As promised, here's the next chapter! To the lovely guest reviewer - thank you so much for your comments. I hope you enjoy this one too.
They wouldn't let him see her. She'd been whisked away after a doctor took one look at her: Gene wouldn't easily forget the sight of her, still tangled in his coat, unable to keep still with the pain that intermittently made her shudder and writhe. He closed a fist with none of his usual force, calling to memory her hand clutching at his. He couldn't unsee the rawness of her emotion or the very animal response to pain she'd displayed in the end, when even the doctor used that word they'd both come to dread. Miscarriage. And then she'd been taken away, wheeled out of the emergency department and finally through doors past which they wouldn't allow him to follow. Not even that matronly woman, who'd mistaken them for husband and wife (he'd been too bowled over to put her right) would pay any attention to the warrant card he waved in countless faces demanding to be let in.
So he perched on a god-awful plastic chair or paced up and down, his head turning the moment a door opened at either end of the corridor. Stupidly, he half-expected Bolly herself to throw open the doors, all legs on those bloody gorgeous shoes, with his coat thrown over one arm and a smile to say there was nothing wrong. And then he remembered that the shoes were abandoned under his desk in CID, and the jeans that made her 'all legs' had eventually been cut off of her when she refused to co-operate, and his last effort before being forcibly removed by a nurse was to growl at them all, "Are you all blind? She's in pain, do somethin' useful instead of askin' her to do flamin' gymnastics to peel off her jeans!"
In the weeks between that night in her flat and the present moment, his mind had been near constantly filled with imaginings of the more explicit kind, starring his right-hand woman. But in his frantic state, he was thankfully devoid of such thoughts – he couldn't and wouldn't conjure them now.
But while they would have been wildly inappropriate, such thoughts would have at least been a distraction. Instead, he was tormented by what might have been. He'd never wanted kids – he'd never trusted himself not to turn into his waste-of-space, dangerous father – and more to the point, he'd never been with a woman he could see as decent mother material in the first place. And then had come Alex Drake, stumbling into his life in that ridiculous outfit as an undercover prozzy, like a whirlwind with a cut-glass accent and a brain worthy of every award going, even if she did have some off-the-wall ideas sometimes. She was something else entirely, like she'd dropped into Fenchurch East from another planet. Not that he'd ever tell her, but she gave him a bloody good run for his money in that department and although it drove him crazy, it also drove him crazy… Which was what had got them into this situation in the first place.
It was getting late. He knew the lads would be expecting him in Luigi's, but he wasn't going anywhere that would put more distance between him and Alex. He yawned, then stood up, pacing to force himself to stay awake. He needed a cigarette: maybe he'd be able to think clearly with a Marlboro between his teeth. Thrusting a hand into his trouser pocket, he swore under his breath. His packet was in the car, so he had nothing to distract him from the thorny issue of how he'd ever tell Alex Drake that he was impossibly, irrevocably, hopelessly in love with her.
Towards midnight, he must have drifted off, because he awoke with a start when a woman in her forties with intense ginger hair took hold of his shoulder firmly.
"Excuse me Sir, are you DCI Hunt?"
Gene took a moment to remember where he was before mumbling something unintelligible. "Yeah, why? Where's Alex – is she alright?"
"Ms Drake has been asking for you –"
That was all he needed to hear. He was up and out of the chair at once, and halfway down the corridor before the nurse pulled him back by his jacket.
"Mr Hunt, wait! You need to know that she's still unwell –"
"I 'ardly expected her to be ready for active duty, I did bring her in! I think I know what a state she was in!" His temper was rising and it was only the thought of Alex that tamed it before he did something stupid. She was under his skin, right inside his head – she might as well have been standing there with one of those disapproving looks, pointing out that getting thrown off the premises wasn't constructive.
