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Alex realised how drunk she was as she attempted to climb the stairs to her flat backwards, mouth on Gene's and high heels catching on the threadbare carpet. The thought occurred to her that this was probably dangerous, the way they were staggering drunkenly up a steep flight of steps with their eyes closed and their hands anywhere but the banister, but then Gene's lips found hers again and any reasoning, any rationality slipped suddenly away.

"Jesus, Bolls." He stopped, moving to stand beside her and rest his forehead against hers. She opened her eyes to find him looking at her, eyes almost silver in the half-light and hair gold from the single bulb dangling above their heads, and felt her breath hitch in her chest. He looked tired, drunk, lived-in, the same Gene Hunt she'd so abhorred several months ago, but there was something else there too. Something she couldn't put her finger on, but something that set her alight every time he looked at her. Every time they burst into CID side by side. Every time he called her into his office and shut the others out.

Her heel caught again and she stumbled against the banister, hand clutching his shirt as she steadied herself. He moved with her, steps matching hers as though this was some strange dance they both instinctively knew, and she wondered if he'd noticed the way his hands had gone to her waist, protecting her even without meaning to.

They were still for several minutes, her hands still fisted in his shirt and his on her hips, breathing slowing a little. Alex felt as though she was under his spell, unable to move away or let him go out of some inexplicable fear that the moment she did, he would disappear like a shadow in darkness.

The mood of desperation, of need, was broken only when she started to slide past him back up the stairs at the same moment that he leaned in to kiss her, and his mouth ended up crashing down somewhere around her ear. She laughed, a sudden, breathless sound, and it shattered the tension, lifted the loneliness and replaced it with a warm tipsiness that stripped away her inhibitions.

"Careful, Mr Hunt," she whispered, ducking under his arm and away up the stairs, aware that his eyes followed her every movement. "I might start to think you actually like me."

"Not a hope." He was suddenly behind her as she slipped the key into the lock, turned it once, pushed the door open. "Doing you a favour, that's all. Anyway, you kissed me first."

She grinned at him over her shoulder, shrugging off her jacket and then turning to face him. "Oh, very mature. If we're going to play that game..." she trailed off and raised an eyebrow. "After all, I think you'll find-" The rest of the sentence was swallowed as his lips found hers, fierce, possessive, and he backed her up against the wall so that the length of his body was pressed along hers. "Shoes," he muttered in between kisses. "Take them off."

She pulled back a little to frown at him, then reached down and slowly slid them off. She instantly lost three inches of height and she had to tip her head back to kiss him, frowning again as she felt him smile against her mouth.

"What are you smiling at?"

"Nothing." He tried to kiss her again but she planted a hand in the middle of his chest, pushing him back.

"Go on, you've intrigued me now."

He sighed. "Alex, I'm pissed. It's after bloody midnight. Whatever I say now is going to make me look like a poof." She just raised her eyebrow, a smile of her own now playing around her mouth, and he sighed again, eyes darting away from hers in embarrassment. "Just...like it when you're shorter than me."

She laughed, curling her arm around the back of his neck to draw him down to her. "You, Gene Hunt," she murmured against his lips, "are a big softy." She shivered as his hands moved down to her blouse, drawing it up and over her head as his fingers skated over her ribs, teasing the skin into goosebumps. She still felt giddy, tipsy, though whether it was on the wine or on him she couldn't be sure, and any banter fell away into a silence that was broken only by whispers and moans.

They moved quickly then, stumbling gracelessly together towards her bedroom, hands everywhere and fighting for supremacy, clothes scattered in a haphazard trail across the living room floor. His skin blazed beneath her touch, pale in the moonlight and marked here and there by tiny pink scars, marks that she healed with wet kisses that tasted of wine.

She opened her eyes again as he rose over her, strong and warm and flawed and hers, and she reached up with one hand, rested her fingertips against the skin of his cheek. His eyes flew open, the wild blue of a stormy sea, and she marvelled at the contradictions of him, the fierce tenderness, the soft heart beneath the hard armour. Smiling then, she gave herself up to his ministrations, until everything melted away and she was left only with his body, his touch, the thrum of his heartbeat, as her tethers to the world.

The night was quiet when Chris and Shaz stepped out of Luigi's, leaving Ray to amuse himself with the string of women he was entertaining at the bar. They hadn't seen the Guv and DI Drake for a long time, but then they'd noticeably kept themselves to themselves throughout the evening, and Chris wasn't altogether surprised that they'd clearly decided to call it a day a while back. It seemed that neither of them particularly relished the thought of a wedding, and although he knew that they were both happy for him and Shaz, it was obvious even to him that such open celebration of marriage wasn't something that either of them were particularly comfortable with.

The air was crisp and cold, the velvet night sky illuminated by the pinpricks of a thousand stars. It was noticeably chilly, but the light spilling out of Luigi's lent a glimmer of warmth to the evening.

