Inaugural ficpost from my new laptop, yay.
Title: Turn and turn again (five Alexes who weren’t)
Fandom: Ashes to Ashes
Featured Characters: Alex, Alex/various
Genre/Rating: AU/Five Things/adult
Content: variously: spoilers; mind control; unsafe sex; off-panel violence; memory loss; drinking to excess; Evan; inevitability; questionable consent; creeping horrors; really, really inappropriate patient/therapist relations.
Disclaimer: Characters: Kudos/BBC. Title and section headers: Bowie.
Summary: But what if there’s more than one real world? Or, It Could Be Worse. (Explication of AUs here.)
Wordcount: 6504
Notes: For
kink_bingo’s Alternates challenge, much belated. It’s all the Usual Suspects’ fault, probably; it’s certainly down to them that it’s readable.
1. A nation in his eyes
She visits Sam in the hospital, in the six months after he phones her from the roof. They don’t speak about his coma, or her book, or the reason he’s there; they hardly speak at all, and she realizes after the third time that if she were him, she’d despise herself.
It doesn’t stop her going.
She doesn’t expect him to answer her messages once he’s been discharged, and she’s nearly shocked when he agrees to meet her again. He’s thinner than the last time she saw him, no more and no less present in his body; he asks after Molly, he makes efforts at small talk, he gives her tapes labeled in his stiff black writing. Ray and Chris. My memories. Things that checked out.
He stirs sugar into his second coffee -- plain, black -- and says, “I think the girl my dad killed must have been a Linda Grey. Not a copper, actually. She was found a week later. Red dress. History of bad boyfriends.”
“Have you spoken to your mother about it?” Conflation, Alex notes; recovered memory. Nothing new under the sun.
He shrugs, and smiles his skimmed smile. “No point. If she suspects, she’s not interested in dragging it up. If she doesn’t --”
Alex nods, and manages to look as though she’s paying close attention through the following fifteen-minute summary of information available on underworld power struggles in Manchester circa 1973. He looks half alive when he’s discussing it, half interested in anything his life has to offer; it’s more than he does otherwise. She wonders if he’s eating, how much thought he’s given to working again, whether he’ll ever care as much about reality as he does the world he’s been exiled from. Whether he’ll try again.
“It is very helpful to me that you’re researching all this,” she says, “but what are you doing in this decade?”
He half laughs at that, and shakes his head. There are circles under his eyes, fever-dark, his skin as pale as if he carried her office’s spitting fluorescent light with him wherever he went. “Nothing you’d notice. I get up, I go out, I come back home. Maya and I don’t give each other the time of day. Whenever I see someone I used to work with, I have to remind myself who they are. I haven’t slept in a week because I hear people screaming whenever I close my eyes. And before you ask, no, my new therapist doesn’t know a thing about that.”
He reaches across the table and covers her hand with his, squeezing hard enough to make her start. “I couldn’t wait to get back here.”
Alex keeps her face neutral. “You’re hurting my hand.”
“Christ.” He draws back as sharply as if she’d slapped him. “I’m sorry. I only wanted -- your hands are freezing. I wouldn’t have imagined that.”
The thing to do now would be to detach, evaluate, reinforce their boundaries. Send him home and hope he makes it and type up the draft of her next chapter. She’s nothing in his life, an intruder, a proxy for the help he really needs, and he’s less than that to her; and he called her from the rooftop with the wind rushing past his ears.
She puts her hand out, palm upwards. “It’s all right. Only not so hard.”
His hand shakes as he reaches out; two fingers follow the track of her lifeline, press against the pulse in her wrist. He shuts his eyes, and she wonders how often he’s been touched since he woke up. His fingertips are dry, warm, more solid than she’d half-expected from the sight of him. There’s nothing wrong with his body. It’s still there, waiting for him to come back to it.
She can’t save him like this, drag him home, shock him into life. Breathe for him, warm him with her heat. It would be easy to believe she could, and she shivers when his hand closes again over hers.
“Alex,” he says. “I. Please.”
And she could lose everything, her reputation, damn near her job, and she squeezes back and meets his strange slate-grey eyes and says, “Molly’s out with her godfather until five.”
They slam through the door of her flat, kissing, his hands desperate on her back and in her hair, as though she’ll be taken away from him at any minute. “Please,” he says, when he gets his breath again, and “please” for a rake of her fingernails down his arms as she pulls him onto the bed, and “fuck, please” when she ducks her head and swallows him. He returns the favor, kissing between her legs until she gasps and rides out her orgasm against his mouth, and then he’s on his back and she’s kneeling over him, her hands covering his as he cups her breasts.
“Tell me you want this,” she says, and doesn’t wait for a reply before sinking down around him. “Tell me --” and he groans when she freezes, flexing around his cock, her hair falling into her eyes as she crouches over him. She feels light-headed and electric and powerful, making him hiss through his teeth with every microscopic shift of her weight, until his hips buck hard enough to bruise.
He makes a mantra of her name as they struggle against each other, mindless enough to help her forget what she’s doing, and he looks more alive than she’s ever seen him. Which isn’t saying much, but he’s flushed and breathing hard and he moans full in his throat when she arches her back and bears down as hard as she can stand.
“Alex, fuck --” He breaks off, biting his lip, and she kisses him and forces his hand down where she wants it. Shows him how to stroke her, fast and rough, and his fingers catch the rhythm of it after a moment. He comes a second before she does, panting like a marathon runner, but lets her grind against his hand and his cock until she follows him, coming in a breathless stretched instant.
He sleeps, afterwards; mouth open, eyes REM-shifting under thin lids, fragile but entirely normal to look at. Sleep balances him out; he’s no more absent than anyone would be, in the circumstances, in the thin grey light from her bedroom window. Alex, shy of waking him, curls close and shuts her eyes. She won’t sleep -- she never can in the daytime -- and someone needs to stay conscious enough to clear him out and change the bedsheets before Molly comes home, but the longer she can put it off is the longer she can go without acknowledging what she’s just done. What the consequences will undoubtedly be.
She doesn’t want to wake him. She’s done enough of that already.
2. Nothing’s gonna touch you
It takes a week of panicked, dreamlike uncertainty before she can even begin to get her feet underneath her, and even then Alex has no idea where Gene Hunt came from.
If she’s gone mad -- if she’s trapped somehow in her own shattered brain, neurons sparking like storm-downed wires as her life bleeds out -- he and his station must be somehow part of her, assembled from what childhood nightmare of the police force she can hardly imagine. There can be nothing here she didn’t create. It’s a depressing thought, but the only one even remotely plausible: she will not, cannot, consider any other possibility, any scenario from the books Molly insists she’s outgrown. Arthur Layton, whoever he is, is nothing magical, no guide between the worlds. A bullet is a bullet. She knows what’s happened to her.
“You could be my animus,” she says to Gene, that first week, midway down a bottle of cheap, warm champagne. Across the aisle, a group of junior officers are constructing a pyramid of inverted pint glasses. Money is changing hands. “Isn’t that a horrible concept?”
He squints at her. “You what?”
Despite everything, it’s a seductive fantasy: the color and grain of it, the solidity, clearer and more definite than any dream she’s ever had. She’s sure she’ll discover later that her grasp of the history is half fabrication, as the dreaming mind will cheerfully accept utter nonsense as the foundation of reality, but it’s harder and harder to remember that as she experiences it. The ground bears her weight, the laws of physics hold true, her mother can’t stand what she’s become; she can’t find a gap in the logic no matter how hard she tries.