"Look, I shouldn't even be letting you in, visiting time is long, long over! The least you could do would be to keep your voice down and show a bit of respect." There was something steely in her – she'd have made a half-decent plonk, probably. "If anyone catches you with her, it wasn't me who let you in, understood? You can have ten minutes, no more."
Gene nodded, feeling something like a schoolboy who'd been told off by his mam. He allowed himself to be led to the small side room with a card slipped into the holder by the door: Alexandra Drake. Spontaneous miscarriage. He wanted to rip that smug little card to shreds and stamp it into the ground.
"Ten minutes, remember?" the nurse said, before turning on her heel and squeaking off down the ward as if she hadn't seen him.
Her face was creased with upset, each line sporting its own display of teardrops that glinted under hospital lights. She had make-up down her cheeks and such a heartbroken expression that Gene was of half a mind to turn around and leave. Forget everything he'd thought out in that corridor – he couldn't deal with crying. But then –
"I missed you, why weren't you here?"
In the time it took for Gene to put his coat back on and shove his hands deep into the pockets in the hope of finding cigarettes, he realised that aside from being an emotional wreck, Alex was also very, very out of it on some ungodly amount of painkillers.
He sat in the chair next to the bed, and looked at her closely. "They wouldn't let me come with you," he replied, frowning. "You still in pain, Bolly?"
Alex shook her head uncertainly. "I don't think so. Everything feels a bit… weird." She tilted her head to one side and then the other.
"That's morphine, probably," he said gently. "I'll not take anythin' to heart that you say, just in case you really 'ave gone off your trolley." He gave her half a weak smile.
"I'll endeavour to keep my own mind, for your benefit," she said, although she didn't meet his eye. Drugged to high heaven she might be, but nothing could dull the memory of what had happened. Why were they like this, skirting around it and not finding the words? Where would they even start? Alex rested her head back on her pillows, aware of a pulling in her stomach even though the pain receptors had been dulled beyond recognition. She knew her eyes were filling with tears and there was nothing she could do to stop them.
Now or never, Gene thought. He had to tell her – she had to know. He opened his mouth to speak, and then she sat up.
"Can you stay?" she asked with wide eyes.
"Bolls, you know they won't let me."
"Please stay," she pleaded. "I – you make me feel safe, when you're here." It might have been the drugs, making her a little freer with her words than she would have usually been, but they didn't detract from the truth. "I don't want to stay here alone."
Gene let out a long breath. "I can't stay. I'm – I'm not even meant to be in 'ere now."
Alex reached out for his hands. Tears were falling again, endless cascades that she couldn't stop.
" 'm sorry, Bolls." He held her hands tightly, and thought about checking his watch before stopping himself. To hell with the rules. Gene Hunt didn't do rules, especially not tonight. He took his coat off again, and squeezed onto the bed beside Alex, careful to avoid all the medical bits and pieces attached to her.
Moving over to accommodate him, Alex mumbled groggily, "What're you doing?" She was, however, only too happy to lean into him and accept his arms around her.
"I'll stay until you fall asleep," he whispered.
Alex nodded into her pillow and felt the tendrils of sleep curl their way around her. "Thank you," she said. And then, after a moment: "love you."
It was a sleepy mumble, but Gene heard it clearly. His heart rate picked up – he hadn't said anything he'd planned to say, but did she know already? He held her to him and felt each rise and fall of her chest slow to the rhythm of sleep. Maybe the nurse wouldn't come back, maybe he could just stay like this.
It had hit him briefly in his office, but it was much more real on a hospital bed shared with tubes and wires. It hadn't been on either of their radars before, but it had been unintentionally added and then suddenly torn away. They could have had a baby. Gene buried his face in Alex's hair: she'd turned carefully onto her side to face him and her own face was somewhere in his chest. He closed his eyes and breathed the clean scent of whatever girly shampoo she used, mixed with the slightly tart sting of hairspray.
He was almost asleep himself when the door opened without a preceding knock.