"C'mon, I'll walk you home," Chris offered, glancing at Shaz, who was shivering slightly despite her thick jacket. She gave him a vague smile and took his hand just as she usually did, but the action was absentminded, and he could tell that something was troubling her. "Penny for your thoughts, Shazzer."

"It's nothing really..." She looked away from him, her eyes darting across the parked cars and shop windows. "My mum used to say...she always said that your wedding day was something you'd remember forever." She glanced up at him, and something resembling her usual humour glimmered for a moment in her eyes. "Course, for her that was because my dad had too much to drink at the reception and started a food fight with my uncle over the wedding cake..." She smiled wryly, but at the next moment the anxiety had returned and she bit her lip, a frown creasing her forehead. "She said that...that in life there'll always be something you'll wish you did differently, no matter how small...but if you're lucky getting married will be the best thing you ever did, and your wedding day will be the one perfect thing you can look back on, as long as you live."

"Sounds about right to me." Chris shrugged. "Do you think you're going to regret it or something? Because that really makes me confident –"

"It's not that." Shaz bit her lip. "It's just...what if something goes wrong? If I'm supposed to remember it forever, I want it to be perfect. I'm just so worried that something's going to happen that'll ruin the memory, you know?"

"Shaz, we've been through this." Chris sighed, his breath misting in front of him in the cold night air. "Don't worry about it. Please. Nothing's going to go wrong." They rounded the corner away from Luigi's, and he smiled slightly. "Well, as long as we keep your relatives at a safe distance from the wedding cake, anyway." The comment was engineered to cheer her up, but she didn't so much as crack a smile. He tried again. "Look, even if something did go a bit wrong, so what? I mean, it's not really all about the ceremony, is it?"

"No..." she conceded unwillingly. "But it's still important. It's meant to be wonderful. Everyone's expecting it to be perfect. If anything goes wrong – anything –" Her expression, caught for a fleeting moment in the glow of a streetlamp, was troubled. "If I'd known getting married was this complicated I'd have given it a miss," she said glumly.

Chris knew she wasn't being serious, but he couldn't help the flutter of panic that he felt at her words. "C'mon, Shaz, don't say that." He cast around for something to reassure her. "Look, when my sister got married, she got the giggles in the middle of her vows. They had to stop the service while she calmed down. Wasn't the end of the world." This earned him a slight twitch of the lips. He grinned in encouragement. "And look, whatever happens, it'll all be over soon, won't it? A couple of days and we can forget all about it, we can just –"

"Wait a minute." The smile sliding off her face, Shaz stopped short beneath a streetlamp and rounded on him unexpectedly. "What do you mean, we can forget all about it?"

"Well, y'know..." Chris stopped short, surprised. "There's things that's more important than making a couple of promises in front of a load of people, right? In the end, it doesn't really matter what happens on the day –"

"It doesn't matter?" She looked as if she'd been slapped. "Sorry, I was under the impression that you actually wanted to get married."

"Course I want to get married!" said Chris hastily, her acid tone confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt the realisation that she wasn't best pleased with him. "I just think maybe you're making too big a deal of it, y'know?"

"I'm making too big a deal of it?" she repeated dangerously, extricating her hand from his and glaring at him. "In what way am I making too big a deal of it?"

"I don't know, I'm not saying..." Chris quailed under the force of her glare. "I just mean...I wouldn't have minded having it all a bit simpler, you know? We could've had something a bit smaller, saved a lot of stress and, well, and money..." He trailed off, sensing that he was straying into shark-infested waters.

"So it all comes down to money, does it?" she snapped, her voice rising. "Money, and how convenient it is to you?"As she spoke, a couple of drunks stumbled out of the pub down the road and slurred something unintelligible in Chris's direction. Shaz shot them a withering look. Chris ignored them.

"Look, that's not what I said –"

"Oh, isn't it?" she shot back, seemingly unconcerned now about being overheard. Tears sprang to her eyes, frustration mingling with pain. Chris immediately regretted every word he'd said, but it was too late to go back and undo it now. Shaz dashed the tears away angrily. "And you think right now is a good time to tell me this? We've been planning this wedding for months, I've been looking forward to it for months..." She was looking at him as if she'd never seen him properly before, and her expression was like a knife to his heart. "And you're telling me that all this time you were thinking how stupid it all was?"

"Well, not exactly – I never thought it was stupid, I just –" He took her hand in both of his, trying to keep her there, to make her listen to him. "Shazzer, I'm trying to help, here!"

"Are you?" She slapped his hands away. "You know what, Chris, sometimes you are so useless."

He flinched. "Shaz –"

"Don't bother walking me home." The words were hard, bitter, final, and they stung like nothing he'd ever experienced. Chris dropped his arms back to his sides and looked at her helplessly. Her expression like granite, Shaz gave him one final glare and turned her back on him.

