Just to assure you all that I have not forgotten... the plot bunny is still biting...

Gene walked wearily up the steps to Alex's front door, a reluctant and weary CJ in tow. He had no idea if it was a good idea to bring her back here, but he wasn't leaving her on her own. And he was having a hard time getting past the point that she was his daughter. Some strange paradoxical loop had brought him face to face with his own child as an adult, before she had even been born in his own time. None of this made the slightest sense, and for a moment he wondered if it was all a dream. Bloody nightmare more like.

He pressed the doorbell, and the front door was wrenched open, as though she's been there all night waiting for me. Uh oh... One look at Bolly's face and he knew he was for it.

"Of all the insensitive oafs, you really do take the biscuit...Gene Hunt" She punctuated her diatribe by stabbing him in the chest with a long finger.

"You're busy."

Gene grabbed CJ's arm before she could walk away. "No. Nothing you can't hear." He pushed her ahead of him, and slid by the perpetually angry woman who was the love of his life, if she did but know it. As CJ stepped past Alex into the hall, she looked back at him, and with the blinding light of clarity, he knew at once who her mother must be. A surge of very strange emotions washed through him like the backwash from a speedboat. On one level, he was aware that Bolly was still tearing him off a strip, that CJ was standing there looking sulky and angry, and the expressions that were crossing her face were a mirror image of her mother, but there was this other weird feeling... Gene tested it out... it felt strangely like joy... he didn't do joy.

The volume of what was being said to him increased, penetrating his fog of emotions, but he wasn't quite ready to acknowledge any of it, and he turned away. Then she grabbed his arm.

In his night of revelations, he'd forgotten all about it, but by dawn's early light it seared through him like an avenging angel. A bolt of what felt very like lightening shafted through his elbow and his brain, and for the first time in his life, Gene fainted.

He hit the floor like a ton of bricks.

Alex and CJ gasped as one, "Gene" and swooped.

They managed to drag him into the sitting room, and somehow managed to push, pull and drag him up onto Alex's sofa.

Now she sat by his side, biting her bottom lip to keep it from trembling and wishing with all her heart that he would wake up. Because he was scaring her witless.

Alex smoothed his hair back gently, and for the first time in her confident, generally together life, she didn't have a single clue what to do. She needed him to be the Gene Genie for her, because she was too fragile to figure this out, and too tired. He was Gene, tough, arrogant in his certainty, strong, and dependable, and that was exactly how she needed and wanted him.

A waft of perfume brought Gene back to the land of the living, Bolly, he would know her scent anywhere, didn't care what it was called, to him it was Bolly. It was her fingers gently stroking his hair back, her thigh pressed against his side, and he just lay there with his eyes closed, drinking in the sensations of a softer and gentler DI Alex Drake. The angry version was a little more than he wanted to handle right then.

At what point Alex became aware that he was back with her, she couldn't really say, but the fact that he was still lying there, and his eyes were still firmly closed, worried her.

CJ sat on the easy chair, her legs curled up and she hugged her knees against her. Clutched herself with all her might and held on. Otherwise she might be screaming. She was here, and her parents were here, but they weren't as she remembered them, these were much younger versions of her parents, in their prime. Her dad had been in his sixties, and her mum in her mid fifties when the car bomb had taken them from her. She didn't know how or why this was possible, but they were here together and she was seeing the first early dawn of their relationship. She could still feel the imprint of his hands on her arms, as he'd shouted at her in the back alley only a couple of hours before. Life was precious, he'd said, well she hadn't felt that for sometime. Somehow, in some impossible way, her Dad was back, and her Mum, she'd been given a second chance like no other and she felt like she might break apart with just one more tiny thing. And facing up to their disappointment in her and when they found out just what she had done to get the club, that was more than she could cope with.

Gene was exhausted, his arm hurt, his head hurt with just the pressure of all that was going on, and then there was the two women, one from his present, and his future, and one only from his future, which might never happen unless he could untangle the trail and get them back to where they all came from so that all their lives could continue. He was the Manc Lion, the ruler of his pride, except that right now he felt more like a middle aged tabby cat than a lion. And a pretty battered old mouser at that. Feeling every day of his forty five years, he prised his eyelids open and looked up into his Bolly's face.

Relief coursed through Alex, and sympathy. She'd been almost out of her mind with fear, for him, for herself, for what all of this meant, and Molly, even Evan and what this meant for him, she hadn't really stopped to think about what must be going through Gene's mind. She put her hand up to his cheek, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. A moment of truth passed between them, and he sat up, gathered her into his arms and held her. It was just comfort, like he had so many times before, and Alex put her head down on his shoulder and took comfort, because she really, really needed it.

CJ watched the tender moment pass between her parents, and shrank within herself. How they must have loved each other, and how much they must have sacrificed, and how I have repaid that... She clutched her knees tighter and dropped her head forward on them, tears for all that she had misunderstood, and done wrong, and the price which had been paid.

How could she undo it?