Ten:
Gene keeps his eyes closed. He keeps his eyes closed because he's afraid, afraid to hear Alex's voice, tinny and somehow even more posh – sounding through the deck, and he breathes out slowly, and the room feels smaller, and darker, and narrower. The door opens, but he doesn't rise. He sits, leaning back in his chair, his palms pressed against his closed eyes and doesn't respond to Alex's "Guv?"
He hears her approach, the click of her finger against the STOP button, the clack of boots ridiculous to a police officer as she draws near.
He opens his eyes to Alex's hand pressing against his shoulder, her fingers cupping its roundness, her eyes wide, lips pursed in her worried-about-you-guv way. Gene has no words for her, cannot find the way out, he has done everything, tried everything. If he thought the key was loving her, seeing her, he knows he could've unlocked the door ages ago. As it is, neither love nor death nor good old Gene Hunt follow-through seem to budge the universe.
One day of losing Bolly-knickers was more than enough. But now he can see a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a million such days, stretching out in front of him: a bleak and weary landscape.
"I'm sorry, guv," she says lower lip trembling. "I'm sorry I asked you about Sam Tyler, but I'm lost, and I don't know what to do."
"You and me both, Bolly," Gene says, and pours them both two fingerfuls of scotch.
Gene passes the Operation Rose job on to Ray, and he and Alex spend the rest of the day at Luigi's, going more and more sideways as the day toddles on. It reminds Gene of when Alex first arrived at the precinct, believing, he now knows, that the entire world in which they live is nothing more than a funhouse fantasy. Gene knows how it can be when you can't trust your own senses, when all you've got is whatever's inside.
"When I first arrived here, I was so confused, so alone."
It's the first Alex has ever offered him on her own, which makes it an unusual and important event, and Gene's reply even more important to get just so. He leans forward across the patterned tablecloth, chin pillowed in one hand. "That's where you're wrong, Alex. You were never alone. You and Tyler, always thinking I was a force to be overcome. That we weren't in this together. You both chose to be alone."
"Perhaps you're right, guv," Alex says swirling her glass of white wine. "Perhaps that's just the way we work, me and Sam." She looks up at him, and her eyes do that squinty thing she does when she believes a suspect is lying to her. "But this isn't just about the tapes," she says licking her lips. "You wouldn't hand a case off to Ray just because you had evidence I was even madder than you thought. What is going on, Guv?" Her lips compress and he realizes she's worried again, worried for Gene Hunt. It, more than anything else, seems unreal.
"What's going on. What's going on is that no matter what I do, nothing ever changes."
"That's the job, Guv," Alex says, pressing the tips of her fingers into his arm, real as anything. "You can't let yourself think like that. You're making a difference, Guv, really."
Gene realizes this must be what Sammy and Bolly felt like all along, everyone talking around the real problem. "Did you really think that you could have made us all up? That your brain was so complex, so wondrous, but it could invent the likes of Gene Hunt? And not just me, Bolly, but Chris, Shaz, Ray, the entire station, all of 1982?"
"It seemed more reasonable than the alternative," Bolly says, tossing her hair.
"The alternative being that you are stuck here?" Gene says. "With us. Really."
She leans forward even more, tipsiness making her lower her voice, intimate: "…the alternative being that I'm an accidental time-traveller, or mad as a box of monkeys," she confides.
"I see. Given that…" Gene toasts her. "…I suppose I can understand why you decided you were a veritable psychological genius, capable of inventing a host of personalities tailored to suit."
She looks surprised he agrees. "Cheers, Guv," she says after a moment, tilting her wine glass his way.
"But… you knew Tyler, before. You were his psychiatrist."
"Psycho… wait, no, that's absolutely right. I was."
"And he talked about me, the presinct back in Manchester, our cases."
"He did. Rather enthusiastically."
"So Tyler would've invented me, not you."
She looks up at him from under long lashes. "You sound awfully serious about it."
"Am," he replies, downing the last of his scotch and signalling to Luigi for another. This time, the Italian leaves the bottle, eyeing the pair with his usual weighty significance: knowing precisely what is going through their heads and happy he has no part in it.
"You aren't taking me seriously, Guv," Alex says. "Are you?"
"Ah, Drake, I always take you seriously," Gene counters. "If I don't, you lay these soppy gazes my way, like I've smashed your lippy and drowned your kittens in a well." He sees her roll her eyes away and has to add, "If you'd had the day I'm having, you'd be ready to believe anything. I just want to get to the bottom of it. That's all."
