Taken 4/10
By: am1019 (amproof on livejournal)
This chapter rating: T
(language)
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, I sure wouldn't do
this to them.
Characters: Gene, Sam
An Action Out of Character
The area where Sam was dropped was not entirely unknown to him. He found himself amongst buildings that would undergo the opposite valuation of his factory-cum-high rent flat in the next thirty years, but they would still stand, albeit condemned, in 2006. Good for nothing but crime, which was why he knew exactly how to weave through them.
He had no money in his pocket, so he couldn't have taken transport if he'd wanted to. The walk was doing him good. Aside from allowing him to stretch his legs after being curled up, his mind was getting exercise, too. He wondered if Gene had known this about him, that a stroll with the brisk wind on his face and hands would bring him back to himself. (He remembered the Guv's red face as he shouted and decided Gene hadn't put any thought into how Sam might or might not like a walk.)
He told himself that he had no hard feelings towards Gene. This was simply how the ape operated, on over-reaction autopilot.
Sam took a step and his thoughts were pleasant, easy. He took another and his fists clenched of themselves. Who did the Guv think he was? Sam had made an offhand remark. A stranger wouldn't have got noticed for it, but Sam, second in command, got hauled out in front of everyone—and he didn't need any help in giving Ray reason to disrespect him.
They were probably all having a good laugh at the station.
Another step, and he wondered, seriously, about the other man—what he looked like—not his injuries, for surely he was painted with them, but his size. Only a hulking horse of a man could have withstood battle with the Guv long enough to lay those scratches on his neck, to bruise the forehead, to swell the jaw. That was life, he supposed, never knowing what you'd find in the morning. While Sam had been sleeping off whatever he'd inhaled (or whatever new drug his doctors had given him), the Guv was fighting for his life from the looks of him.
Another step. Ray—he stopped himself from cataloguing all the asinine things Ray had done—had never been taken for a spin in the boot. Nor Chris. No, just Sam, and it was not because he was the only one small enough to fit. Remnants of bile rose in his throat. He turned his head and spat. He couldn't fit in at the station, but he could fit in a boot just fine. What did that say about him? He wouldn't be here much longer, not long enough to waste time dwelling on what it might mean that Gene had found this perfect match of man and machine and put it to such eager use. Let them hate him and mock him. Let them do to him what they would not do to each other. Let them.
Step. It must have been 2 men (or 3) who attacked the Guv and left marks like that. Had he caught a glimmer of dread in the Guv's eye before Gene grabbed him, as if he feared Sam would say something else? Just a flash, perhaps, of an expression he'd seen before on victims of unprovoked attack. He tried to imagine the Guv becoming someone who looked over his shoulder and slept with the windows closed and locked. It bothered him that he could imagine it. He had seen it happen. Great men, turned into neurotic shells thanks to an anonymous thug stepping from the shadows. But not Gene. No. He wouldn't. He would recover himself before his bruises faded. He had to. He was the Guv.
Step. Sam had been afraid of the dark. Not as a little child—he'd skipped that cliché, perhaps because his father always returned home during the night. He developed it in university. It came on suddenly, the first night alone, darkness dropped over him, an eyeless mask, and him with no one to say goodnight to. Maybe it wasn't darkness but loneliness that scared him. In the boot, he shouted and shouted and shouted, knowing that it wouldn't make Gene stop the car, but at least he had the sound of his own voice to keep him company.
Step. Then it wasn't lonely in the boot anymore. He could hear Gene talking to him, though his voice seemed to start in his mind and push outwards, offering the awareness of an idea before it was put to sound. (He had stopped yelling when he'd first heard the Guv's voice, and had been comforted.) It was as if Gene Hunt was now sparring with Sam's mother and doctor for the role of lead soloist in the choir of his psyche. As if his words, his voice, had been in Sam's mind all along, just waiting for the moment—a well-placed bump in the road—to fling them against the right neuron and wake them up. "You're mine," Gene said. "You're mine." Taken nicely, as whispered to a lover, Gene would never say this. Interpreted sinisterly, as a method of vengeance, Gene would never do this (though Sam's current situation cast that into doubt). But, his ears were full of the bumps of the road and the squalling of the wheels and, a product of his mind or not, he decided that he had got the words wrong.
So it went, Sam's resolve fluctuating between forgiveness and fury with each step until he came finally to the station and climbed the stairs, wondering how he would stop. With which emotion would he land in the Guv's office?
Ultimately, it didn't matter. The Guv was out. (It was fury.) His journey ended with an open door, an empty office, and Ray and Chris gaping at him like a pair of stuffed fish. Ray's impression was made more cow-like by the ever-present gum that he chewed without urgency—as he did everything; punching people the only thing he did in a rush, a trait shared with the Guv.