Aside from the clown, and the other visitations, of course, but even they seem less a violation of the dream than an extension of it. They obey their own rules: menacing, courteous, never-touching, bearers of cryptic and dangerous knowledge. The taxonomy expands to include them, no matter that she hates and fears their appearance, or that in the mock-daylight it’s easy to forget that they are the other side of the coin.
That they’re nothing more than that, no matter how realistic the world; how plausible, how solid. She had enough trouble with reality after her parents died; it took two therapists five years to talk her out of TARDISes and afterlives and the back of the wardrobe being permeable next time she checked. She’d gone close enough to the edge of rationality to shudder at it when she remembers, and to be sure that giving into this place would be a danger.
Evan, when he turns up, is both more and less reassuring than any of the rest of it; a known quantity, a fantasy grounded in the truth. More explicable than Gene, more safe, and it doesn’t bother her until she realizes why she’s comparing them. What it means.
The way she looks at Evan, the way he looks back, is a perversion, a parody of the truth. It invades and rewrites their history; she’ll never see him, when she wakes up, without remembering. It’s still safer than wanting Gene Hunt; she can ride with him, fight him, scream at him, but if he’s part of her, he’s a part she can’t face. If he’s not -- but he is, he must be, and so she allows Evan to buy her drinks and compliment her and tell her stories of the people he can’t know are her parents, until the room blurs softly at the edges and she’s stopped wondering how she manages to reconstruct the details.
“We shouldn’t do this now, you know,” he says, just before kissing her. His hands frame her face, impossibly gentle, and if they’re not as vast, in comparison, as she remembers --
Then they’re not, and it’s just as well.
“Why not?” She hooks her arms round his neck, rocks up on her toes, pressing into him until he sighs, the sound of it too-familiar; frustration, capitulation, the way she always could twist him round her little finger. There’s nothing in this world she can’t make filthy, in the fragile hope that nothing will have changed when she gets home.
He kisses her forehead, into her hair, and she shudders and clings to him. “I don’t want you doing anything you’ll regret.”
“I’m not so drunk.” She is, more than she’s ever allowed herself to be with Molly to provide an example for. It doesn’t matter.
“Alex.” He shakes his head, half-smiling. “I’m sorry, the other Alex in my life is eight, I can’t exactly use her name --”
“I understand completely.” Alex kisses him again, shuts her eyes, feels the room swing and settle around them as he relaxes into it. She’s drunk. She’s gone mad. She’s performing for herself, in the theater of her skull, playing out a pattern unrelated to the clutch low in her stomach. If that’s not true, if the world is a stranger place than she can stand, then there’s no point in playing by the rules any more. “You don’t have to call me anything at all.”
He’s as considerate as she would have imagined. His mouth on her breasts, his hand inching up her thigh; a queasy pleasure, greedy and exhausted, like too many sweets. She digs fingertips against his shoulders as he fucks into her, and tries to unhear the familiar catch in his breathing; her body rocks and cries out and comes, a long dazed way away.
“You won’t remember this,” she says, later, as he rubs circles at the small of her back.
“What?” He sounds half-conscious, fuck-drunk, blessedly strange. “Of course I will. You were amazing. Are. Amazing.”
“Not really.” Alex yawns. A vast black pit of exhaustion is waiting to swallow her whole. “If you remembered, then I’d remember you remembering. You’d have realized. You must have. And it would have changed things. So obviously -- obviously -- this can’t be real.”
He laughs. “Go to sleep, Alex.”
They find the photographs a week later. Ray sniggers, and Alex feels her heart turn to ice and shatter.
3. When the nightmare comes
Ten years after her parents’ death, Alex’s godfather sits across from her at the breakfast table and tells her she’s going to have to be brave. She loses them a second time then, irrevocably, her sharp, regal mother, her awkward father who carried her up the stairs. Evan who’d held her hand and indulged her and done his best to bring her up in what she’d thought were their footsteps. Her odd little four-part family blown to bits, the two of them its only survivors, caught on different sides of the abyss.
She doesn’t come home for the holidays, that year or ever. She lives alone. Some of her senior officers laugh at first to have a Price on the team. It doesn’t last.
“No relation, I hope,” Gene Hunt says when she wakes up in 1981, still reeling, her legs barely willing to hold her up.
They’d had a guard on her flat ever since Layton made parole. It hadn’t been enough.
“It’s hardly an uncommon name,” she says. She already knows what she’s been sent here to do.
And she does it: everything she can think of, subtle at first and then more and more forceful, like trying to rock a train from its tracks. She drops broader and broader hints to Caroline, culminating in outright warnings; she leans on Evan until he stammers and gives up his suspicions; she’s waiting at the airport when Tim comes back from America, a warrant in one hand and the folder of photographs in the other. She feels made of piano wire, vibrating taut enough to cut. She feels immanent.
It all goes to hell.
Caroline, white-lipped, orders her out of the house, hangs up the phone at her voice, lodges complaints with every authority she can find; Alex ends up with two weeks of unpaid leave, spends them pacing the cage of her flat and drinking herself half to unconsciousness. Evan crosses the street when he sees her coming. Tim doesn’t crack and doesn’t crack, and she can’t hold him on more than a faked informant and Layton’s chaotic hints. She’s a prophet, a Cassandra, howling into the void; Gene calls her his pet madwoman and refills her glass.
Caroline files for divorce. Evan lends her his car. It’s two months early, raining, and they find eight-year-old Alex Price curled up and drenched and shaking despite the heat, a quarter of a mile away from the smoking, steaming wreck. Tim’s hours dead by the time Gene kicks in the door of his hotel room; his glasses are folded neatly on the bedside table, the lenses Pollock-flecked with blood. None of his neighbors were in to hear the shot.
Alex screamed her throat raw at the site. She knows she must have; her voice is ragged, choked, a ghost of itself. She can’t string together a coherent memory between the phone call and the videotape: only images, sounds. The hiss of raindrops on the car’s roof, the school hat fallen in the mud. Gene taking off his jacket and wrapping it around the tiny, trembling body, bundling it up into his arms as if it weighed nothing at all. None of it has any meaning, any connection; she’s hollow, thin and empty, buzzing like a phone left off the hook.
She’d been meant to die with them, unknowing. Her father’s will took twenty-seven years to reach her -- pure as a gunshot, unalterable, Layton nothing but the falling hammer. Today wasn’t her fault, in anything but the details. It only feels that way.
She drinks whatever Gene puts in front of her and wakes up half-sober at five in the morning, draped across her own bed and listening to him snore from the sofa. He’s a thin sleeper; the snoring cuts off sharply when she turns the kitchen tap on. She washes down her paracetamol silently, ignoring him, unaware that she’s shivering until his hand falls on her shoulder.
“What was he, anyway?” he says, and his voice is the special sort of soft she’s only ever heard him use on the seriously traumatized.
Alex places her empty glass very carefully in the sink. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Cousin?” He looms behind her, huge and radiant hot; she can feel him on every inch of her skin. “Brother? Ex-husband? I’d have made it for that last one, but I couldn’t see her agreeing to name the kid after you.”
“None of the above.” It would be very easy to lean back into him, let him take her weight, but if she does that she’s positive she’ll fly apart. “This isn’t even the way it was supposed to happen.”
Gene snorts. “Yeah, well, I’d agree with you on that.” He squeezes her shoulder, very gently, before letting go. “Thing is, I’ve never seen anyone so twitchy around anyone else as you in front of him. So unless you want to drop the Mystic Meg act and let me know what’s going on --”
“It’s not important.” Alex stares down at her hands, braced against the counter’s edge; she’d been wearing green nail polish the day Evan told her, and to this moment it’s the first thing she remembers. “Do you think tomorrow I’ll wake up and it won’t have happened yet?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“What if that’s what hell is like?” She coughs, clears her throat, tries to swallow through the ache. “Or what if I just have to play it through over and over until I get it right? What if I can’t let myself wake up until I’ve done that?”
