Can I Hide With You?
Author: Jess_Who
Fandom: Ashes To Ashes
Pairings: Gene/Alex
Rating: 12+
Disclaimer: Only a fan, not the owner :'(
Spoilers: Series 2.6
A/N: This was a one-shot, now it will probably be a few chapters because I keep getting distracted. AU - Riley's men come to Alex's flat, a battered Gene finds Alex hiding behind the sofa.
....A2A...A2A....
Final Chapter: Wide Awake But Barely Concious
Alex can feel the gravitational pull of his body. It grows stronger, her need for him with every twin beat of their hearts.
She hopes she is not the only one in this boat, she hopes he is there too. Seeing her in the same clarity that she does him.
She can see the uncertainty in his eyes like the spiral of grey that is painted into his irises, but slowly the corn flower blue at the edges start to flood the murky windows to his emotions.
Stroking the fine hairs that curl at the back of his ear in an action that she does almost unconsciously, she let its silkiness glide over her skin and settle her nerves.
She could do it she realises, the imagery of doing it is so clear in her mind.
Her lips tingle, blood rushing to the surface of them as though they are independently offering themselves up on a silver plate.
Does she have the guts to go through with it is an entirely different question.
What would it cost her? Gene's friendship? The last piece of her family, her only daughter? Or maybe only vocalising what she feels will barricade her way home.
This could be the reason for her being here. Not her parents and the unspeakable truth that she has for so long kept herself hidden from, but instead to love again. Not the love she has for Molly, the unconditional love between mother and child, but that of a man and woman or whatever emotion it is that comes closest to it so she can help herself move beyond the past.
#
"The truth is not a switch that can be turned on and off. It is absolute. If you deviate from it for one split second, you invalidate it, you shatter it. There can be no compromises with the truth."
All what her father said has truth in it, he believed in it and so does she, but only what is in plain sight. She does not believe in the hidden context that is far more sinister.
Her father had loved her it is something she has always been sure of. She has not allowed herself to believe he could love her too much, her and her mother, but it is the truth.
He loved them to death.
For a man so intelligent and her a daddy's girl through and through she had not for some time after witnessing their deaths again realised that he did not understand that love had its limits, he thought it forever. That the vows shared at the alter were justifiable to kill for.
He let himself become possessed by it, his jealousy, while the world of hers became suddenly and violently unraveled, because all he could see was that one solution for forever and ever to be theirs.
"But shed no tears for me, Caroline or Alex. We are where we want to be, together, forever."
#
Alex remembers her younger self before her innocence is lost and the world as she knows it went up in a betrayal of flames.
She remembers thinking the colours were being misleading on purpose, that they were simply going against what she wanted.
She is filled with an uncontrollable frustration. She will probably be told she is being childish for throwing her toys, but she does it anyway and crosses her arms. She scowls at the Rubik's cube, her lips pouting sulkily.
"Alex Price, don't you dare be a quitter!" Her mothers voice should have held admonishment rather than amusement at having been interrupted from her 'important' paperwork, "Come on, keep going. Seven steps to solving it, you said. What's the first one?"
She still feels a little tearful and remains pouting sulkily outwardly when she is secretly pleased to have her mother lavishing even this small amount of attention on her and she really wants to prove she can do it so her mother will tell her how proud she is. "You start at the top. With the corners."
"Well, go on then." Her mother encourages.
#
Evan, her god-father, her surrogate parent, her friend and confidant, the unwitting destructor of her family. His love for her came at a cost and the price was her mother.
He wanted Caroline, he had her and she thinks the reason her father, Tim found out is because Caroline was going to leave and Evan was willing to have her. With mother came daughter.
He had known before she had that her mother had loved her.
As a child he brought his way into her affections. With retrospective she thinks he may have intended to become her step-father and in a sense he got that only it was without her mother.
The year of tears, rebellion, boys, Peter, all endured in guilt.
He loves her because he feels guilty. She does not want love formed by guilt.
#
It has been a day beyond all her expectations and she is more than happy to be getting away from the station. Nothing can ever be that simple though, can it? Apparently every world even the fictional variety are difficult, this particular one probably intentionally so.
