So it's only been about a month since I last updated, so these are getting more frequent! (Woo?) I FINALLY finished the last chapter of this fic tonight (June 5). Maybe I'll actually post the rest of the story sort of regularly now?
Gene stared at Alex laying on the floor. Her eyes had not quite gone glassy, but he knew that she was as good as gone. As she had fallen to the ground, her dress had smeared blood around her exposed neck and shoulders. It was slowly drying to her pale skin, contrasting sharply. There was an ever growing scarlet stain underneath her, and he could swear that he heard dripping as the blood continued to flow onto the saturated carpet. She had been crying from what he assumed was pain, but that had stopped now.
"Alex," he murmured, ignoring Jimmy talking over him.
Alex gave no indication that she had heard, staring through him now. Gene felt the rage building inside. She was gone. And what was worse, he couldn't do anything. He was stuck on his side, the ropes so tight they were digging into his skin. He struggled against them uselessly. He just wanted to get to her, to hold her hand once last time.
Jimmy started laughing then. "She's gone, Hunt. Do you feel sad? Hurt? Angry? Do you feel like your life is over? That's how I felt when I found out Scottie died."
"HE WASN'T MEANT TO DIE!" Gene roared. "I TRIED TO SAVE HIM!"
There was a long silence before Jimmy spoke again. "Yeah, well you fucking failed that, didn't you?" he asked, his voice deadly.
Gene rolled on his back, ignoring the strain in his arms to stare Jimmy in the face. He could see the angry madness in his eyes, and knew that especially now, high off the exhilaration of a kill, there would be no reasoning with him. He wanted to scream, to rage, to throw off his bonds and punch Jimmy in the face. But there was nothing he could do.
Gene snarled in rage and frustration, when suddenly, outside the door of the room he heard another door slam open.
"Police! Come out or we will shoot!"
He had never been so happy to hear Ray's voice in his life. They were going to get Jimmy. He might survive this ordeal. But the figure in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Alex. He turned his head to face her. She was ghostly pale now, her eyes only halfway closed. He couldn't see her chest moving. Even if he did survive, she already had not. He fought off tears of anger and sorrow as the bedroom door slammed open. Alex Drake was gone.
Pain radiated across his chest, arm and leg suddenly as he heard a series of pops. Gene watched Jimmy fall to the ground as someone tackled him from behind. "You're nicked," said a man in a familiar denim jacket.
Ray rushed in behind Chris, rushing to Gene when he saw him. "Don't deal with me," Gene said. "Alex. How's Alex?" It was too much to hope that she was alive, but he had to be sure.
He watched Ray pale as the man looked at Alex. "Guv," he whispered quietly.
"Is she dead." It was more of a statement, rather than a question. It was the only way he could mask his emotions, go into his professional mode. By being professional, by being a police officer, he would be able to deal with it. He had to disassociate.
A fresh wave of pain spread over his body from the bullet wounds as Chris opened a knife and Ray reached a shaking hand to Alex's neck. Gene noted his hands become loose and realised that Chris had cut the rope. He sat up, ignoring the pain, and let Chris start working on the rope around his ankles.
Ray pulled his hand off Alex's neck, his fingers covered in her blood. "Bloody Nora," he whispered to himself, before announcing loudly to the group. "She's alive! Get the ambulance up here, NOW! Drake is critical!" The last two sentences were spoken into his radio.
Gene heard confirmation from whoever was on the other side, and felt relief wash over him.
Jimmy started laughing in reply. "Sure, she's alive," he said mockingly. "For now. I give her three minutes."
As if he had spoken to her directly, Alex's eyes opened wide in that moment, and she started coughing. Blood tinged the corners of her mouth as she stared without seeing to the world beyond.
"C'mon, Drake," Ray said. "Don't do this to us!" He cut the ropes of her arms and legs and grabbed a sheet to press against the wound. "You just gotta keep fighting ma'am," he whispered. Gene swore he heard Ray's voice break, but ignored it, trying to preserve Ray's dignity.