“You’ve really lost me.” Gene ruffles her hair. If he’d slapped her full across the face, it wouldn’t have been more startling. “Come on. Back to bed. I’ve already carried you in there once tonight, so you’re on your own.”
She gives a laugh that wants to be a sob, tries to twist into one in her throat, and turns to look at him. His face in the half-light, heavy shadows across it, and she reaches up and touches the place where one hollows out his jaw.
“Price,” he says, low and thick.
“Don’t --” Alex has touched him before; slapped him, buried her face in his neck. She doesn’t know why it surprises her to find him tangible, or why it makes her pulse flutter. “I don’t know what it is I’m meant to be doing anymore, I really don’t, and I just -- I want --”
“Shut up,” he says, and kisses her.
His mouth is sour, hot, utterly real; Alex kisses back as though it could save what’s left of her life. She’s outlived herself, her usefulness, her place in the world. She’s dying by the waterside, and she grinds against him like the tart he took her for when they met. Need twists and billows beneath her skin, thick as smoke, half enough to cloud the merciless edges of her thoughts.
The morning before, she took away the last two months of her mother’s life, and now she’s one step shy of rutting on the kitchen floor with a man Caroline loathed. Would have loathed. She’s monstrous, as bad as he is, worse -- she can’t conceive of the gentleness she saw from him today, the way he carried her constructself, the way he carried her. The precisely-judged tightness of his hands on her hips, pulling her against him.
All she can do is want.
“Not here,” she says, and drags him by the hand into her bedroom.
It’s darker there -- the dawn hasn’t reached it yet -- and Alex clings to him, hands tight in his shirtfront, as though it were possible for the two of them to lose each other. She feels anchorless, drifting, everywhere but where she touches him, and she moans when his hands slide up under her blouse. All heat and roughness, shaping her out of the dark, and she batters herself against him like a moth on a windowpane.
“Steady on, Price,” he says, harsh into her ear, and Alex laughs a bit hysterically. “Fuck me, if I’d known you were like this --”
“I’m not.” It’s a flagrant lie -- there have been other men, other nights, she lives alone and there’s nothing to keep her from it -- but it feels true enough to say. She’s never been this wild for it, this high and hot and empty. “Come on --”
The smells of blood and burning petrol keep trying to work their way back to her, and she hits the bed sitting down. She’s up on her knees before he can react, tugging at his belt, and he calls her every kind of slut by the time she gets it open.
He grabs her wrist when she goes for his trouser buttons; his hand swallows hers, and she freezes. She’s never been more aware of their relative sizes -- not when she punched him and thought he’d lash back, not when he carried her through CID, and she’s not a small woman. Next to Caroline she was a giant.
“There’s a girl.” He pulls her against him. Kisses her with her wrists held at shoulder height, bending her back beneath his weight, and her breath strains in her throat by the time he’s done. A fistful of rain strikes the window, and she shudders; “Hey, easy,” he says, and squeezes her hands. “You going to lie down for me?”
She thinks of lying on her back, his weight on top of her -- split and pinned and helpless -- and the wave that breaks over her is half desperate need and half revulsion. She kisses him again rather than try and talk it through, and wrenches her hands back.
“If you’d like,” she says, forcing a casualness she doesn’t feel. “But I’d rather --”
She twists round on her knees, turning her back to him. One hand braced against the headboard, the other in the sheets, and his thick intake of breath is audible over the rushing in her ears.
“Yeah.” The bed dips heavily when he settles onto it, and his hand slides round her hip as though he owned it. Even that much contact is nearly too much to stand, and nothing like enough. “Good enough for you?” he says, and rucks her skirt up before she’s had a chance to answer.
She’s wet when he hooks her knickers aside, when his fingers spread her open, and it feels like a betrayal. Her construct-body should be saner than she is, shouldn’t melt and brim over for his touch just as though the world hadn’t ended.
He tilts her hips back, shifting her weight as easily as a doll’s -- as a child’s -- and her nails scrabble in the headboard when he enters her with no more preparation; it’s been months in the real world, almost a year, and the white-hot perfect hurt of it makes her keen and writhe back against him. Her hair is damp with sweat, and she’ll never be warm again, and she twists like a candleflame and forces herself down to meet every thrust.
Gene bites her neck where her hair falls tangled away from it, wraps an arm firm as iron round her waist. “Good girl,” he snarls when her fingers find her clit, “that’s it, do yourself in for me, go on --”
Her head is full of nightmares, thin-smiling and bloody, flicking subliminal-fast behind her eyes. She’s no better than the worst of it, howling on her knees, his voice hitting every raw spot inside her; she comes fighting in his grip like a drowning woman, hard and then again, the nerve-scouring rush of it dying in aftershocks as he groans and follows her over.
“Don’t come in today,” he says, later, as she’s watching him dress.
“I have to.” She doesn’t want to. She wants to lie in bed and watch the light unroll itself across her ceiling; to stop moving, breathing, until the world turned cold and white around her and she could let go of her dead and her own failures. She wants not to know what’s changed. She wants not to know. “Please. Don’t make me stay here on my own.”
He shrugs one mountainous shoulder. “Well, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it?”
4. Oh leave me alone
The scar’s invisible, now, unless you’re looking. She’s grown her fringe out long and straight to cover it, the ghost-mark, the pale raised thumbprint left once the surgeons were finished with her. Only her friends still stare at it.
It might have been worse. She heard a lot, those first few weeks, about angles and trajectories and quite frankly an act of God; she heard a lot about luck. She can write her name and list words beginning with p and fill out stacks and stacks of incident report forms. Molly’s beginning, cautiously, to fight with her again. It might have been much worse.
“But do you feel,” a newsreader asks her, “as though you’ve been given a new lease on life?” and Alex refrains from offering any of the first nine responses to cross her mind.
“I’ve been very lucky,” she says, on national television, to a woman who thirty seconds earlier had been telling the world the latest details of Layton’s confession. Evan will never work again; her mother’s memory will never be allowed to rest. All shrapnel. “Really I have been.”
At home, the first three chapters of a book she hadn’t permanently titled The Leap sit on her desktop, unopened, and the only mercy in it is that she hadn’t told too many people what it was really about. She can imagine the questions, otherwise -- the jokes even -- and so far she’s been able to keep from mentioning 1981 to anybody. It’s appalling irresponsibility, to herself and to her real, breathing colleagues; but there’s something small and tense and tightly sealed deep inside her, and prying it open would be the end of everything.
She’d expected to dream about it, and she does. It’s manageable there, the sheer racing joy of being back again; and her daughter is twelve years old, taller and more serious and more perfect than anything she could have hoped for, and Alex will not leave her alone.
She only has to learn how to stay.
She’s approximately a decade too old for the club she’s found tonight, and it doesn’t matter; the light’s too erratic to show any sins at all. The music throbs and buzzes in her temples, thankfully unfamiliar, and she shuts her eyes and tries to sway with it. Louder, duller, harsher, four vodka tonics the worse, and the boy who stumbles against her is a boy, twenty-five at the outside. Dark skin blue-shadowed under the lights, hair in loose thick curls, and he mouths his apologies as she forces up a smile.
“I know you from somewhere?” he shouts, and she shakes her head and laughs and hooks her arms round his neck.