Evan catches up with her at the top of the steps just as she is breaking for freedom.
He should understand the extent of the betrayal he has committed. She trusted him, she will again, she already does. The relativity of time is messing with her head. The Evan that brought her up, who is now looking after Molly, she trusts him, she has to.
But this Evan the one here, now in front of her apologising, questioning why she is so bothered by the sordid relationship he has had with a respectable married woman, her mother. Well, she does not like him all that much right now.
"What would you do if your god-daughter found out?" she asks wondering if he truly means what he says; that 'It's finished'. Should she threaten to tell herself, her younger self?
"She won't. Why would she? It would break her heart." He is almost pleading with her and damn if she won't keep this a secret from herself because she not remember being told about or trying to understand a sexual relationship between her mother and her god-father.
But back then she had seen everything like a silent black and white film, her naivety preventing her from seeing the colours of she just had not wanted to see them.
She will find out though, years from now on this very day and she will not know if it hurts more to have been blind all this time or if she had known all along. Either way it breaks her heart and there is no one here now standing on the steps outside Fenchurch East that she wants to fix it for her.
#
If time were on her side he, Gene, would be able to continue his work of fixing it for her, but she cannot wait that long.
The thought of spending that much time separated from Molly is crippling. Molly has filled the void inside her for so long that she forgot a part of her was broken to start with. Now she is scared the space has gotten bigger and that it will need bigger boots to fit it.
She will miss him, she has admitted that outright on more then one occasion just in case this world is still standing. She does not want him in particular to think she is so cold-hearted that she will move on without so much as a backwards glance.
She pushes her fingers farther into his hair, cradling his head in her hand, his scalp warm, the length of his golden mane trailing among and over her fingers.
He is ordinary. Someone she would have over looked at one time, but now she has taken the time to study him, tried and failed to psycho-analyse him, she can see he is exceptional.
The light tickle of his breath against her lips, exceptional.
#
The stark unforgiving purr of oxygen being pushed mechanically into her lungs. The feeling of medication moving sluggishly through her veins.
#
Light-headed, body clammy and weighed down by the fever he causes. Her pupils dilate and in the low light they must look like dark pools to him. She blinks slowly, languidly, an unintentional flutter of lashes, her seductively sweet looking lips parted slightly as though frozen in a breathless sigh.
Her body is alert to its own excitement, lost are her caution and any remaining hesitations.
This moment already feels like a treasured memory, she has seen it coming from a long way off in her peripheral vision and consciously decided to pretend it would never happen. Scared of not knowing what outcome would greet her.
Still she is none the wiser, has not learned a thing while playing this game of waiting, but now she is willing to step into the unknown blinded by the rush of untampered emotion. It is the definitive step and she is looking forwards to where it will take her.
She unweaves her fingers from his hair, she dances the tips of them over the shell of his ear in a passing gesture before stroking around his eye. Delicately touching his lashes, lashes that any child, teenager or woman would kill for.
She feels his eyes open, the flicker of change in the tension of his cheek as the muscle goes taut and then relaxes again.
The bloody stain under the surface of his skin receives a gentler greeting. She hovers above it, does not press it. Instead lets the heat penetrate her in a way an open fire would fail to.
#
Above the drilling deep within her skull she can feel Molly's small hand slip into her limp, unresponsive one. Her hand is boiling hot in Alex's tepid one and she feels a gentle pressure, the strength carefully measured as Molly squeezes her hand.
#
Alex's eyes fly open. She regards Gene warily, but he does not seem to have noticed anything is amiss as he is too busy staring with longing at her mouth.
She lets the tense line of her lips fade, her tongue smoothing over them, leaving them to appear moisturised and shiny.
Of its own accord her finger played down the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth, just where its pout starts to take affect. The pale pink is infused with the rush of life. She presses two fingers to them feeling the ghost of his pulse, it is faint, but fast and sure of its self.
Her forefinger drags the natural swell of his bottom lip downwards slightly as she replaces then with her lips, taking his before he can complete the closure of his mouth.
It is the most tender exchange of the evening.
