The Morning After

She wasn't sure what had woken her. It could have been the drill rattling through her head or it could have been the raging thirst - her tongue felt as though she'd spent the previous night licking wine off that God-awful rug next to her sofa rather than from a glass. Sadly, neither was an unfamiliar sensation. Feeling trapped, because there didn't seem to be any way out for her, it had become so very easy to find some solace in the bottom of a bottle. But she felt exceptionally rough this morning; a brief attempt at calculating exactly how much she had consumed the previous night failed miserably due to the unnerving blanks in her memory.

She thought about opening her eyes, about facing the world; her mouth was begging for a drop of water but her head absolutely refused to let her move an inch, arguing that as it was the weekend she could lie there a bit longer. She was content to let her head win for now; trying to sleep the worst of this off wasn't such a bad idea. It was possibly too late for a New Year's resolution, and she might have said it before, but this time, she resolved, she meant it: she would never drink again. It wasn't worth the brief escape it offered. She gently manoeuvred her head on what felt like the most uncomfortable pillow imaginable (kudos to her psyche for that one), trying to find a suitable position to recapture sleep, when an image flashed through her muddled mind.

"Oooh, Vienna!" she crooned, only slightly out of tune, and rather loudly. Around her a sea of faces were smiling directly at her though she was too drunk to wonder if they were smiling with her or at her. And right then, standing on a chair in Luigi's snug restaurant, the wall with the mural supporting her, she didn't care either.

She groaned at the memory; if this was all in her head why couldn't she give herself the ability to sing in tune? Not for the first time, and with the benefit of both hindsight and a dusting of embarrassment, she wondered why she continued to drink with her colleagues. It was an action that she liked to justify by proximity alone (the lack of distance required to stumble home to bed was a huge positive) but the truth was blindingly obvious: she had no one else in this world. Shaz, Chris, even Ray - they were all she had. Them and Gene. She groaned again as the memory expanded; Chris, Shaz and the rest of CID were still egging her on - she couldn't remember how the song had come to be played - but Gene had merely sat there stoney faced, his dissatisfaction evident. She groaned once more at the thought of seeing him again after last night. A situation she had been in before and such encounters never went well.

"It means nothing to me. This means nothing to me!" she shouted, the words meaning more than the tune. Somewhere in her fuzzy head it had seemed as if those two lines had been written just for her, to be the slogan for her long running campaign against whatever powers had placed her here. A 'screw you' statement. But only Gene seemed to be listening.

There'd been a point in her journey through this world, not long after her parents had died and when she'd first come to suspect that this was it for her, when she'd wondered if Gene was something... more. More than a construct of her damaged mind. More than a temperamental player in this little theatrical production of hers. She'd tried, maybe half-heartedly in retrospect, to find out exactly who he was, to prise him open just a little and see what really lay beneath that long, dark coat but he hadn't given very much away besides the usual name, rank, and potted history. As if he was like everybody else here and therefore nothing more than the product of a few of her more rampant brain cells.

"Don't you think you've had enough to drink?"

The question was one of those queries that didn't really require an answer. It was more of an unspoken demand to stop and coming from him it only encouraged her to carry on. "Absolutely not." She wasn't sure if the words had come out right; they'd sounded okay to her but now he was looking at her strangely and not because she'd just defiantly disobeyed him. Well, the Gene on the right was; his twin on the left was more of a blur to her.

She refused to confront the issue of her drinking. The only problem she had was being stuck here. Besides, it was all fake so what did it really matter if, every now and then, she got well and truly drunk? Drunk enough to forget everything. Drunk enough to chase away the pain. She sighed into her pillow, feeling her resolve crumble already. Even if her hangovers, which always seemed to burrow through a spot just above her eye, like a bullet to the head, weren't real they were significant. She couldn't ignore their choice of location or growing intensity. She'd tried to convince herself that they were merely the result of drinking far too much and had absolutely nothing to do with her slowly dying back in the real world but the headache, that dull pain above her eye, never truly disappeared. It lingered on, a constant reminder of her mortality.

"Stay, Gene." The words slipped easily out of her wine soaked throat and over her drink-loosened tongue - they always did. When she was sober there were always so many logical, practical, and intellectual reasons not to say those words. When she was drunk they never seemed so important. When she was drunk it was so much easier to follow her heart.

"Whatever you want, Alex."

Her heart fluttered at the memory, the sensation raising her above all others. Just for a moment the idea that he had stayed with her felt like the most wonderful thing in this world. Then it disappeared into the darkness of her mind to be chewed up and spat out: he never stayed. He would take her to bed but never in the way she hoped he would. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she moved her free arm behind her back, keeping her eyes shut and holding her breath as she did so. That glimmer of hope urged her on but under her fingers she felt only cool, empty sheets and the strong pang of disappointment.