The alley out behind is dark enough for anyone’s purposes; they’re not the only ones taking advantage. Alex counts two potentially illegal transactions and one definite before her back hits the wall and she tries to stop thinking. It very nearly works: he sucks at her neck and cups her through her knickers, hard cock ground into her thigh, and there’s only a tiny part of her thinking what are you playing at, Bolly.
“I haven’t got anything --” he begins, breath tacky against her neck.
“It’s not important.”
He fucks her onto tiptoe, clinging for balance, one leg hooked up against his hip; he scratches at the wall with the hand not under her arse. Cold wet grit of it, soaking through her top -- she’s going to go home filthy. The beat still pounds in her skull, and she keeps her eyes resolutely open. Here, now, this half-life, this mouth on hers and this tight, twisting climax burning through her in the dark; nothing and nowhere else.
“Can I call you?” he says, afterwards, tugging at his zip.
“I don’t think so, no.” He really is very pretty, in the watered-ink light of a distant streetlamp; she spots a CCTV lens over his shoulder, and wonders which of her colleagues will eventually recognize her, one of these nights.
Later, curled up on her bed and still fully dressed, she stares up at the ceiling and concentrates on the stinging between her legs, on the perfect eggshell blankness of her mind. Molly’s asleep one wall over; she hasn’t started yet to tax Alex with these nights away, these absences, which no doubt means she’s afraid to bring them up. Erratic behavior, mood swings, changes in personality, they’ve all had the litany. Alex doesn’t know how to tell her what it is: scar tissue, hangover. A ghost of a life without ties, without limitations. It would be unspeakably cruel to describe.
The television babbles softly to itself at the foot of her bed. She never pays attention anymore.
5. Falling in love
She never remembers her nightmares.
She still wakes up trembling, almost every night, but the reason for it’s gone before she gets her eyes open: a blind spot, an absence of information. She’s not sure how she knows it used to be different; there’s a boundary she crossed somewhere, some uncertain time ago, and she can’t think of when or what it was.
“Lucky girl,” Jim says, laughing, when she tells him. “I’d give anything not to be able to remember mine.”
“You never told me you had them.” The chemical backwash of panic is receding, dragging with it whatever freight it had carried. Alex stretches after it, as she can remember doing when the dreams started, and pulls back a disjointed fistful of images. A dark room, a river, a strange little girl in tears.
Jim kisses into her hair. “That’s because I don’t when you’re around.”
“I used to dream about my parents,” she says, another night -- at his flat, this time, tucked up under slightly too many blankets. “I remember that.”
Once, not long ago, it would have hurt to mention them. It still does, a soft distant ache like sad music, but she’s learned somehow to contain it. The wounds in her life are healing, knitting patiently together, and now and again she can even forget she has the scars.
“They’d be proud of you.” He sounds so certain of it that it might be true: it’s hard to imagine meeting them as equals, pouring her life out on the table before them. Look what I’ve made. They might even have respected the work she does now. “But maybe you don’t need them anymore.”
Alex sighs and curls back closer against him. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asks. “I mean, every night --”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Alex,” Jim says, so seriously that she twists round in his arms to try and see his face in the half-light.
They’re not living together. There are rules about that sort of thing: she keeps clothes at his place, and he keeps albums at hers, and they never go to bed alone, but they hold down separate leases and drive to work in separate cars, and everyone pretends not to already know. He tends to apologize when he’s had a drink, and promise her it can be different someday: “When I make the rules,” he likes to say, and tumble her into the sheets. “When I can have you in front of the station if I feel like it.”
They’re a good team, his calculation, her insight. They’re making a name for themselves in the department, after only a few months. And there are other things.
He kisses her bare stomach, by the scar from the hostage incident, and leaves a curving trail of suck marks from her hipbone down to her thigh. He holds her wrists above her head and makes her beg to be fucked. He makes her confess every kiss, every touch, every one-night stand she’d had before him, and strokes her so lightly that she’s breathless before she’s half into her twenties.
He presses his mouth to her hairline and whispers “trust me” and coaxes her onto her belly across his bed, every pillow he owns tucked up beneath her hips. Exposed, served up, and she’s vibrating with nerves and lust before he lays another hand on her. He kisses the bowed back of her neck, bare as for execution, and then an inch lower, open-mouthed and as careful as he can be not to touch her at any other point. Down her back, between her shoulderblades, and she feels as though he’s calling her into existence with every brush of tongue and teeth. Heat spreads and stretches through her in his wake, and she can hear herself making greedy open-mouthed noises into the sheets.
He moves over her slowly, glacially slowly, no matter how she pleads with him -- his patience, she’s long since learned, is very nearly inhuman -- but after what feels like hours he’s kissing and scraping his teeth across the base of her spine, playing long electric shudders out of her. It’s a torment to hold still as he orders her to, and worse when he moves lower and lower again and “wait,” she gasps, “God --”
“Alex?” She can’t see him, but she knows what he looks like -- eyes wild, mouth bruised and spit-wet. She’s seen him after he’s kissed her, gone down on her, sucked at her breasts until she’s had to push him away. “Do you need to stop?”
“No -- I --” He exhales, breath cool against her burning skin, and she thinks nonsensically this is how people die. “How far are you going with this?”
“As you’ll let me, sweetheart,” he says, and she’s sure she’d slap anyone else who called her that. She hates pet names.
He kisses her again, the same spot, just above the rise of her arse. Alex shuts her eyes. He’s breathing as hard as she is, she realizes, he’s all but moaning against her, and the thought nearly undoes her. “You like this.”
“Alex.” The bed creaks as he shifts his weight. “I love it. I want all of you. Every inch. And you --” his knuckles graze against her cunt, slipping-wet, shamefully hopelessly wet “-- you don’t seem to mind.”
“Fuck.” She exhales on it, long and deep. “All right.”
And she’d swear she could hear him smile; he kisses down and down, moving in hairs’ breadths, until the tip of his tongue flicks once, twice, just there. Pressing into her so gently it’s a form of torture itself, and she’ll never breathe again but it doesn’t matter; she’s opened, defenseless, flayed bare with it, every nerve in her body burning, and she’s dimly aware that her inner thighs are cold with wetness.
“Please --” she says, unsure what she’s asking for, and he hums assent and fucks her with his tongue, slow and relentless enough to set her screaming so his neighbors must think she’s being killed. It’s nothing like anything he’s done to her before, not even the times he’s licked her out until she ached; it builds and builds without breaking, and the second more purposeful brush of his fingers against her cunt is almost extraneous.
Until two of them are inside her, almost effortlessly, and his tongue curls, his fingers hook forward, twisting and wringing her out. It’s overload, so good she wants to flinch away from it, need coursing through her thick and sweet; her orgasm uncoils slow and merciless and so long it frightens her, the deep dragging waves of it pulling her under, and he doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop until she’s boneless and gasping and trying to form the word “enough.”
He kisses his way back up her spine as she’s still calling herself back together. She barely notices the touch, until he’s pressed full-length alongside her. Hard against her hip, she registers in some impossibly distant outpost of herself, and they’ll have to work out in a minute how to manage that: he presses fingers to her mouth, and she sucks salt from them reflexively until he hisses.
“I love you,” he says, so soft it would be easy to miss, and with damp fingers tucks a damp strand of her hair back behind her ear. “I always loved you, Alex Drake. I always will.”
She doesn’t have to say it back. He knows.
1. Sam didn’t jump.
2. Sam didn’t wake up.
3. Evan told Alex about her parents.
4. Alex woke up.
5. Keats won.
This entry was originally posted at http://thatyourefuse.dreamwidth.org/190815.html. Please comment there if you can.