His lips are like pressing your mouth to a silk handkerchief, a sweet fresh warmth, fluid when he moves back and recaptures her lower lip in his. He holds her with his teeth, sucking her into his inviting mouth and using his tongue to play with its lusciousness, swirling over her, tasting her, teasing her with a promising kiss.
#
She is like, but not a dead body. She has been embalmed. Her blood draining from the tough Common Carotid artery that has been pulled with two fingers from her neck. Her blood is being swapped for formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde...
The embalming chemical, it fills her veins, clears it of clots, disinfects and preserves her. Concentrated chemicals with more formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde replacing her soft organs giving her weight and substance that death has stolen from her.
Her skin pale, but with a false spark of life, more chemicals injected into her while she lays waiting endlessly, her face molded into a peaceful sleep. Eyes glued shut. Strokes of a brush, mascara applied. Lips threaded neatly together to stop her mouth from going slack, from hanging open at an almost disfiguring angle, a haunting sight for an open casket. A touch of lip stick.
It twists her soul to think she is like that, even though her heart still pumps, her lungs expand, her brain ticks over, she cannot make a sound or movement. She is held hostage within the walls of her body, unable to let Molly know she is there in the room with her. That if she speaks Alex will listen, wants to listen, but Molly does not speak.
Alex wants to cry out, to scream, to whisper, but the tiny loops of silk threading her lips together will not move. The invisible glue holding her unseeing so she cannot open them, cannot have Molly see the small flicker of lashes and lean over into her line of sight.
Why does she have to be embalmed like this? Embalmed, existing. What keeps her frozen in this state of rest?
#
Alex's mouth on Gene's is a fierce display of kinetic energy. Her one-minded devotion in possessing him reminds her that not everything is as it seems.
A sharp tongue be the disguise of a lovers tongue, a secret poet.
Her body hides in his. Chest to chest, the thinnest layer of silk between them, gliding over skin. His hands on her shoulders.
His heart beating, strong and alive against her right breast a reminder that blood red with oxygen and blue without flows through her every organ from head to toe, not a drop of embalming fluids.
Hi hands out stretched on the plains of her back.
She realises that at some point in her desperation to feel, to be alive, she has re-arranged their positions from side-be-side to her laying full length over his entire body.
Her night shirt has ridden up to her waist, the excess fabric caught up between them. Gene's hands find the exposed skin at her lower back, fingers running over the bumps of her spine and pausing.
She has seen him looking. She has walked away smiling to herself, giving an extra swing to her step because she knows his eyes are following her.
Her tongue duelling with his, dragging over teeth, probing the soft side of his mouth, where their lips are locked in embrace.
Her hand reaches back to find his larger one and plants it on her behind where it automatically clenches against the welcome roundness that it has been given to explore, fondle, grope inappropriately and molester. She can sense in his eagerness a man who has waited for this, dreamed, pondered in his office and fantasised this flesh in his palm.
Skin both soft and rough with calluses win against any rival hands that have in her mixed up past future touched her. The ghost of them pushed aside by all that is this man.
#
The distance changes, it is minute, but a change none the less.
She still cannot move, she tries, but it has to be enough that she can feel some give in the stitches, the glue weakens atom by atom.
From deep under the waves Molly's voice cuts through the static.
"For god sake, just wake up!" Her voice loud, clear and angry.
Alex can hear heavy shuddering breathes, a chair scrapping on linoleum flooring, then the sudden shift of tension as Molly climbs on to the bed next to her. Her face burrows into Alex shoulder, dampening it with tears.
"Please." Her daughter begs, clasps her Mothers hand, tight, nails pushing into her cool palm. "Please, give me something, let me know you're there, Mum."
Alex can feel the sterile light like a hot poker on her eye lids, all she can see is a red glow. The temperature is quickly eaten up by the room so despite the warm nature of such a colour it leaves her cold. It is something though, it really is something.
It gets brighter still. Suffocating some darkness, forces itself against the shutters covering her eyes. She drinks, swallows the light down, stares at the fine web of veins the only things she can see. She does not fight it, she rides on it.
"Please, please, please... If you... If you love me, you'll wake up."