"Mr Hunt!" It was that same nurse, with a hushed, urgent whisper. "Get off that bed at once – you had ten minutes, remember? It's been almost half an hour!"
Gene rubbed his eyes and reluctantly extricated himself from the bed. Alex stirred and he winced, hoping she wouldn't wake. She didn't, at least not properly. She half-opened her eyes and reached out for him one last time.
"Will you… leave..." She yawned. "Leave your coat, please?"
It was practically Baltic outside, but... What have you turned me into, Lady B? He picked up the coat from the chair and without a moment's hesitation, laid it on top of her blankets.
"I'll be back tomorrow," he promised, but she was already asleep again.
Outside the door, he hovered for a moment, not sure what to do with himself.
"She's lucky to have you, Mr Hunt."
He coughed to disguise the way his throat felt like it was closing. She didn't have him, that was the problem. And he didn't have her. They'd spent more than a year skirting around each other, avoiding the obvious, and one alcohol-fuelled night of honesty had left them in an even more complicated situation than before.
The next morning, Gene's decision to abandon his coat for the greater good of Alex's comfort seemed like an exercise in self-punishment. His breath rose in clouds even when there wasn't a cigarette balanced between his lips and the pavements were like an ice-rink as he hurried from the Quattro into Fenchurch East Station. The hurrying was an attempt not to be noticed minus his coat, but this turned out to be a waste of time.
"Guv, what are you wearing?" Ray's effort to contain spluttering laughter was weak at best.
"It's called a jumper, Carling," Gene replied coldly (in tone and in body temperature.) "People wear them when it's bloody freezing."
Ray raised his eyebrows in amusement. "You look like my cousin – he's a geography teacher!"
"Piss off, are we going to stand out here all day and wait for the scum to come sliding up to the cells for us?" They walked most of the way to CID in silence, the Guv using a silent salute of the two-fingered variety to fend off comments about his attire as they made their way through the station.
"Where's your coat, Guv?" Chris asked innocently as soon as the Guv stepped through the doors, not taking the hint from Ray, who was making a cutting motion at his own throat, a few steps behind the Guv.
"Oh for Christ's sake!" Gene pushed a hand through his hair. He did not need this today: he did not want to be dragging this bunch of bastards under control like boys in a playground, when his mind was firmly elsewhere. "Let's get this straight, shall we? Oi, Bammo, Poirot, I'm not sayin' this twice. I left my coat be'ind at the 'ospital, right? I am wearing a jumper, because I don't want bloody frostbite out there!" He gestured at the icy windows.
Ray chipped back in, having picked up a detail of interest. "What, you stayed?!"
"Of course I stayed!" Oh, shit, good luck coverin' that up. "You didn't see the state she were in," Gene said quickly, "I couldn't just up and leave 'er. Not as if she's got anyone on 'er file to call, anyway." He shot a glare towards Ray and Chris, as if challenging them to add anything else.
"You mean… She ain't got no family listed, Guv?" Shaz asked nervously.
Glad of a less loaded question, Gene resisted his usual impulse to bite Shaz's head off. She's rubbing off on you, that posh mouthy tart. "None, Shaz. Blank page."
"So she's got no-one to go see 'er then..." she said thoughtfully, half to herself, which definitely should have elicited a sharp comment.
With what Shaz had observed over the time Alex had been part of CID, she strongly suspected that her DI would have one visitor. And if her hunch was correct about what had put the woman in hospital in the first place (and she truly hoped that it wasn't) then DCI Hunt was quite strongly implicated, despite the distance he'd so obviously tried to put between them. She knew better than to ask him about Alex's situation: stress always put him in a foul mood and this wasn't 'just' stress either.
She put a cup of tea with the prerequisite number of sugars on his desk, and dropped an additional sachet beside the mug just in case, before turning to leave the office.
"Cheers, Shaz," he said wearily.