Fandom: Ashes to Ashes
Featured Characters: Alex, Alex/various
Genre/Rating: AU/Five Things/adult
Content: variously: spoilers; mind control; unsafe sex; off-panel violence; memory loss; drinking to excess; Evan; inevitability; questionable consent; creeping horrors; really, really inappropriate patient/therapist relations.
Disclaimer: Characters: Kudos/BBC. Title and section headers: Bowie.
Summary: But what if there’s more than one real world? Or, It Could Be Worse. (Explication of AUs here.)
Wordcount: 6504
Notes: For
kink_bingo’s Alternates challenge, much belated. It’s all the Usual Suspects’ fault, probably; it’s certainly down to them that it’s readable.
1. A nation in his eyes
She visits Sam in the hospital, in the six months after he phones her from the roof. They don’t speak about his coma, or her book, or the reason he’s there; they hardly speak at all, and she realizes after the third time that if she were him, she’d despise herself.
It doesn’t stop her going.
She doesn’t expect him to answer her messages once he’s been discharged, and she’s nearly shocked when he agrees to meet her again. He’s thinner than the last time she saw him, no more and no less present in his body; he asks after Molly, he makes efforts at small talk, he gives her tapes labeled in his stiff black writing. Ray and Chris. My memories. Things that checked out.
He stirs sugar into his second coffee -- plain, black -- and says, “I think the girl my dad killed must have been a Linda Grey. Not a copper, actually. She was found a week later. Red dress. History of bad boyfriends.”
“Have you spoken to your mother about it?” Conflation, Alex notes; recovered memory. Nothing new under the sun.
He shrugs, and smiles his skimmed smile. “No point. If she suspects, she’s not interested in dragging it up. If she doesn’t --”
Alex nods, and manages to look as though she’s paying close attention through the following fifteen-minute summary of information available on underworld power struggles in Manchester circa 1973. He looks half alive when he’s discussing it, half interested in anything his life has to offer; it’s more than he does otherwise. She wonders if he’s eating, how much thought he’s given to working again, whether he’ll ever care as much about reality as he does the world he’s been exiled from. Whether he’ll try again.
“It is very helpful to me that you’re researching all this,” she says, “but what are you doing in this decade?”
He half laughs at that, and shakes his head. There are circles under his eyes, fever-dark, his skin as pale as if he carried her office’s spitting fluorescent light with him wherever he went. “Nothing you’d notice. I get up, I go out, I come back home. Maya and I don’t give each other the time of day. Whenever I see someone I used to work with, I have to remind myself who they are. I haven’t slept in a week because I hear people screaming whenever I close my eyes. And before you ask, no, my new therapist doesn’t know a thing about that.”
He reaches across the table and covers her hand with his, squeezing hard enough to make her start. “I couldn’t wait to get back here.”
Alex keeps her face neutral. “You’re hurting my hand.”
“Christ.” He draws back as sharply as if she’d slapped him. “I’m sorry. I only wanted -- your hands are freezing. I wouldn’t have imagined that.”
The thing to do now would be to detach, evaluate, reinforce their boundaries. Send him home and hope he makes it and type up the draft of her next chapter. She’s nothing in his life, an intruder, a proxy for the help he really needs, and he’s less than that to her; and he called her from the rooftop with the wind rushing past his ears.
She puts her hand out, palm upwards. “It’s all right. Only not so hard.”
His hand shakes as he reaches out; two fingers follow the track of her lifeline, press against the pulse in her wrist. He shuts his eyes, and she wonders how often he’s been touched since he woke up. His fingertips are dry, warm, more solid than she’d half-expected from the sight of him. There’s nothing wrong with his body. It’s still there, waiting for him to come back to it.
She can’t save him like this, drag him home, shock him into life. Breathe for him, warm him with her heat. It would be easy to believe she could, and she shivers when his hand closes again over hers.
“Alex,” he says. “I. Please.”
And she could lose everything, her reputation, damn near her job, and she squeezes back and meets his strange slate-grey eyes and says, “Molly’s out with her godfather until five.”
They slam through the door of her flat, kissing, his hands desperate on her back and in her hair, as though she’ll be taken away from him at any minute. “Please,” he says, when he gets his breath again, and “please” for a rake of her fingernails down his arms as she pulls him onto the bed, and “fuck, please” when she ducks her head and swallows him. He returns the favor, kissing between her legs until she gasps and rides out her orgasm against his mouth, and then he’s on his back and she’s kneeling over him, her hands covering his as he cups her breasts.
“Tell me you want this,” she says, and doesn’t wait for a reply before sinking down around him. “Tell me --” and he groans when she freezes, flexing around his cock, her hair falling into her eyes as she crouches over him. She feels light-headed and electric and powerful, making him hiss through his teeth with every microscopic shift of her weight, until his hips buck hard enough to bruise.
He makes a mantra of her name as they struggle against each other, mindless enough to help her forget what she’s doing, and he looks more alive than she’s ever seen him. Which isn’t saying much, but he’s flushed and breathing hard and he moans full in his throat when she arches her back and bears down as hard as she can stand.
“Alex, fuck --” He breaks off, biting his lip, and she kisses him and forces his hand down where she wants it. Shows him how to stroke her, fast and rough, and his fingers catch the rhythm of it after a moment. He comes a second before she does, panting like a marathon runner, but lets her grind against his hand and his cock until she follows him, coming in a breathless stretched instant.
He sleeps, afterwards; mouth open, eyes REM-shifting under thin lids, fragile but entirely normal to look at. Sleep balances him out; he’s no more absent than anyone would be, in the circumstances, in the thin grey light from her bedroom window. Alex, shy of waking him, curls close and shuts her eyes. She won’t sleep -- she never can in the daytime -- and someone needs to stay conscious enough to clear him out and change the bedsheets before Molly comes home, but the longer she can put it off is the longer she can go without acknowledging what she’s just done. What the consequences will undoubtedly be.
She doesn’t want to wake him. She’s done enough of that already.
2. Nothing’s gonna touch you
It takes a week of panicked, dreamlike uncertainty before she can even begin to get her feet underneath her, and even then Alex has no idea where Gene Hunt came from.
If she’s gone mad -- if she’s trapped somehow in her own shattered brain, neurons sparking like storm-downed wires as her life bleeds out -- he and his station must be somehow part of her, assembled from what childhood nightmare of the police force she can hardly imagine. There can be nothing here she didn’t create. It’s a depressing thought, but the only one even remotely plausible: she will not, cannot, consider any other possibility, any scenario from the books Molly insists she’s outgrown. Arthur Layton, whoever he is, is nothing magical, no guide between the worlds. A bullet is a bullet. She knows what’s happened to her.
“You could be my animus,” she says to Gene, that first week, midway down a bottle of cheap, warm champagne. Across the aisle, a group of junior officers are constructing a pyramid of inverted pint glasses. Money is changing hands. “Isn’t that a horrible concept?”
He squints at her. “You what?”
Despite everything, it’s a seductive fantasy: the color and grain of it, the solidity, clearer and more definite than any dream she’s ever had. She’s sure she’ll discover later that her grasp of the history is half fabrication, as the dreaming mind will cheerfully accept utter nonsense as the foundation of reality, but it’s harder and harder to remember that as she experiences it. The ground bears her weight, the laws of physics hold true, her mother can’t stand what she’s become; she can’t find a gap in the logic no matter how hard she tries.