"That's all I want," she says, suddenly, drunkenly sincere. "What became of Sam Tyler, Guv? Why won't you tell me?"
And Gene closes his eyes again, because it's this, it's always this, always Sam. Anger rises in him like a rough wind around his ribcage, his heart, and then he realizes it's because he doesn't know. "One day he was here," he says. "Then he was gone."
"Do you think he went home?" she asks, careful all over again, like careful now does them an ounce of good.
"Home to the future, Bolly?" Gene sighs, running a hand down his face. "Who knows? Perhaps. And good luck to him."
They end up in bed together, upstairs on her gigantic thing with the satin sheets, and Gene'd be chuffed if they weren't both fully dressed and on the verge of passing out. Alex is blabbing the whole thing to him, her and her parents and the exploding car, Molly, her daughter, with light brown hair and sweet, bright eyes, and Blackberries to make a cobbler. Her fears that he'd made Sam disappear, but she knows, she knows that can't be it, now.
In 2006, she says, they have these phones, like those car phones you see today, but mobile, able to be carried about, much smaller. (He remembers Sam muttering about mobile numbers.) In 2006, women are a bit more respected in the police force, but "…psychology, understanding people, a woman's job, even if it is for the police, so I wasn't the brunt of that joke." In 2006, there is global warming and Doctor Who is back. Women are hiding again, their hair smaller, their shoulders smaller, their makeup lighter.
It's like being in that locked filing room, knowing that he and Bolly could die together, and somehow that's making her lean against him, tucking herself under his arm, scooting close. Somehow, that makes her look up at him like she knows him, loves him, trusts him the way he has no choice but to love and know and trust her.
She's very, very drunk.
"You aren't saying anything, Gene. I know you must think I'm mad. I think I'm mad, half the time."
"I've lived the same day over, ten times," Gene says.
She pulls away, staring.
"So, does that make this an imaginary world? And me, an imaginary person? Probably, Bols. But maybe you're imaginary, too. Maybe we can all be fictional together."
"You're having me on," she says, scuttling back. "You're imitating me, Guv. Please. Don't."
He reaches out to her with both hands, drags her back in. After a moment of pushing him away, she relents. "No," he whispers into her hair. "No, Bolly-luv, no. We're just mad together, is all. We can be one, enormous, jiggling box of mad monkeys together."
She laughs, then, her best mad, Bolly-laugh, and he smiles, or at least his face stretches like a smile, as he leans into her.
"I would talk to Ray," she says, long after he thinks she's fallen asleep.
Gene tilts his face down, only to find that her head is tilted up. They're centimeters away. "What?"
"Ray," Bolly repeats. "Sometimes. I know it's weird. But sometimes, Ray knows things."
It occurs to him that he hasn't spoken to Ray except for that first day. That first time, where he asked Ray if Bolly'd heard about Sammy-boy from him.
"Ray," Gene says, incredulous.
"Well, I wouldn't waste any more time on me," she replies, turning her head to snuggle back into his shoulder, voice far too clipped and sensible for all the wine she's tipped back. "I'm wrapped up in my own worries, too much to be of any help to you. If you're really going through the same day over and over again, you need someone who thinks differently to you. Or me."
"Oh." Gene settles back, himself, and Bolly squirms a bit, cushioning her head in the best possible position. It's silent for a few more minutes. It's the best Gene's felt since the whole business started, Bolly tucked under his arm: the way it should be.
That's when they get the call: Ray and Chris and Shaz are at the morgue. The operation went south in a pretty spectacular way, without either Gene or Bolly to head it up, and the idiots are dead, all three.
He gets to watch Alex go through the paroxysms of grief that now seem too familiar to be entirely real. He watches her wrack herself with guilt – we should've been there, Guv! – and rail at him, pounding his chest with her fists.
"Are you mad, are you really that mad?" she shouts, and slaps him.
"No," he says, "just. Used to it."
She stares.
"Get out, Bolly," he says, too tired for it, now, for any of it: for Chris's young face, slack and cold; for Shaz's dark hair, still sticky with blood. The coroner could hardly recognize Ray, because he'd tried to get between the kids and the bullets, and Gene is sick of it all. "I just want this day to end," he tells her, and she stumbles off.
A/N: Aaaand, review? I do have this one completed already, but I'd like to hear what you think of it.
-K