She stopped in surprise. Paused. Took a step back and allowed the door to swing almost shut. "Tell me to butt out, Guv, but are you alright?" she asked quietly.
"S'not me you should be asking, don' matter about me, does it?"
Shaz wondered if he was quite concentrating – he'd almost perfectly told her, without telling her, why Alex was in hospital. In which case, it did matter, not that she'd say anything to suggest she'd worked it out. "No, s'pose not, Guv. Was it… was she alright, when you left 'er in the end?"
He looked up and met her eyes. "I've never seen a woman in so much pain," he said plainly. And then he shut the conversation down. "You've got work to be getting on with, Granger."
Later that morning, Chris questioned Shaz on why she'd taken so long just to take a cup of tea to the Guv. "What was all that about?"
Shaz frowned. It wasn't her business, so definitely not hers to share. She decided to be cryptic and leave it there. "You'd 'ave to be blind to miss it, baby, sorry."
The end of the working day could not come soon enough. Ignoring calls from the team to join them in Luigi's, Gene drove straight from Fenchurch East to the hospital, mirroring the journey from the day before and all its haste. The only difference was that he hesitated in the car park: Alex might have been thoroughly out of it the last time he saw her, but she was likely to be back to peak intelligence by now. All those things he didn't know how to say…
Alex was sitting up in bed when a muffled shout from outside her door raised a gentle smile to her lips. In the midst of the grim situation in which she found herself, she wondered if anyone else could have possibly had that effect on her.
"Bolly, you decent?" It was followed by a mumble, that Alex didn't doubt for a moment would be laced with expletives. "I mean, can I come in?"
She squeezed her hands together anxiously, despite the smile that had evaporated as quickly as it arrived and despite the butterflies he put in her stomach. "Yes, come in," she called.
It was a surprise to see Gene Hunt looking almost as rough as she felt herself. There was a weariness in his eyes that was different to what she'd seen before, on the tail end of drawn-out cases or extended drinking sessions in the trattoria. He didn't stand quite so fearlessly in the doorway as he might have done ordinarily. And to her astonishment, he waited to be invited further into the room instead of just marching over and taking up position in the chair. She knew better than to ask him about it, and was glad that she knew him and his idiosyncrasies so well.
He stood at the foot of the bed, his hands jammed in his trouser pockets. He shuffled where he stood, looking at her in brief snatches before averting his eyes. "Can I have my coat back now, Lady B?" he asked. "I've been freezing my knackers off all day, and takin' insults off the 'ole station about looking like a geography teacher!"
Alex laughed, although she tried to stop quickly as it hurt her sore stomach. "Ouch," she hissed. "Of course you can – one of the nurses hung it on the back of the door this morning. Gene?" She watched as he shrugged his arms back into the coat, seeming to grow several inches by doing so. "Thank you. For leaving it, I mean. It must have been an awful shock for you, and I honestly can't remember much of it once I got here and they were pumping me full of God knows what… But –" She paused, biting her lip. "Thank you for staying. It means a lot to me that you stayed."
He nodded thoughtfully. "You wanted me to stay, so I did. You needed me."
"I did. I do," she corrected herself. She met his gaze and held it. "Please sit down, so we can talk. I know you're not good at that and you won't want to –"
"I'm sorry, Alex." He rubbed a hand roughly over his mouth and jaw as he sat down, reaching the back of his neck, which was a dead giveaway to her that he was intensely stressed by the idea of conversation involving anything emotional.
She shot him a sympathetic look. "It's not your fault your generation was brought up to reject all human emotions," she commented.
"No – I'm sorry about – all this," he said, gesturing helplessly at the room, the bed, and her.
"Ah." Her chest tightened a little and she held out her hand, the one that wasn't encumbered by an intravenous cannula. To her relief, he came and took it, allowing her to hold on tight and guide him to sit on the bed beside her. "Gene, look at me, please," she implored. "That night, I believe we both knew what we wanted, and were both consenting parties to what we did. So it can't be your fault, any of it. It happened."