Aside from the clown, and the other visitations, of course, but even they seem less a violation of the dream than an extension of it. They obey their own rules: menacing, courteous, never-touching, bearers of cryptic and dangerous knowledge. The taxonomy expands to include them, no matter that she hates and fears their appearance, or that in the mock-daylight it’s easy to forget that they are the other side of the coin.
That they’re nothing more than that, no matter how realistic the world; how plausible, how solid. She had enough trouble with reality after her parents died; it took two therapists five years to talk her out of TARDISes and afterlives and the back of the wardrobe being permeable next time she checked. She’d gone close enough to the edge of rationality to shudder at it when she remembers, and to be sure that giving into this place would be a danger.
Evan, when he turns up, is both more and less reassuring than any of the rest of it; a known quantity, a fantasy grounded in the truth. More explicable than Gene, more safe, and it doesn’t bother her until she realizes why she’s comparing them. What it means.
The way she looks at Evan, the way he looks back, is a perversion, a parody of the truth. It invades and rewrites their history; she’ll never see him, when she wakes up, without remembering. It’s still safer than wanting Gene Hunt; she can ride with him, fight him, scream at him, but if he’s part of her, he’s a part she can’t face. If he’s not -- but he is, he must be, and so she allows Evan to buy her drinks and compliment her and tell her stories of the people he can’t know are her parents, until the room blurs softly at the edges and she’s stopped wondering how she manages to reconstruct the details.
“We shouldn’t do this now, you know,” he says, just before kissing her. His hands frame her face, impossibly gentle, and if they’re not as vast, in comparison, as she remembers --
Then they’re not, and it’s just as well.
“Why not?” She hooks her arms round his neck, rocks up on her toes, pressing into him until he sighs, the sound of it too-familiar; frustration, capitulation, the way she always could twist him round her little finger. There’s nothing in this world she can’t make filthy, in the fragile hope that nothing will have changed when she gets home.
He kisses her forehead, into her hair, and she shudders and clings to him. “I don’t want you doing anything you’ll regret.”
“I’m not so drunk.” She is, more than she’s ever allowed herself to be with Molly to provide an example for. It doesn’t matter.
“Alex.” He shakes his head, half-smiling. “I’m sorry, the other Alex in my life is eight, I can’t exactly use her name --”
“I understand completely.” Alex kisses him again, shuts her eyes, feels the room swing and settle around them as he relaxes into it. She’s drunk. She’s gone mad. She’s performing for herself, in the theater of her skull, playing out a pattern unrelated to the clutch low in her stomach. If that’s not true, if the world is a stranger place than she can stand, then there’s no point in playing by the rules any more. “You don’t have to call me anything at all.”
He’s as considerate as she would have imagined. His mouth on her breasts, his hand inching up her thigh; a queasy pleasure, greedy and exhausted, like too many sweets. She digs fingertips against his shoulders as he fucks into her, and tries to unhear the familiar catch in his breathing; her body rocks and cries out and comes, a long dazed way away.
“You won’t remember this,” she says, later, as he rubs circles at the small of her back.
“What?” He sounds half-conscious, fuck-drunk, blessedly strange. “Of course I will. You were amazing. Are. Amazing.”
“Not really.” Alex yawns. A vast black pit of exhaustion is waiting to swallow her whole. “If you remembered, then I’d remember you remembering. You’d have realized. You must have. And it would have changed things. So obviously -- obviously -- this can’t be real.”
He laughs. “Go to sleep, Alex.”
They find the photographs a week later. Ray sniggers, and Alex feels her heart turn to ice and shatter.
3. When the nightmare comes
Ten years after her parents’ death, Alex’s godfather sits across from her at the breakfast table and tells her she’s going to have to be brave. She loses them a second time then, irrevocably, her sharp, regal mother, her awkward father who carried her up the stairs. Evan who’d held her hand and indulged her and done his best to bring her up in what she’d thought were their footsteps. Her odd little four-part family blown to bits, the two of them its only survivors, caught on different sides of the abyss.
She doesn’t come home for the holidays, that year or ever. She lives alone. Some of her senior officers laugh at first to have a Price on the team. It doesn’t last.
“No relation, I hope,” Gene Hunt says when she wakes up in 1981, still reeling, her legs barely willing to hold her up.
They’d had a guard on her flat ever since Layton made parole. It hadn’t been enough.
“It’s hardly an uncommon name,” she says. She already knows what she’s been sent here to do.
And she does it: everything she can think of, subtle at first and then more and more forceful, like trying to rock a train from its tracks. She drops broader and broader hints to Caroline, culminating in outright warnings; she leans on Evan until he stammers and gives up his suspicions; she’s waiting at the airport when Tim comes back from America, a warrant in one hand and the folder of photographs in the other. She feels made of piano wire, vibrating taut enough to cut. She feels immanent.
It all goes to hell.
Caroline, white-lipped, orders her out of the house, hangs up the phone at her voice, lodges complaints with every authority she can find; Alex ends up with two weeks of unpaid leave, spends them pacing the cage of her flat and drinking herself half to unconsciousness. Evan crosses the street when he sees her coming. Tim doesn’t crack and doesn’t crack, and she can’t hold him on more than a faked informant and Layton’s chaotic hints. She’s a prophet, a Cassandra, howling into the void; Gene calls her his pet madwoman and refills her glass.
Caroline files for divorce. Evan lends her his car. It’s two months early, raining, and they find eight-year-old Alex Price curled up and drenched and shaking despite the heat, a quarter of a mile away from the smoking, steaming wreck. Tim’s hours dead by the time Gene kicks in the door of his hotel room; his glasses are folded neatly on the bedside table, the lenses Pollock-flecked with blood. None of his neighbors were in to hear the shot.
Alex screamed her throat raw at the site. She knows she must have; her voice is ragged, choked, a ghost of itself. She can’t string together a coherent memory between the phone call and the videotape: only images, sounds. The hiss of raindrops on the car’s roof, the school hat fallen in the mud. Gene taking off his jacket and wrapping it around the tiny, trembling body, bundling it up into his arms as if it weighed nothing at all. None of it has any meaning, any connection; she’s hollow, thin and empty, buzzing like a phone left off the hook.
She’d been meant to die with them, unknowing. Her father’s will took twenty-seven years to reach her -- pure as a gunshot, unalterable, Layton nothing but the falling hammer. Today wasn’t her fault, in anything but the details. It only feels that way.
She drinks whatever Gene puts in front of her and wakes up half-sober at five in the morning, draped across her own bed and listening to him snore from the sofa. He’s a thin sleeper; the snoring cuts off sharply when she turns the kitchen tap on. She washes down her paracetamol silently, ignoring him, unaware that she’s shivering until his hand falls on her shoulder.
“What was he, anyway?” he says, and his voice is the special sort of soft she’s only ever heard him use on the seriously traumatized.
Alex places her empty glass very carefully in the sink. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Cousin?” He looms behind her, huge and radiant hot; she can feel him on every inch of her skin. “Brother? Ex-husband? I’d have made it for that last one, but I couldn’t see her agreeing to name the kid after you.”
“None of the above.” It would be very easy to lean back into him, let him take her weight, but if she does that she’s positive she’ll fly apart. “This isn’t even the way it was supposed to happen.”
Gene snorts. “Yeah, well, I’d agree with you on that.” He squeezes her shoulder, very gently, before letting go. “Thing is, I’ve never seen anyone so twitchy around anyone else as you in front of him. So unless you want to drop the Mystic Meg act and let me know what’s going on --”
“It’s not important.” Alex stares down at her hands, braced against the counter’s edge; she’d been wearing green nail polish the day Evan told her, and to this moment it’s the first thing she remembers. “Do you think tomorrow I’ll wake up and it won’t have happened yet?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“What if that’s what hell is like?” She coughs, clears her throat, tries to swallow through the ache. “Or what if I just have to play it through over and over until I get it right? What if I can’t let myself wake up until I’ve done that?”
