Chapter 1

Gene could liken his life to waiting all day for the match highlights while trying to avoid the scores.

It was one thing to shut yourself away from the world for a few hours so that no one could spoil the result for you before you watched the match on TV that night, but living with a number of people who had an insight into the future meant he spent most of the time avoiding spoilers; sporting or otherwise.

Things were much easier in the days when he didn't remember the nature of his world or the fact that he was dead. There would be the odd one or two 'floaters'… Sam, Alex… one at a time, now that was manageable. And the deny everything policy, even after he remembered, seemed to do the trick for the most part.

But quite suddenly a couple of years earlier the world seemed to have grown quite quickly. Maybe more coppers were having issues? Or more were going into comas. There were more and more of them. Usually there would be one at a time, that was the rule, but by the latter part of 1995 there were three of the buggers, all in one go.

The world was expanding. That's why he needed help, he supposed. Having Alex working by his side for ten years had been a godsend. Aside from their personal relationship their professional one was second to none. Then with Simon's arrival the world had grown a little more. And now there was Robin, based in uniform. It was about time someone took the helm down there, Gene couldn't help but think.

But the thing that Alex, Simon and Robin had in common was that they all knew. And they all had a grasp of the future. Which meant that it was easy to let things slip about what was coming up, the next day, the next month, the next year. Even Gene himself had a little insight after his strange coma world but his limit was the pasty tax and how to Rickroll an unsuspecting schmuck. Everyone else had far more interesting information.

"I don't want to know!" Gene clamped his hands over his ears as he tried to avoid the definitive answer about who would come out on top in the general election. Yes, the opinion polls and his gut instinct said the country was going to turn redder than Simon's face after he suffered his trouser tents going back a way but he still didn't want to be told for certain.

At least this wasn't as bad as Euro '96, he thought to himself. He'd initially been pleased to discover that Simon was a football fan but suddenly the whole tournament became one long quest to avoid getting the results spoiled. He would walk back and forth in the corridors past Simon with his hands over his ears.

"Don't want to know, Shoebury!"

And then it reached a point where he could tell who was going to win a match by Shoebury's temperament that day.

Was this what it was going to be like from now on? Were all sporting events – not to mention world events – going to be spoilt for him by a troop of future-dwellers? He groaned as he thought about it. Hazards of the job, he supposed.

He pulled the keys to his car from his pocket and gave his walking stick a shove to one side before he left the office. He knew he was supposed to keep using it as long as necessary and he knew that he would be slower and far less steady without it but he couldn't bear to be seen with it any longer. It was taking away from his reputation. He was the Manc Lion and the Manc Lion did not need a poncey stick to keep him on his feet.

What the Manc Lion did need, however, was to get going before the voters started turning out and queuing up outside the doors of the polling stations.

His walk through the station and down to the car park was slow and awkward and a few times he regretted leaving his stick behind but when he strode outside into the fresh air, taking his steps by himself, he felt empowered. His injury had taken a few things from him, including some of his motility. It had taken half his hair as well. It was taking time to grow back and he didn't feel like himself with his more-or-less cropped locks. Heaven help him if he ever went bald.

The fact that he'd come so seemingly close to losing his life had shaken him up a bit. He'd thought that he was indestructible, that was the way of his world, after all. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps things were changing more than he'd realised. That was worrying. He couldn't help but wonder if it had anything to do with a certain bespectacled DCI at a rival station.

Since his confrontation with Alex in the car park Keats had been suspiciously quiet. While Alex had spent days expecting him to appear when she was least expecting it with another 'persuasion technique' to force her to stop Gene from giving evidence against him he seemed to have more or less disappeared off the face of the earth. After finding out that he no longer had anything to lord over Alex he knew he'd lost his chance to force the outcome he wanted from her.

But it was her parting words that had stung him to the bone. Reminding him that all his sexual conquests has been thanks to pills or gas and air; that he'd never been able to feel the love and warmth of someone who wanted him, and seeing Alex and Kim enjoying a little more than a night in front of the TV together had set off a chain reaction of fury inside of him. All the energy and the power he'd been absorbing had hit a high that he couldn't supress and although he was now able to control it without it controlling him his rage had struck its peak and this time there was no reining it in.

There were fires burning. And to those who knew him, his silence was more daunting than seeing him in plain sight.

But right then Gene couldn't worry about Jimbo and whether he was aiming a gun in his direction or crooning to All By Myself over a glass of sherry. It was an important day and he needed to focus. With the Cheshire Cat and the Little Grey Man battling it out for supremacy Jimbo was the last of his worries.

He didn't even realise at first. His mind was working its way through 101 different scenarios for getting some alone time with Alex in one of the polling booths later that morning but before he had a chance to unlock his car he noticed them:

His tyres. Slashed. All four of them.

He stepped back. He stared. He slowly walked around the vehicle, checking and double checking each wheel at a time as though he couldn't quite believe that someone would do that, to him, to his car. To his precious car; the only thing that ranked in his life almost as highly as Alex. It even came above scotch and lattes in his list of priorities.

"Knife-wielding bastards!" he cried as he dropped to his knees and poked at the deep gouges like he was examining the torso of a murder victim. "The tossing arseholes!" His outraged eyes turned from the car to the station and back again as he staggered to his feet. His car! His bloody car! His pride and joy!

He struggled for a moment to work out what to do first. Should he go back to the station and demand the security footage to see who'd done such a thing? Should he try to catch Alex before she set off so that he'd at least have someone to ride with – and to rant to about his terrible sense of loss? Should he just stand where he was, swearing his head off in the blind belief that it would somehow make his tyres heal and his car driveable again?

He chose the last of the three options first. Standing in the middle of the car park, swearing his head off like some kind of foul-mouhed comedian doing some performance art, he let forth an angry tirade but alas his tyres remained shredded and his anger levels only increased.

"Bollocks," he said eventually, his hands angrily on his hips and his lips pursed with fury.

He wanted to get the footage. He wanted to find out exactly who had maimed his beauty but there wasn't time.

"Don't worry, I'll be back," he told his car with a reassuring pat to the bonnet, "I'll catch the arseface that did this. And I'll give you first option on running over their bloody toes."

Reluctantly he left his car and began to slouch away to find Alex and try to get his mind back on the main matter of the day. It was time to make sure the voters got their crosses on their forms safely.

And then he just might have to have a word with his MP about extra security for car parks in the immediate area.

~xXx~

A/N: Sorry this chapter was on the short side, just felt things needed a brief recap, and also I've been distracted... The next chapter will be up in the next couple of days, I want to get my other fics updated by the end of the week as well :)