Molly's last ditch attempt makes Alex's heart contract painfully. In that second Alex is convinced if Molly were to look at the monitor at the hospital bedside she would have seen the electric line jump, erratic and high.
The words that are locked within her are soft, motherly, 'I do. I do. Oh, Molls, I do love you. I'd move heaven and earth to be with you, honey."
The light is fading. The darkness does not creep it eats at her, taking some of her strength.
She concentrates on the hand in hers, Molly's sobs washing over her aching mind.
With all the strength her body has retained she wills her brain to spark into making and re-building connections between mind and body.
Her hand flexes and tightens around Molly's.
"Mum?"
#
When she looks directly at him his eyes are knowledgeable, it shocks her nerves like a blow. She cannot swim, she is drowning in the depths of his soul. His eyes are trying to speak to her in a language she cannot decipher.
She sits up and moans slightly at the intimate contact of sitting in his lap. Arching her back Alex pushes her hair from her face, his hands at her rear partially sat on. She breathes deeply before she looks down at him.
He takes her breath away, reaches into her and draws it from her lungs. With his slight fringe flopping over his forehead, the rest of his hair sticking untamed and at all angles over her pillow, eyes hooded with desire, there is nothing quite so exquisitely delicious, as him blissed out after a kiss, an earth shattering, life giving kiss.
She is poised like a wanton goddess reveling in the deep, dangerous waters of love. Each crash of water on her shore's hiss as her ligaments ignite, welding, mending.
The burn of his loves fixing, the calm intensity of his touch a balm on her fragility.
Gene is her constant, her rock when everything else slips from its holding. When her world is untangling, falling apart and exploding before her he is the hand that catches her, comforts and hides her from prying eyes. He keeps her fighting, distracts her from her harrowing grief.
She has to kiss him again, he means so much, too much and she has to have it all while it is here for the taking.
She takes with guilt gnawing at her innards, she knows with sickening truth that she is not enough for him, that she will keep some part of herself from him, words that cannot be shared on either side.
Actions speak louder then words.
She kisses him in a slow gentle greeting. Teasing with nips and the touch of tongues to lips. Daring, but not taking more, she decides instead to enjoy its sensuality. Kissing like it is a memory they will take beyond the grave.
She pulls his shoulder knowing he is her homecoming. Rolls them. He is her postage stamp. Mouth still attached as he arrives above her. Posting her home. His baby soft blond hair brushing her temple.
She knows she loves him, but the words seem stark, real, sat at the front of her mind waiting for her to be brave and unfurl her tongue and let the words slide without fault. But his tongue entwines with hers and thought the moment is still available she pushes it aside.
The regret is immediate and will be so for awhile, forever, but she has skipped over unnoticed chances to get him before and saying, 'I love you' would be the key turning in the lock. She has to stick to her objective, her promise that has laid dormant for over a year.
#
A disco of lights shining into her eyes, she things they are white, but then they flicker at the edges blue, yellow, pink and they sway up and down, side to side as though dancing. She watches them, tries to move her eye with or away with them, there is too much light for her to decide what he is doing with them.
"She squeezed my hand, I'm not lying."
That light snaps off with a click and the blackness returns the imprints of the shine in dazed dots across the back of her eyes lids. It must have been a doctor.
"Is she waking up?"
Alex lays still, on the cusp of consciousness waiting for a reply.
#
She had closed her eyes and again she was in that room with her future waiting for her, but when she opens them, struggles passes a weight heavier then sleep, she is with him.
She hates that she cannot wake up before she falls too deep into this world, too deep into Gene arms. She has to stop thinking of this as real it's must be what keeps her tethered. She had promised herself no attachments, but that is exactly what she has formed with him from the day they met. They had hissed and railed, but in the end settle into a routine of rows, coalitions and alcohol as much alcohol as they could contain before one of them pleaded mercy or passed out.
"I thought we'd sorted all this, Bolls. You're not going anywhere unless I say so. And I don't say so."
His voice echoes back to her from a few weeks ago. She should have paid more attention to what he was saying, should not have allowed herself to become so immersed in him as a person and a man.