"Shaz, don't be...Shazzer, come back –" Disproportionate panic clutching at his throat, he ran after her a few paces and seized her wrist. "Shaz –"

"I said, don't bother!" She tore her arm away from him and carried on walking, but not before he had registered the tear tracks on her cheeks and heard a sob catch in her throat as she turned her back on him. "Leave me alone, Chris."

"Shaz, wait – at least let me walk you home, it's dark and –"

Her voice floated back to him, colder than the sharp night air. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Chris."

He let her go. There was no point doing otherwise. They were only a couple of streets away from her flat, and he knew that if he tried to follow her she'd only snap at him. Nevertheless, he stood and watched her walk away from him until the darkness swallowed her up, and then, with a heavy sigh, he turned and retreated, hands deep in his pockets, into the night.

Alex awoke suddenly. Weak sunlight was filtering through a gap in the curtains and she lay still, momentarily disorientated. The evening came back to her in fragments. The rapist. Chris's speech. The loneliness. Kissing Gene. Gene.

She snuck a hand beneath the covers, realised it was his arm thrown across her stomach. The thought made her smile. Gene Hunt, Manc Lion, purger of London's scum, was a cuddler. She ran her fingertips along his forearm, the fair hair tickling her skin, and turned her head to look at him. The pale light was casting strange shadows across his face and the effect made him look younger, glossing over his scars and setting off the gold in his hair.

As she watched him, relaxed and vulnerable beside her, she felt a rush of affection for this complex, contrary man. In sleep, his poise, his ferocity, his sharpness had all been lost, and she could glimpse in that moment the boy he had once been, before he'd become loaded with his own guilt, with other people's cares. She wondered if he was still in there, the little boy with sandy hair and blue eyes, the child who trusted implicitly and shimmered with innocence. She had a feeling, looking at him now, that he was, just buried somewhere beneath the surface, hidden behind the armour.

The shrill ring of the telephone shattered her reverie and she jumped, startled at its volume against the quiet of the morning. Slipping from Gene's embrace, she rolled over and pulled the phone hastily to her ear, turning away and cupping her hand around the receiver so the noise wouldn't wake him.

"Hello?" Her voice was little more than a whisper, hoarse with alcohol and sleep.

"Ma'am? Is that you?" The line crackled with static and Alex frowned, sitting up a bit straighter and pulling the sheets to her chest.

"Chris?" There was more indistinct speech, fractured by interference. "Chris, if that's you, I can't hear you."

"Bloody Chris." The voice in her other ear was far from indistinct. It was low, clear - warm and delicious as molten honey - and she shivered, clutching the receiver more tightly to her ear but unable to stop the slow smile that crept across her face. Gene's hand stole up to sweep the hair from her neck and she closed her eyes as his lips trailed a slow, torturous line of kisses across her shoulders. "Tell him to bugger off," he murmured against her skin. "It's not even eight o'clock."

She gestured at him to be quiet, frowning at the phone in her hand. "Chris? Is something wrong?"

"Ma'am!" Chris suddenly came through loud and clear, and from the way the static fell suddenly away, she guessed he'd found better reception. "Ma'am, it's Chris. There's...I mean...it's Shaz."

"Shaz? What about Shaz?" Alex knew she was being irritatingly slow, but the path of Gene's hands as they wandered lazily across her body proved to be too much of a distraction. She batted him away and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, unresisting as he tugged the sheet from her body and sat behind her, one leg either side of hers. This time, she barely noticed. There was something in Chris's voice, some note of frenzied panic, and she put her hand on Gene's thigh, squeezed lightly, distractedly in warning.

"Oh Ma'am...I dunno what's going on. We had a fight, like, on the way home and she...and she..." Chris's voice was climbing in panic and Alex glanced at Gene over her shoulder, saw that he recognised her confusion in the way that his hands stilled on her skin.

"What is it, Chris?"

"She's..." He trailed off, and she heard him take a deep breath. "She's disappeared."

There was a heartbeat of a pause. Alex's mind whirled with possibilities - she was staying with friends, she just wasn't answering the door, she'd gone to visit her parents - but she knew Shaz and she knew Chris and she knew that even if they'd had a blazing row, Shaz wouldn't totally shut him out, not like this. She thought too of Chris's tone, uneven with panic and horror and guilt, and she knew inexplicably, unequivocally, that this was serious.

"What's up?" Gene was on his feet by the time she'd hung up, suddenly alert, suddenly a police officer, and she couldn't help feeling the tiniest pang of loss for the innocent boy he'd been only minutes before. She slipped past him and started pulling on her clothes, already trying to piece Shaz's movements together in her head.

"That was Chris." She looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes were fixed on her even as he buttoned his shirt, and she almost smiled at his attention. "Shaz has disappeared."

He nodded, a tight nod, one that showed his concern more clearly than if he'd broken down and wept, because this was Gene Hunt, and he protected his team as if they were his own family.

"We'll sort it, Bolly, don't worry." He knotted his tie and then strode to the door, keys jangling in his pocket. "Time to fire up the Quattro."