tyler!" Gene's voice is white noise, the sound of blood pumping through veins. I think of myself, at four, holding Annie's hand and being content that she'll take me back to Mommy. I should try to hold it together for myself, so I don't frighten myself at such a young age, but I can't. Annie won't let me see me like this. She won't let me see my father like this. She's been holding my hand since I got here, to 1973 New York City, to the 125, helping me to see what is real and what isn't.
Her heartbeat is real, I remember its steady rhythm under my palm on the first day we met. I trusted her immediately before I allowed myself to trust me, and she became my ally, challenging all my sideways theories but never telling me, flat out, that I was crazy. That I am crazy. That I might be. Unreal.
I felt Annie's heartbeat again while she stood with me on the ledge. When she took my hand and told me that she would jump, if that's what I really wanted. "We can go on the journey together." But haven't we, already?
Never mind Gene yelling at the both of us to get down. If Gene and Ray and Annie hadn't come to rescue me, I may have been goaded into jumping. In my state of mind, I didn't even need the gun to my back, any outside threat. I'd already been condemned—guilty of murder or guilty of insanity—and Agent Frank Morgan's voice was the one on the phone, telling me what to do here in 1973 so I could get home. "I work for the dream police," he'd said. "The tiny robot inside your head has tapped into your baser instincts. The dark blood of your father."
I'd gotten on the ledge like Frank Morgan ordered because he'd said he was sending me home. Or was there another reason he wanted me to jump, a more simplistic reason? Hadn't Annie said so—he'd read my psychological evaluation. He knew every detail. He'd just wanted me to jump because I was a liability. I asked too many questions; maybe I did so because of Vic's dark blood—and a deep need to never repeat Vic's mistakes as my own.
I'm lying in the woods, bleeding on crushed, dry brown leaves, curled on my side. Disbelieving. My hand still stinging from Vic's cruel final act—a mocking high five. My shirt and jacket are soaked with my own blood and I can taste it in my mouth. He left me here to die.
And yet, I went in search of Vic again—for self-preservation, for answers to questions that have no answers—after he pulled a parental abduction—to save myself, as instructed. But where he was taking me no one should have known about. No one should have been able to follow us, or ever find me, dead or alive.
# # #
"Is Sam okay?" Chris's voice wavers above my head, but I can't force my eyes open to see him. I'm still drifting somewhere in the past—or present.
"Does Spaceman look okay to you?" Ray sneers. They sound as if they're underwater, or I am.
"I just meant—"
"He'll be okay," Annie says quietly, her voice much clearer than the others', and her urging thoughts, spoken only for me: "Sam, you know what's real."
# # #
Vic planned to get away with it—with me, one way or another, setting my life on a different course entirely. So that I might choose evil over good, every time, see the world in black and white, with a hungry greed always on my mind, a thug, an aggressor, a thief and a liar. Instead of just growing up haunted, always wondering with an dull, angry twinge, just where my father went. What it was that made him walk away. Was it my mother, was it me?
"Sam Tyler, so help me," Gene snarls, close to my face. "It's time to wake up."
I do start to open my eyes to slits and recognize the familiar indifference and anonymity of a hospital room, almost interchangeable from the next. Except it's still 1973 in my room. Have I been shot? Am I back to that day? The four of them are here, standing over me, watching me—just the way they had been on that dock in Hyde, New York. The significance isn't lost.
"Sammy?" I ask gutturally, my mouth dry.
"He's fine, Sam," Annie says. I could use her cool touch on my cheek, but she's at the foot of my bed. "The doctor gave him a clean bill of health." She beams me a little smile and I feel my heart crack.
Ray rolls his eyes. "Great. Spaceman's back on Earth for now."
"Sam," Chris says, ignoring Ray, smiling at me. He appears to be shaken or pale, but I may be mistaken. Maybe it's just that he's seen too much of hospitals recently. "Glad you're okay."
"Thanks, Chris," I say, trying to encourage saliva production in my dry mouth. I don't want to imagine what the doctors may have put in the syringe for the pain.
Gene ushers everyone out, except for Annie, leaning down and squeezing my shoulder before he leaves, telling me through clenched teeth that I have twenty minutes to get out of bed or I'll miss the ride back to the 125.
"Sure, boss," I mutter. "I'm fine." I can tell in his one tight look that he doesn't really want to move me, but I think that I've scared him enough for one day.
I replay the conversation I had with Gene in the car earlier in the day, and consider that not all families are families related by blood. He said that I was one of his squad, that we were all family, that we all together made a good team. If I'm honest—and though it hurts more than the physical battering I took from Vic—I admit to myself that Gene was the only who could take that shot, that he already owed Vic a bullet, at least one, for his previous attempt on my life. Not as act of revenge, which is for the weak, according to Gene, but as simple fact.