Alex's breathing became slow and erratic, only taking a gasping gurgle every few seconds.
'Agonal breathing,' he thought to himself, knowing that it was a sign of impending death. But at least in that moment, she was breathing, even if it was only a facsimile of what could truly get oxygen to her lungs. She must be trying to stay alive.
There was a sudden bustle of noise, and an ambulance crew came into the room. They took one look at Alex before loading her onto the pretended not to notice how the blood drained out of their faces as they saw her. They were thinking the same thing he was. As she was whisked out of the room, only Chris had any words to offer. "Boss...ma'am...You can make it through this." No one else said anything, all too aware of the unlikelihood of that statement coming true.
"You need an ambulance too, Guv," Ray said, picking up his radio and calling for one.
Gene finally looked down at his injuries. He had a bullet wound in his upper right arm, one in his upper right chest near his collar bone, one in his lower stomach, and one in his right thigh, near where he had gotten shot nearly ten years previously. Blood was not pouring out of him like it had been Alex, but he knew that he probably needed to be seen soon.
He tried not to stare at the spot that Alex had left on the floor as Chris took Jimmy out of the room, instead trying to assess his wounds. This proved to be fruitless, as he just kept staring at the dark red against the light beige of the carpet. He had seen enough murder scenes to know that there was far too much blood there.
Trying to find anything to distract himself, he looked at Ray. Ray had blood on him, but not too much. Alex hadn't bled on him long. In fact, the most that he could really see was from where Ray reached to check for a pulse. How did you find us?" he asked finally.
"Shaz saw the bastards putting you in their car. She got a plate. She ran into Luigi's before we started drinking in earnest, and we went back to CID and called Hackney Street, since they were handling Drake's disappearance. We worked together to find it. Get this. The twonks used their own sodding car! It pulled back to Liam O'Malley. We went to his flat, and there was a picture of him in his Royal Navy uniform with another bloke. On the back, someone, probably his mum, had written 'Liam with James Payne, 1980'. James Payne sounded a bit familiar, so we looked up his record, found out he was stationed elsewhere when his son was killed in a bank robbery. That gave him motive. Opportunity and means, well, Shaz saw that when she got the reg."
"So you can function without me. And here I was, thinking DS stood for dog shit." Ray smiled as pain from the beating and the bullets were starting to overwhelm Gene and his vision flickered. He noticed that he had started panting slightly, trying to control the pain. That wasn't a good sign.
"No offense Guv, you look like shit."
"I feel like it, Carling," he responded, trying to act as though nothing was wrong.
At that point, the second ambulance crew made its way into the room. Gene grudgingly let himself be loaded onto a stretcher, as he couldn't currently walk. They strapped him on and he got the disconcerting feeling of being lifted into the air.
As they started carrying him down the stairs, Gene saw black on the corners of his vision. This might not be good. Was he passing out from blood loss, or from the concussion he had received earlier? Either way, he knew he needed to stay awake.
Gene shook his head, trying to shake off the darkness of his vision, but it did nothing. The black was continuing to eat away at his eyesight, and he noticed that the ambulance crew was looking increasingly worried.
"Gene, stay with us okay?" one of them said to him.
"What do you mean? I'm fine," he tried to say. What came out was a slur of unintelligible words. He realised that he was much further gone than he felt, as he tried desperately to stay awake. However, it became too much, and finally, he succumbed to the darkness, letting himself fall away from consciousness.
His last thought was of Alex.
~(*)~
"C'mon Drake. Don't do this to us."
The voice startled her out of the reverie she had been in. She had no idea how long she had been wrapped in the golden sunlight of what she assumed was death. If the voice was coming to her now, though, did that mean that she was still alive?
Honestly, even if it wasn't death, Alex was quite content where she was. She wasn't sure what it was, but it was calm and warm. She had always thought of Gene's world as a sort of purgatory, but if that was purgatory, where was she now?
"You just gotta keep fighting, ma'am."