“You’ve really lost me.” Gene ruffles her hair. If he’d slapped her full across the face, it wouldn’t have been more startling. “Come on. Back to bed. I’ve already carried you in there once tonight, so you’re on your own.”
She gives a laugh that wants to be a sob, tries to twist into one in her throat, and turns to look at him. His face in the half-light, heavy shadows across it, and she reaches up and touches the place where one hollows out his jaw.
“Price,” he says, low and thick.
“Don’t --” Alex has touched him before; slapped him, buried her face in his neck. She doesn’t know why it surprises her to find him tangible, or why it makes her pulse flutter. “I don’t know what it is I’m meant to be doing anymore, I really don’t, and I just -- I want --”
“Shut up,” he says, and kisses her.
His mouth is sour, hot, utterly real; Alex kisses back as though it could save what’s left of her life. She’s outlived herself, her usefulness, her place in the world. She’s dying by the waterside, and she grinds against him like the tart he took her for when they met. Need twists and billows beneath her skin, thick as smoke, half enough to cloud the merciless edges of her thoughts.
The morning before, she took away the last two months of her mother’s life, and now she’s one step shy of rutting on the kitchen floor with a man Caroline loathed. Would have loathed. She’s monstrous, as bad as he is, worse -- she can’t conceive of the gentleness she saw from him today, the way he carried her constructself, the way he carried her. The precisely-judged tightness of his hands on her hips, pulling her against him.
All she can do is want.
“Not here,” she says, and drags him by the hand into her bedroom.
It’s darker there -- the dawn hasn’t reached it yet -- and Alex clings to him, hands tight in his shirtfront, as though it were possible for the two of them to lose each other. She feels anchorless, drifting, everywhere but where she touches him, and she moans when his hands slide up under her blouse. All heat and roughness, shaping her out of the dark, and she batters herself against him like a moth on a windowpane.
“Steady on, Price,” he says, harsh into her ear, and Alex laughs a bit hysterically. “Fuck me, if I’d known you were like this --”
“I’m not.” It’s a flagrant lie -- there have been other men, other nights, she lives alone and there’s nothing to keep her from it -- but it feels true enough to say. She’s never been this wild for it, this high and hot and empty. “Come on --”
The smells of blood and burning petrol keep trying to work their way back to her, and she hits the bed sitting down. She’s up on her knees before he can react, tugging at his belt, and he calls her every kind of slut by the time she gets it open.
He grabs her wrist when she goes for his trouser buttons; his hand swallows hers, and she freezes. She’s never been more aware of their relative sizes -- not when she punched him and thought he’d lash back, not when he carried her through CID, and she’s not a small woman. Next to Caroline she was a giant.
“There’s a girl.” He pulls her against him. Kisses her with her wrists held at shoulder height, bending her back beneath his weight, and her breath strains in her throat by the time he’s done. A fistful of rain strikes the window, and she shudders; “Hey, easy,” he says, and squeezes her hands. “You going to lie down for me?”
She thinks of lying on her back, his weight on top of her -- split and pinned and helpless -- and the wave that breaks over her is half desperate need and half revulsion. She kisses him again rather than try and talk it through, and wrenches her hands back.
“If you’d like,” she says, forcing a casualness she doesn’t feel. “But I’d rather --”
She twists round on her knees, turning her back to him. One hand braced against the headboard, the other in the sheets, and his thick intake of breath is audible over the rushing in her ears.
“Yeah.” The bed dips heavily when he settles onto it, and his hand slides round her hip as though he owned it. Even that much contact is nearly too much to stand, and nothing like enough. “Good enough for you?” he says, and rucks her skirt up before she’s had a chance to answer.
She’s wet when he hooks her knickers aside, when his fingers spread her open, and it feels like a betrayal. Her construct-body should be saner than she is, shouldn’t melt and brim over for his touch just as though the world hadn’t ended.
He tilts her hips back, shifting her weight as easily as a doll’s -- as a child’s -- and her nails scrabble in the headboard when he enters her with no more preparation; it’s been months in the real world, almost a year, and the white-hot perfect hurt of it makes her keen and writhe back against him. Her hair is damp with sweat, and she’ll never be warm again, and she twists like a candleflame and forces herself down to meet every thrust.
Gene bites her neck where her hair falls tangled away from it, wraps an arm firm as iron round her waist. “Good girl,” he snarls when her fingers find her clit, “that’s it, do yourself in for me, go on --”
Her head is full of nightmares, thin-smiling and bloody, flicking subliminal-fast behind her eyes. She’s no better than the worst of it, howling on her knees, his voice hitting every raw spot inside her; she comes fighting in his grip like a drowning woman, hard and then again, the nerve-scouring rush of it dying in aftershocks as he groans and follows her over.
“Don’t come in today,” he says, later, as she’s watching him dress.
“I have to.” She doesn’t want to. She wants to lie in bed and watch the light unroll itself across her ceiling; to stop moving, breathing, until the world turned cold and white around her and she could let go of her dead and her own failures. She wants not to know what’s changed. She wants not to know. “Please. Don’t make me stay here on my own.”
He shrugs one mountainous shoulder. “Well, it’s all the same to me, isn’t it?”
4. Oh leave me alone
The scar’s invisible, now, unless you’re looking. She’s grown her fringe out long and straight to cover it, the ghost-mark, the pale raised thumbprint left once the surgeons were finished with her. Only her friends still stare at it.
It might have been worse. She heard a lot, those first few weeks, about angles and trajectories and quite frankly an act of God; she heard a lot about luck. She can write her name and list words beginning with p and fill out stacks and stacks of incident report forms. Molly’s beginning, cautiously, to fight with her again. It might have been much worse.
“But do you feel,” a newsreader asks her, “as though you’ve been given a new lease on life?” and Alex refrains from offering any of the first nine responses to cross her mind.
“I’ve been very lucky,” she says, on national television, to a woman who thirty seconds earlier had been telling the world the latest details of Layton’s confession. Evan will never work again; her mother’s memory will never be allowed to rest. All shrapnel. “Really I have been.”
At home, the first three chapters of a book she hadn’t permanently titled The Leap sit on her desktop, unopened, and the only mercy in it is that she hadn’t told too many people what it was really about. She can imagine the questions, otherwise -- the jokes even -- and so far she’s been able to keep from mentioning 1981 to anybody. It’s appalling irresponsibility, to herself and to her real, breathing colleagues; but there’s something small and tense and tightly sealed deep inside her, and prying it open would be the end of everything.
She’d expected to dream about it, and she does. It’s manageable there, the sheer racing joy of being back again; and her daughter is twelve years old, taller and more serious and more perfect than anything she could have hoped for, and Alex will not leave her alone.
She only has to learn how to stay.
She’s approximately a decade too old for the club she’s found tonight, and it doesn’t matter; the light’s too erratic to show any sins at all. The music throbs and buzzes in her temples, thankfully unfamiliar, and she shuts her eyes and tries to sway with it. Louder, duller, harsher, four vodka tonics the worse, and the boy who stumbles against her is a boy, twenty-five at the outside. Dark skin blue-shadowed under the lights, hair in loose thick curls, and he mouths his apologies as she forces up a smile.
“I know you from somewhere?” he shouts, and she shakes her head and laughs and hooks her arms round his neck.