He wasn't sure what made him wrap his arms around her. She seemed so small and vulnerable, even with her full mental capacity. And if he forced himself to be honest, he needed her as much as she appeared to need him. They were silent for a while, even when they pulled apart from the embrace, their hands still interlinked. He studied her face intently. Suddenly there was a minute change in her expression.
"Bolls? What's goin' on in that head o' yours?"
She shook her head by way of response, and he wondered if she was in pain again – it was what she'd done when she couldn't answer questions the night before. But her bottom lip quivered while the rest of her was still. She brought her cannulated hand over to meet the other, and knotted them together. Gene, careful of the tubes, encased her hands with his but said nothing.
"It happened," she repeated, and it was worse than a punch in the chest.
"Go on..." he said uncertainly. "You've – you've got something to say, say it." What would the team think if they could see him now? He decided he didn't care.
Alex sniffed and he expected her to cry, but she didn't, not straight away anyway. He felt her hands tense under his. He leaned forwards and rested his lips on her hairline at one temple.
"A baby, Gene," she said in a voice that didn't quite sound like her own. It was empty of her sparkle, devoid of the personality he'd come to miss when it wasn't present in his CID. "I know it wasn't what you wanted, I know you don't like children – and I certainly hadn't planned for this ever happening… but we could have had a baby. And now… we don't have one anymore." The words hung in the air between them for a moment, before she dissolved into tears and sobbed into his chest.
She was right, though he'd never said a word about any of it. Infuriatingly clever woman that she was, she just knew. He stroked her hair, a vague, alcohol-sullied memory surfacing that once upon a time, she'd liked that. He hoped she'd know that he was trying to soothe her, rather than flirt with her. Of course she'd know, bloody woman knew everything, even when she was trying to evacuate every drop of liquid from her body through the form of tears. Curling himself gently around her, he murmured her name and held her until the sobs became smaller and smaller cries. "We'll be alright, Alex," he said eventually.
"We?"
Gene took a breath. "Yes, if that's what you want. It wasn't just the drink that made me take you to bed, y'know. I do 'ave some self-control."
She simply raised her eyebrows.
"God, woman, I'm trying to tell you that I –" He faltered, the words sticking in his throat with their unfamiliarity. "You were bob-on with what you said, psychiatric mind-reader that you are – I never thought I wanted kids. But… Christ almighty, I don't know 'ow to say it! I wouldn'a minded, with you. So don't go thinkin' you 'ave to be the only one upset about it. Just don't expect tears from me – you know I don' do that."
Alex was stunned.
I wouldn'a minded, with you.
Those words were still ringing in her ears when a nurse burst into the room, and Gene sprang back from the bed like he'd been stung.
"Mr Hunt, your station just put a call in to the desk – you're needed at once. Murder investigation."
"Bugger," Gene cursed. He looked desperately into her eyes, and it was an expression she was so unused to that he barely looked like himself.
"Go, then!" she urged. "I'll still be here tomorrow. Big Important DCI has to go to work," she added cheekily.
"I've barely been out of the sodding place for an hour!" he retorted, hesitating more. "Can I… Can I kiss you?"
"Well, now I do feel special. Gene Hunt, asking permission?" she teased. "Yes," she said, sensing his embarrassment.
It was a cliché, but the kiss was electric. He tasted of cigarettes and faintly of Scotch. He was gentle, kissing with his mouth barely open, and he touched his forehead to hers for a moment afterwards.
"What'll you do, without a DI?" Alex whispered uncertainly. A murder investigation needed a Detective Inspector, and she was hardly any use to him from a hospital bed.
"That," he said slowly, "is not for you to worry about." He kissed her cheek and murmured, "Goodnight, Bollyknickers."
She could still feel him on her lips, and she touched the space on her cheek that he'd kissed with her fingertips. "Goodnight, Guv."