All this time. She had believed wholly that she had invented this world, Christ, she had proclaimed that it was of her making too many time to count.
That knowledge that had, is still in his eyes is because he knows. The bastard knows, she tries not to be angry and she is not, well, entirely. She is relieved this world it will continue on without her, it will not blink out and disappear.
She whispers into his mouth, eyes looking up at him beseeching her freedom at the same time as telling him he is wanted, "Let me go."
He snatches his mouth back, it's not done viciously but she can see it has cost him something. "Can't." He looks away and down just like a little girl she knows.
"You know. How long have you know? She's been waiting and it's been killing me, you knew it was killing me. How long?"
He glances down to her mouth and back up again. "The kiss. I didn't.. I..."
"You what? Gene, come on, please." She shakes his shoulder as his mind moves miles away.
"You can go home." He says it like he is reiterating a point, not releasing her.
"Then let me."
"You're not ready yet and neither am I" He says, his last words coming out like his voice is sore and scratchy.
Alex looks at him with something akin to shock and knows an emotion similar has skipped across her face.
She wants to act on the compulsion to disagree, to tell him she is ready, to have and to leave him at a moments notice, but she isn't, not really. If she is ready she would no longer be here.
She is not healed, not fully, not yet. Her heart needs fixing as much as her head.
Alex hopes Molly understands she needs a day or more, and in the end though leaving fixed, her heart will have become two pieces of a whole and each half will be devoted souly to their respective loves; Molly and Gene.
She will be worlds apart from him, her Gene Hunt, but something tells her when she is ready to depart from what she once would have called a dystopia, it will only be a temporary transfer.
"Don't be worried. I'm coming back, I promise you. You have to believe me, Molls"
...A2A...A2A....
Finished.
Fandom: Ashes To Ashes
Pairings: Gene/Alex
Rating: 12+
Disclaimer: Only a fan, not the owner :'(
Spoilers: Series 2.6
A/N: This was a one-shot, now it will probably be a few chapters because I keep getting distracted. AU - Riley's men come to Alex's flat, a battered Gene finds Alex hiding behind the sofa.
....A2A...A2A....
Final Chapter: Wide Awake But Barely Concious
Alex can feel the gravitational pull of his body. It grows stronger, her need for him with every twin beat of their hearts.
She hopes she is not the only one in this boat, she hopes he is there too. Seeing her in the same clarity that she does him.
She can see the uncertainty in his eyes like the spiral of grey that is painted into his irises, but slowly the corn flower blue at the edges start to flood the murky windows to his emotions.
Stroking the fine hairs that curl at the back of his ear in an action that she does almost unconsciously, she let its silkiness glide over her skin and settle her nerves.
She could do it she realises, the imagery of doing it is so clear in her mind.
Her lips tingle, blood rushing to the surface of them as though they are independently offering themselves up on a silver plate.
Does she have the guts to go through with it is an entirely different question.
What would it cost her? Gene's friendship? The last piece of her family, her only daughter? Or maybe only vocalising what she feels will barricade her way home.
This could be the reason for her being here. Not her parents and the unspeakable truth that she has for so long kept herself hidden from, but instead to love again. Not the love she has for Molly, the unconditional love between mother and child, but that of a man and woman or whatever emotion it is that comes closest to it so she can help herself move beyond the past.
#
"The truth is not a switch that can be turned on and off. It is absolute. If you deviate from it for one split second, you invalidate it, you shatter it. There can be no compromises with the truth."
All what her father said has truth in it, he believed in it and so does she, but only what is in plain sight. She does not believe in the hidden context that is far more sinister.
Her father had loved her it is something she has always been sure of. She has not allowed herself to believe he could love her too much, her and her mother, but it is the truth.
He loved them to death.
For a man so intelligent and her a daddy's girl through and through she had not for some time after witnessing their deaths again realised that he did not understand that love had its limits, he thought it forever. That the vows shared at the alter were justifiable to kill for.
He let himself become possessed by it, his jealousy, while the world of hers became suddenly and violently unraveled, because all he could see was that one solution for forever and ever to be theirs.