The alley out behind is dark enough for anyone’s purposes; they’re not the only ones taking advantage. Alex counts two potentially illegal transactions and one definite before her back hits the wall and she tries to stop thinking. It very nearly works: he sucks at her neck and cups her through her knickers, hard cock ground into her thigh, and there’s only a tiny part of her thinking what are you playing at, Bolly.
“I haven’t got anything --” he begins, breath tacky against her neck.
“It’s not important.”
He fucks her onto tiptoe, clinging for balance, one leg hooked up against his hip; he scratches at the wall with the hand not under her arse. Cold wet grit of it, soaking through her top -- she’s going to go home filthy. The beat still pounds in her skull, and she keeps her eyes resolutely open. Here, now, this half-life, this mouth on hers and this tight, twisting climax burning through her in the dark; nothing and nowhere else.
“Can I call you?” he says, afterwards, tugging at his zip.
“I don’t think so, no.” He really is very pretty, in the watered-ink light of a distant streetlamp; she spots a CCTV lens over his shoulder, and wonders which of her colleagues will eventually recognize her, one of these nights.
Later, curled up on her bed and still fully dressed, she stares up at the ceiling and concentrates on the stinging between her legs, on the perfect eggshell blankness of her mind. Molly’s asleep one wall over; she hasn’t started yet to tax Alex with these nights away, these absences, which no doubt means she’s afraid to bring them up. Erratic behavior, mood swings, changes in personality, they’ve all had the litany. Alex doesn’t know how to tell her what it is: scar tissue, hangover. A ghost of a life without ties, without limitations. It would be unspeakably cruel to describe.
The television babbles softly to itself at the foot of her bed. She never pays attention anymore.
5. Falling in love
She never remembers her nightmares.
She still wakes up trembling, almost every night, but the reason for it’s gone before she gets her eyes open: a blind spot, an absence of information. She’s not sure how she knows it used to be different; there’s a boundary she crossed somewhere, some uncertain time ago, and she can’t think of when or what it was.
“Lucky girl,” Jim says, laughing, when she tells him. “I’d give anything not to be able to remember mine.”
“You never told me you had them.” The chemical backwash of panic is receding, dragging with it whatever freight it had carried. Alex stretches after it, as she can remember doing when the dreams started, and pulls back a disjointed fistful of images. A dark room, a river, a strange little girl in tears.
Jim kisses into her hair. “That’s because I don’t when you’re around.”
“I used to dream about my parents,” she says, another night -- at his flat, this time, tucked up under slightly too many blankets. “I remember that.”
Once, not long ago, it would have hurt to mention them. It still does, a soft distant ache like sad music, but she’s learned somehow to contain it. The wounds in her life are healing, knitting patiently together, and now and again she can even forget she has the scars.
“They’d be proud of you.” He sounds so certain of it that it might be true: it’s hard to imagine meeting them as equals, pouring her life out on the table before them. Look what I’ve made. They might even have respected the work she does now. “But maybe you don’t need them anymore.”
Alex sighs and curls back closer against him. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asks. “I mean, every night --”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Alex,” Jim says, so seriously that she twists round in his arms to try and see his face in the half-light.
They’re not living together. There are rules about that sort of thing: she keeps clothes at his place, and he keeps albums at hers, and they never go to bed alone, but they hold down separate leases and drive to work in separate cars, and everyone pretends not to already know. He tends to apologize when he’s had a drink, and promise her it can be different someday: “When I make the rules,” he likes to say, and tumble her into the sheets. “When I can have you in front of the station if I feel like it.”
They’re a good team, his calculation, her insight. They’re making a name for themselves in the department, after only a few months. And there are other things.
He kisses her bare stomach, by the scar from the hostage incident, and leaves a curving trail of suck marks from her hipbone down to her thigh. He holds her wrists above her head and makes her beg to be fucked. He makes her confess every kiss, every touch, every one-night stand she’d had before him, and strokes her so lightly that she’s breathless before she’s half into her twenties.
He presses his mouth to her hairline and whispers “trust me” and coaxes her onto her belly across his bed, every pillow he owns tucked up beneath her hips. Exposed, served up, and she’s vibrating with nerves and lust before he lays another hand on her. He kisses the bowed back of her neck, bare as for execution, and then an inch lower, open-mouthed and as careful as he can be not to touch her at any other point. Down her back, between her shoulderblades, and she feels as though he’s calling her into existence with every brush of tongue and teeth. Heat spreads and stretches through her in his wake, and she can hear herself making greedy open-mouthed noises into the sheets.
He moves over her slowly, glacially slowly, no matter how she pleads with him -- his patience, she’s long since learned, is very nearly inhuman -- but after what feels like hours he’s kissing and scraping his teeth across the base of her spine, playing long electric shudders out of her. It’s a torment to hold still as he orders her to, and worse when he moves lower and lower again and “wait,” she gasps, “God --”
“Alex?” She can’t see him, but she knows what he looks like -- eyes wild, mouth bruised and spit-wet. She’s seen him after he’s kissed her, gone down on her, sucked at her breasts until she’s had to push him away. “Do you need to stop?”
“No -- I --” He exhales, breath cool against her burning skin, and she thinks nonsensically this is how people die. “How far are you going with this?”
“As you’ll let me, sweetheart,” he says, and she’s sure she’d slap anyone else who called her that. She hates pet names.
He kisses her again, the same spot, just above the rise of her arse. Alex shuts her eyes. He’s breathing as hard as she is, she realizes, he’s all but moaning against her, and the thought nearly undoes her. “You like this.”
“Alex.” The bed creaks as he shifts his weight. “I love it. I want all of you. Every inch. And you --” his knuckles graze against her cunt, slipping-wet, shamefully hopelessly wet “-- you don’t seem to mind.”
“Fuck.” She exhales on it, long and deep. “All right.”
And she’d swear she could hear him smile; he kisses down and down, moving in hairs’ breadths, until the tip of his tongue flicks once, twice, just there. Pressing into her so gently it’s a form of torture itself, and she’ll never breathe again but it doesn’t matter; she’s opened, defenseless, flayed bare with it, every nerve in her body burning, and she’s dimly aware that her inner thighs are cold with wetness.
“Please --” she says, unsure what she’s asking for, and he hums assent and fucks her with his tongue, slow and relentless enough to set her screaming so his neighbors must think she’s being killed. It’s nothing like anything he’s done to her before, not even the times he’s licked her out until she ached; it builds and builds without breaking, and the second more purposeful brush of his fingers against her cunt is almost extraneous.
Until two of them are inside her, almost effortlessly, and his tongue curls, his fingers hook forward, twisting and wringing her out. It’s overload, so good she wants to flinch away from it, need coursing through her thick and sweet; her orgasm uncoils slow and merciless and so long it frightens her, the deep dragging waves of it pulling her under, and he doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop until she’s boneless and gasping and trying to form the word “enough.”
He kisses his way back up her spine as she’s still calling herself back together. She barely notices the touch, until he’s pressed full-length alongside her. Hard against her hip, she registers in some impossibly distant outpost of herself, and they’ll have to work out in a minute how to manage that: he presses fingers to her mouth, and she sucks salt from them reflexively until he hisses.
“I love you,” he says, so soft it would be easy to miss, and with damp fingers tucks a damp strand of her hair back behind her ear. “I always loved you, Alex Drake. I always will.”
She doesn’t have to say it back. He knows.
1. Sam didn’t jump.
2. Sam didn’t wake up.
3. Evan told Alex about her parents.
4. Alex woke up.
5. Keats won.
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