Son of ficsnips
I’m not the lucky one
I’m what happens when the world forgets we’re here
What he does, it’s a function. He doesn’t romanticize it, doesn’t build it up: it’s only seeing the law laid down. No exceptions, no special cases -- Hunt offends him in his bones, all those back doors, all those pardons. And that from an overgrown child who claims to know what being a copper means.
And he’s the one they’d all die for. It’s enough to make you spit.
“How does he do it?” he asks Alex, tucked up safely in her flat with a cheap bottle to help her face the world. They’ll have to work on that once she’s his. “What has he ever done to earn respect from someone like you?”
Alex’s eyes go faraway, and he could kill Gene Hunt where he stands if the man would lie down and bloody die.
“Better question,” he adds before she can answer. “What would he have to do to lose it?” He takes her hand, and she allows it; she’s wide open, innocent of boundaries, and when he strokes the ridge of her knuckles she shudders like a stolen thing. He’s touching skin Hunt’s touched, taking possession of what the man imagines belongs to him, and when she kisses him rather than answer he imagines he can taste smoke and salt on her tongue.
It would be as easy as this to get Hunt to fuck him himself, as easy as freeing her arms from her sleeves; it would be and perhaps he will, but it wouldn’t be half so satisfying as taking what’s already his.
[Electric President -- I’m Not The Lonely Son (I’m The Ghost)]
what comes is better
than what came before
She was briefly hunted with a crossbow yesterday. She hit a man with a branch. Some people might consider that an excuse to phone in sick; those people -- she decides only somewhat regretfully as Fidget attempts to rouse her by walking on her hair -- don’t work with a lot of other people for whom that’s a normal job hazard. Aren’t needed for much of anything, really, but getting the coffee in and pretending to look busy.
Besides, if she stays home to nurse her trauma she might wind up actually thinking about it, and she can practically taste the badness of that idea: there are a lot of thoughts to do with floating grey hair and lying on her side in the reeking back of a van, and she can feel them massing just beneath the surface. If she stops once, she’s fairly certain, she’ll burst into tears, and she must lead the safest life on the Grid; she owes it to herself and everyone who’s been through worse to turn up on time and do her job.
She can tell, once she’s got there, that people are going out of their way to be nice to her. Zaf leans against her desk and flirts for five minutes solid, and Adam brings her tea, and even Fiona smiles brilliantly and says “I hear we’ve got quite a bit to thank you for.” And they’re her colleagues, and she cares for them, and it would be entirely unfair to resent any of them for being -- well -- people who aren’t there, so she smiles and soaks in the attention and carefully doesn’t think about anything but gratitude and fondness and the slow trickle of money from one dodgy bank account to the next, all the way until lunchtime.
Harry doesn’t come out from behind his glass until well after that, and she tries not to mind that either. It can’t be healthy, to be her age and so aware of whether the man she works for pays attention to her or not: that way lies both madness and every likelihood of making an idiot of herself.
But he does, eventually, stop at her station, and she does her absolute level best to keep her eyes on her screen: he’s not tall, Harry, and not young, and not especially exciting-looking, and she’s surrounded by ungodly attractive men, and not a single one of them makes her feel all thumbs and nerve endings the way he can simply by glancing to and away from her.
“Adam tells me,” he says, “you’re an unexpectedly dangerous woman.”
The pen she’d been trying to twiddle nonchalantly between her fingers hits the desktop. “Oh. Well. It wasn’t --”
“I believe the words he used were ‘never piss her off.’” He’s smiling, small but genuine, and she can’t help but beam back. “I should congratulate you for once again keeping a remarkably level head in an unforeseen crisis.”
She’s still trying to find the words for “thank you” when he leans across her desk, close enough to make her start.
“But if you ever walk straight into an unknown situation with no weapon, no planning, and no backup ever again, Ruth, I will personally demote whatever happens to be left of you to fetching coffee and handing round pens at diversity training seminars. Are we quite clear?”
And she ought to feel stupid, she does, but he looks steadily at her and something inside her is rising like a balloon with its string cut, up and up into thin air, as she tries to stop smiling and say “Yes, Harry.”
[The Velvet Underground -- I Found A Reason]
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