Fighting what? She was probably dead, or at least she was going to be soon. There was no way she could have gotten to hospital in time. She had lost too much blood on the floor of the flat, and she knew she could not be saved. And she knew that Gene was probably gone too.
"Boss...ma'am… you can make it through this."
She pushed the voices away, choosing to remain in the warmth and rapture that she had never felt before. It was so perfect, so lovely, that she didn't even mind that she was never going to see Gene again.
She realised suddenly that of the voices she had heard, Gene's was not among them. This was hardly surprising, she rationalised. By the time she went motionless, she had known that he would not be close behind her in death. The men could not be reasoned with. There was no psychological tactic she could have used to prevent it. Although, to be honest, she hadn't really tried.
Voices surrounded her, whispering at a distance. She ignored them, unable to figure out what any specific one was saying. They were all at the corners of her consciousness, too far away to understand. Alex heard urgency in their tones, but it did not matter. Everyone was too late. Everything was too late. Too much of her life was smeared onto an ugly beige carpet in a sparsely furnished flat.
She knew that the man had been almost surgical in his precision of where to shoot her. He had made sure that the wound would be fatal, no matter if someone had found them. And he had made sure that she suffered beforehand.
Alex could still recall the idea of the pain and the suffering she was in after the bullet hit her, even if she could not actually place the actual feeling. Too much of the past few months had been spent suffering. These men had wanted her dead, and they finally got their wish.
The voices murmured around her, louder, with increasing urgency. She paid them no mind, resuming her exploration of the brilliant glow of what she had now determined was near-death.
If this was near-death, if it was this beautiful, then what would death be like? She wondered this as she pushed away the voices again. They had gotten louder and more desperate and she was certain she heard her name at least once. Nothing she had experienced had ever been this wonderful, not even the best of her dreams. Even in the afterglow of childbirth, with her body so overjoyed at bringing a life into this world that it forgot everything else, she had not felt this way.
Molly. The thought was sudden, but urgent. If she was going to die here, she would definitely be leaving Molly behind. But what was the likelihood of her ever going back? Except for two weeks after waking up in hospital, all flashes of Molly had disappeared, even before she lost her memory. She might as well be dead back in the real world. A bullet to the forehead was not going to be an easy wound to overcome, so why should she try?
Alex realised that the bright radiance had suffused her mind, intoxicating her with its pleasantness. It was muddling her thoughts, her decisions, making her choose things she may have not chosen only a few minutes earlier. For some reason though, she didn't care.
The voices grew in loudness again, still quiet whispers in her mind, but closer than ever. She heard them saying her name, a cacophony of whispers. There was other conversation too, but she could not understand it. She tried to pull away once more, but somehow they were keeping her near them. The rapture was fading, and the panic started setting in.
"Alex, are you with us love?"
"Alex!"
"Alex, c'mon stay with us!"
If she had a body, she would have shaken her head at them. No, she would not stay with them. She had to return back to the warmth, back to the perfection she was just in.
Alex pulled out of their reach, letting the voices return to whispers, and letting the euphoria overwhelm her once more.
All of a sudden, she felt a sharp jolt run through the body she no longer had. It pulled her back to her panic once more, before another jolt ran through her. This time though, it hurt. It was worse than anything she had ever felt before, childbirth included.
Once more, the jolt ran through her body. If she had eyes, she would be crying. It ripped away the last of the ecstasy she had once felt, replacing it with cold darkness. Sound returned once more, and somewhere, at the very edges of her hearing, she heard the long, low beep that signified her heart had finally stopped.
In other news, I have officially been on a writing binge! I haven't written like this since back in my heyday, ten years ago. (JESUS THAT'S CRAZY). I don't know if any of it will make it up here, but I read through a lot of my old fics and took one that I wanted to redo this entire time (sorta like this one) and have officially redone it! I have officially reworked Avenging Heaven. I can't say if it's a ton better, but it is definitely a different story from before. I may or may not post it, but I will officially finish it first before making that decision. Maybe I'll let you know by the next time I actually remember to post an update!