That's what a father should do—even a tough-love father like Gene, estranged from his youngest daughter for all those years—protect and shield, rescue and comfort, and take out any threat made against his offspring.
A terrible thought descends on me, clutches at my throat, forces my full attention as I again replay Vic's last words.
Or my last words.
"You can't do this, Vic."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm your son."
"I know you are."
Since it's just Annie and me in that little hospital room, I muse aloud to dispel that urgency of panic, that moment of clarity or blindness, depending on which way you look at it.
"If he knew I was his son, is that why he took me as an adult? Is that the real reason he was going to kill me?" My voice is still hoarse and Annie has to lean in close to hear my speech, coming out in a rush. "He was going to kill me to stop me from becoming a cop. So I would never catch on to what he really was, to the man he really was. If I grew up differently, under his wing, I may have just repressed that memory for the rest of my life—"
"Sam," Annie cuts in during a raspy pause. "Calm down. Slow down." She's looking at me with all blue-eyed curiosity, but also patience, trying to make quick sense of what I am—or what I could be—saying. "Please, explain it to me."
I drop my voice lower, and force myself not to spew it all out, just in case anyone else could be nearby. "What I witnessed in the woods, on my fourth birthday. Vic . . . killing you. The vision, the red dress, the struggle." A soberness crosses Annie's face and I clam up, tears again stinging my eyes for what I've lost or what I've found. Was I supposed to wake up in 1973 to save Annie's life? Or was it more than that—was I supposed to learn who my parents were as real people, and why my father inexplicably vanished from our lives? I squeeze my eyes shut but I see him again, pinning my legs to the dock, gripping the blade in both hands. Leaning back to get enough momentum to swing.
And see the bullet explode from his chest and feel his blood splash onto my face and neck. See them, the four of them, looking worriedly in my direction. See Vic fall to my right side. He's dead, and all it took was one bullet.
I cry out when Annie grips my bandaged wrist and I open my eyes quickly. "Sam," she breathes, pressing her hand to my chest as if she were the one who needed to know what was real. "Are you saying that Vic Tyler—your father—he knew who you really were?"
I remember myself standing in the middle of the deserted street in Hyde. Running to the phone booth ducking Bumper's shots, running from the same booth while glass exploded over my head. "I think he did, Annie," I say, and realize I haven't given her all the facts, that most of the crazed whirl of thoughts occurred in my head while I was in shock, halfway to some other consciousness, trying to grasp Vic's death and my own life saved at Gene's hand. "And I think Gene . . . wasn't going to let it happen. I mean . . . Vic killing me."
Out of the corner of my eye, Annie nods and my gaze strays to her. She wears a knowing expression, very similar to the one she wore on the night when she climbed on that ledge with me. That night, she wasn't just placating me and now, she isn't either, but I can see that she isn't willing to betray some confidence she's gained from the source—those are answers I will I have look for myself. "I wasn't either," she tells me, close enough now to press her lips against my cheek. It's just a peck but it's just enough. The stinging tears surge out of my eyes and splash my cheeks.
I remember Gene checking me over for injury at the dock in Hyde, after the first time I passed out, probing the back of my head with two fingers, cursing when he saw my blood. "You shouldn't have gone inside that bar alone," he growled lowly, ignoring my winces as he pressed the open gashes near my eyes and mouth. "I should have known. That bastard almost killed you once."
Horror and sadness flashed across my face, a tormented mix for Vic and Vic's actions, for the Vic I knew so little of as a child and for the one I knew too much of as an adult.
"Tyler, snap out of it," Gene ordered.
I nodded, but I knew Gene wasn't angry with me. He had been scared, because he knew what Vic had been capable of—at least knew that Vic was slippery, that he was a decent liar, and knew that Vic wanted to hurt me physically. I was vulnerable and foolish because I had vouched for Vic once and had been so betrayed. Because I had blinders on when it came to my father and who he really was.
"If I had known he was going to take you—disappear—" Gene hissed, frowning sharply at me.
I nodded again, knowing what he would say. Distantly, I heard sirens, the only sounds besides the soft noises of human breathing and the boats rocking in the waves. I tried to block out the presumed violence Gene could have inflicted on Vic if they'd been face to face: Gene putting one right in between Vic's eyes, but the image hit me as solidly and squarely as a blow. I risked a look in Vic's direction but the sight of his body covered by a tarp made me jerk my head back.
In the present, I let Annie help me pull back the sheets and help me with my clothes. It's time to go home, time to see my mother and maybe finally tell her my real name. "Ready?" I ask, standing. Annie slips her hand around mine, the uninjured one, and nods, relieved that I'm still here—I can sense it in her grip. It's time to leave Hyde. It's time to jump.