TRAUMA

Disclaimer

I don't own either A2A or Mad Dogs. Writing for fun not profit.

Thanks for all the superb encouragement, the reviews, alerting and favouriting for chapter one. Knowing people are enjoying it makes such a difference.

Hope you enjoy this just as much.

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Chapter two.

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Quinn looks down at Margery. She's a small woman for all her air of authority. Her greying curls bounce as she talks. He knows her type. Professional woman's woman. She wears ethnic scarves and chunky ear-rings designed to show off her multi-cultural interests but he knows she's brought them from some designer shop not, as would be more ethical, from Oxfam. He can predict the books on her bookshelf, the records in her record collection - pre-digital - but she'd have his balls for breakfast if he told her how transparent she was. Not that he'd want to let on. He grants her the accolade of being an interesting speaker, but as a person…

The woman lying across the chairs in the staffroom on the other hand…

He wonders when he'd become so bold in his thinking. Was when he'd shot Maria? Did killing someone give you confidence, or was knowing he'd faced up to something - the dullness of his own life, the disappointments and failures and in that crisis he's created someone new.

Now this new man has held a woman in his arms for the first time in years. She may have been unconscious at the time, but she'd run to him with such joy on her face. That had to mean something didn't it?

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She comes to in a staffroom. Her first sight is a close-up of the grey marl upholstery of the chair she's laying on. Her nose breathes in the smell of instant coffee mingled with stationary. She tastes iron. Her tongue finds a snag of lose flesh on the inside of her cheek. She must have bit it when she fell.

She wonders if she's in another world. She's lost count of the possibilities now: parallel universes; different time zones; coma world; reality; super-reality…

She's a traveller, a surfer, riding on the crest of time, jumping from decade to decade before the momentum breaks. When she dreams she moves fluidly between them all, but the movement comes only in her dreams, until now.

In the fuzzy cloud in her head she sees the car park, and Gene.

Hysteria rises in her chest as she realises the impossible presence of Gene. She wants to believe, but she can't believe. She ran towards him. He ran towards her - so he recognised her - even though he is impossible. And he caught her, even though to be caught by his arms was an impossibility.

Since waking from her coma she's learnt it is best not to think about him. About any of them. Margery has told her that she can't afford to think of her coma world if she wants to get better: but she does. She knows she should not think of him, for Molly's sake. But she does. Guilty, sly, self-indulgent thoughts that make her feel...

Then she confronts the impossibility of him and God it hurts.

Whoever he was, whenever he was, wherever he was, in her brave moments she hangs on to the thought that they were connected.

But then they weren't.

A nearly relationship; a never-to-be relationship; a no future relationship, a nothing.

She's clinging on to the separation of worlds: this world, his world; this time, his time, but she's constructing connections with damaged synapses. A brain-damaged victim learning to think again.

The doctors have explained to her that inside her brain her frayed neurones will be joining on to other frayed neurones to make new meanings. She understands that they'll spark new sensations and feelings and eventually, so they promise, the world will make sense. But, she asks, which world?

Now her frayed neurones have constructed Gene. So how does that make sense?

She counts the real things around her. The things she can touch and see and smell and taste and hear.

She hears Margery's voice talking to the Gene man standing with his back to her in the doorway.

'I've got to give a talk - people are waiting. She's recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, a coma. I daren't leave her…would you mind?

Whatever happened to patient confidentiality? She wonders if the anger she feels at Margery's unprofessionalism is real or just gut reaction. Someone told her once to trust her guts. She wonders who.

She's woosy, but she sits. The door is ajar. She hears Marjory finalise the arrangement. She grasps that Margery is leaving her in the care of the man who caught her in the car park. She understands that she, Margery, is very grateful. She hears the Gene man promise to look after her. His voice has the same pitch, the same cadences as Gene's and her throat constricts with vain hope, but he Gene man's accent is soft, southern - nancy boy.

The 'man' has got his back to her but Alex takes in all she can. She hangs her fragile sanity on him looking like Gene, but not being him; sounding like Gene but not talking like him. She has a sudden wonderful thought that Gene's come to take her back with him but because he knows people like Margery won't let her go with him he's in disguise - but she pushes the thought back like the nonsense it is.

She resolves to concentrate on their differences: the Gene man and her Gene.

She's an artist drawing a moving life model, correcting her first impressions, trying to draw what she sees, not what she wants to see.

He's got Gene's build but he's standing all wrong. His pose is too relaxed and yet he fidgets as if he's nervous, and his clothes…

Gene would never wear anything so casual and sandals.

Then he turns and he's wearing a smile. A smile on Gene's face with Gene's eyes and she's glad she's sitting because now she knows Margery was right about to tell her not to think about Gene. Now with the Gene man in front of her she doesn't trust herself to stand.

She shouldn't have thought about Gene. She shouldn't have remembered Gene or dreamed or cared about Gene because this is what happens.

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