"But shed no tears for me, Caroline or Alex. We are where we want to be, together, forever."
#
Alex remembers her younger self before her innocence is lost and the world as she knows it went up in a betrayal of flames.
She remembers thinking the colours were being misleading on purpose, that they were simply going against what she wanted.
She is filled with an uncontrollable frustration. She will probably be told she is being childish for throwing her toys, but she does it anyway and crosses her arms. She scowls at the Rubik's cube, her lips pouting sulkily.
"Alex Price, don't you dare be a quitter!" Her mothers voice should have held admonishment rather than amusement at having been interrupted from her 'important' paperwork, "Come on, keep going. Seven steps to solving it, you said. What's the first one?"
She still feels a little tearful and remains pouting sulkily outwardly when she is secretly pleased to have her mother lavishing even this small amount of attention on her and she really wants to prove she can do it so her mother will tell her how proud she is. "You start at the top. With the corners."
"Well, go on then." Her mother encourages.
#
Evan, her god-father, her surrogate parent, her friend and confidant, the unwitting destructor of her family. His love for her came at a cost and the price was her mother.
He wanted Caroline, he had her and she thinks the reason her father, Tim found out is because Caroline was going to leave and Evan was willing to have her. With mother came daughter.
He had known before she had that her mother had loved her.
As a child he brought his way into her affections. With retrospective she thinks he may have intended to become her step-father and in a sense he got that only it was without her mother.
The year of tears, rebellion, boys, Peter, all endured in guilt.
He loves her because he feels guilty. She does not want love formed by guilt.
#
It has been a day beyond all her expectations and she is more than happy to be getting away from the station. Nothing can ever be that simple though, can it? Apparently every world even the fictional variety are difficult, this particular one probably intentionally so.
Evan catches up with her at the top of the steps just as she is breaking for freedom.
He should understand the extent of the betrayal he has committed. She trusted him, she will again, she already does. The relativity of time is messing with her head. The Evan that brought her up, who is now looking after Molly, she trusts him, she has to.
But this Evan the one here, now in front of her apologising, questioning why she is so bothered by the sordid relationship he has had with a respectable married woman, her mother. Well, she does not like him all that much right now.
"What would you do if your god-daughter found out?" she asks wondering if he truly means what he says; that 'It's finished'. Should she threaten to tell herself, her younger self?
"She won't. Why would she? It would break her heart." He is almost pleading with her and damn if she won't keep this a secret from herself because she not remember being told about or trying to understand a sexual relationship between her mother and her god-father.
But back then she had seen everything like a silent black and white film, her naivety preventing her from seeing the colours of she just had not wanted to see them.
She will find out though, years from now on this very day and she will not know if it hurts more to have been blind all this time or if she had known all along. Either way it breaks her heart and there is no one here now standing on the steps outside Fenchurch East that she wants to fix it for her.
#
If time were on her side he, Gene, would be able to continue his work of fixing it for her, but she cannot wait that long.
The thought of spending that much time separated from Molly is crippling. Molly has filled the void inside her for so long that she forgot a part of her was broken to start with. Now she is scared the space has gotten bigger and that it will need bigger boots to fit it.
She will miss him, she has admitted that outright on more then one occasion just in case this world is still standing. She does not want him in particular to think she is so cold-hearted that she will move on without so much as a backwards glance.
She pushes her fingers farther into his hair, cradling his head in her hand, his scalp warm, the length of his golden mane trailing among and over her fingers.
He is ordinary. Someone she would have over looked at one time, but now she has taken the time to study him, tried and failed to psycho-analyse him, she can see he is exceptional.
The light tickle of his breath against her lips, exceptional.
#
The stark unforgiving purr of oxygen being pushed mechanically into her lungs. The feeling of medication moving sluggishly through her veins.
#
Light-headed, body clammy and weighed down by the fever he causes. Her pupils dilate and in the low light they must look like dark pools to him. She blinks slowly, languidly, an unintentional flutter of lashes, her seductively sweet looking lips parted slightly as though frozen in a breathless sigh.
Her body is alert to its own excitement, lost are her caution and any remaining hesitations.