They all three stared at each other. Chris, waiting, with his patient, serene look as Ray and Sam measured who would cave first by speaking. Sam decided to be the bigger man, though he knew Ray would see it as folding. A failure to interpret solicitous gestures was, Sam thought, the sign of a smaller man.
"Where's the Guv?"
Ray rolled his eyes towards him as if to say, 'oh, now you think we're worth addressing?'
"He ain't here," he said, finally.
"Where is he?"
Ray shrugged. "Reckon you shouldna insulted him like that. He's a sensitive guy."
Sam pushed his hand into his pocket and pushed his fingernails into his palm. He counted to ten, slowly, to himself.
"Did he tell you what happened?"
"Nah." Ray's nose flared, and he bit his gum, hard, once, before returning to his careless chewing. It more than shouted his feeling about not being the Guv's confidant. "We figured he told you, you being his DI and all." Smack. Roll of the gum.
Sam tried not to show his shock. He had been asking if the Guv had told them what he'd done to Sam, but Ray thought he was talking about the Guv's injuries. Could it be the Guv hadn't told them?
"When do you suppose he'd have told me?"
"Just now—when you was out joyriding, leaving us here with 'im in charge." He thumbed at Chris, who smiled sheepishly, as if the Guv had ordered him to write down the names of naughty co-workers on a blackboard while he was out and Ray's name was the only one taken down.
No one had followed Sam and Gene outside. Could it be Ray and Carl didn't know what had happened? Had Gene confined Sam's embarrassment to the march through the station?
"Did he come back here?" Sam had to be sure that the reason they didn't know was that the Guv had chosen not to tell them he'd stuffed Sam in the boot (again), and not simply because he had not returned but would later to tell them everything.
Ray would love that.
"Aye. Then he went out again," Ray said.
Gene had saved Sam some of his pride. That was awfully stand-up of him. Awfully…out of character. No, he was keeping quiet to protect himself from talking about what happened. The others would think he overreacted, putting Sam in the boot for so long. They would want to know why.
So what was it? What wouldn't he tell anyone? What secret was worth keeping the finest story yet about the ongoing embarrassing exploits of Sam Tyler to himself?
"Ray?" Chris said.
"Wha?"
"Shouldn't you be telling Sam about..."
Ray looked over, his boredom emanating off him like a noxious fume. "Eh. Yeah. There's been a crime."
Sam stared at him. Could he have given up on policing so thoroughly? "What is it?" The unspoken fury between the words stopped Ray from making a smart remark.
Or, it would have, if Ray had any type of internal barometer for measuring how a person's tone affected the possibility he might get punched. Such mental aids weren't needed by men like Ray, men who could fight with one eye shut and a hand behind their backs and still come out shower-fresh.
"Drugs or sommat."
"...or sommat?" Sam said.
"Yeh."
"Well. So long as we're clear on what the crime's been."
"A lady got mugged," Chris said helpfully. He glanced back and forth to see if it had helped any. "She's in the Lost and Found."
Sam turned towards him. Slowly. "Are you telling me there is a victim of a violent attack sitting alone downstairs?"
"She's with Cartwright, ain't she?" Ray said. It didn't come out sounding like a question, but Chris nodded anyway.
Sam pushed past them, each staring blankly in his own way, as if they'd never been exposed to police work before.
"O.K. I'm going to go take a statement from her. You two get yourselves in order and update me on the drug connection when I get back."
"Oh, that's easy," Chris said. "Her boyfriend was a dealer. We reckon he roughed her up and she don't want to say, so she's claiming it were a stranger." He came forward eagerly. "See, but the boyfriend just got picked up on other charges, so the Guv's gone to get him and make him stand against these first."
"I thought you said the Guv wasn't here?" Sam said.
"He's not."
"The boyfriend isn't downstairs in our lock up?"
"Ah, no." Chris said. "He wasn't picked up in this district."
"I don't understand why he didn't send a constable to do the pick up."
"Well, the thing is, see, they're a bit...uh...." Chris turned to Ray.
"Tetchy," Ray supplied, his smirk unabashed and bordering on gleeful.
"Uh, yeah, tetchy over there. So the Guv decided to go on his own, case he had to have a bang around to get our guy back."
"Well, where is he?"
"In Hyde."
"He's...gone to Hyde?" Sam felt the pull of blood leaving his cheeks, plummeting to his chest, and drawing his color with it.
"Yep. Fat lot of good that will do him. Fuckers over there will never let someone out once they've got him, not even to do something proper for a brother." Ray turned his glare fully on Sam. "Will they?"
"I guess you'll find out. I'll be in the Lost and Found." Sam managed to keep himself steady as he walked out.
Hyde. The Guv was in Hyde. It didn't mean the same, he knew. For Gene, Hyde was just another place. It didn't symbolize anything. It wasn't--fair. It wasn't fair that Gene could hop in a car and drive to Hyde, and Sam couldn't.
Then again, Sam had never tried it.
So maybe he could.