This moment already feels like a treasured memory, she has seen it coming from a long way off in her peripheral vision and consciously decided to pretend it would never happen. Scared of not knowing what outcome would greet her.
Still she is none the wiser, has not learned a thing while playing this game of waiting, but now she is willing to step into the unknown blinded by the rush of untampered emotion. It is the definitive step and she is looking forwards to where it will take her.
She unweaves her fingers from his hair, she dances the tips of them over the shell of his ear in a passing gesture before stroking around his eye. Delicately touching his lashes, lashes that any child, teenager or woman would kill for.
She feels his eyes open, the flicker of change in the tension of his cheek as the muscle goes taut and then relaxes again.
The bloody stain under the surface of his skin receives a gentler greeting. She hovers above it, does not press it. Instead lets the heat penetrate her in a way an open fire would fail to.
#
Above the drilling deep within her skull she can feel Molly's small hand slip into her limp, unresponsive one. Her hand is boiling hot in Alex's tepid one and she feels a gentle pressure, the strength carefully measured as Molly squeezes her hand.
#
Alex's eyes fly open. She regards Gene warily, but he does not seem to have noticed anything is amiss as he is too busy staring with longing at her mouth.
She lets the tense line of her lips fade, her tongue smoothing over them, leaving them to appear moisturised and shiny.
Of its own accord her finger played down the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth, just where its pout starts to take affect. The pale pink is infused with the rush of life. She presses two fingers to them feeling the ghost of his pulse, it is faint, but fast and sure of its self.
Her forefinger drags the natural swell of his bottom lip downwards slightly as she replaces then with her lips, taking his before he can complete the closure of his mouth.
It is the most tender exchange of the evening.
His lips are like pressing your mouth to a silk handkerchief, a sweet fresh warmth, fluid when he moves back and recaptures her lower lip in his. He holds her with his teeth, sucking her into his inviting mouth and using his tongue to play with its lusciousness, swirling over her, tasting her, teasing her with a promising kiss.
#
She is like, but not a dead body. She has been embalmed. Her blood draining from the tough Common Carotid artery that has been pulled with two fingers from her neck. Her blood is being swapped for formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde...
The embalming chemical, it fills her veins, clears it of clots, disinfects and preserves her. Concentrated chemicals with more formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde replacing her soft organs giving her weight and substance that death has stolen from her.
Her skin pale, but with a false spark of life, more chemicals injected into her while she lays waiting endlessly, her face molded into a peaceful sleep. Eyes glued shut. Strokes of a brush, mascara applied. Lips threaded neatly together to stop her mouth from going slack, from hanging open at an almost disfiguring angle, a haunting sight for an open casket. A touch of lip stick.
It twists her soul to think she is like that, even though her heart still pumps, her lungs expand, her brain ticks over, she cannot make a sound or movement. She is held hostage within the walls of her body, unable to let Molly know she is there in the room with her. That if she speaks Alex will listen, wants to listen, but Molly does not speak.
Alex wants to cry out, to scream, to whisper, but the tiny loops of silk threading her lips together will not move. The invisible glue holding her unseeing so she cannot open them, cannot have Molly see the small flicker of lashes and lean over into her line of sight.
Why does she have to be embalmed like this? Embalmed, existing. What keeps her frozen in this state of rest?
#
Alex's mouth on Gene's is a fierce display of kinetic energy. Her one-minded devotion in possessing him reminds her that not everything is as it seems.
A sharp tongue be the disguise of a lovers tongue, a secret poet.
Her body hides in his. Chest to chest, the thinnest layer of silk between them, gliding over skin. His hands on her shoulders.
His heart beating, strong and alive against her right breast a reminder that blood red with oxygen and blue without flows through her every organ from head to toe, not a drop of embalming fluids.
Hi hands out stretched on the plains of her back.
She realises that at some point in her desperation to feel, to be alive, she has re-arranged their positions from side-be-side to her laying full length over his entire body.
Her night shirt has ridden up to her waist, the excess fabric caught up between them. Gene's hands find the exposed skin at her lower back, fingers running over the bumps of her spine and pausing.
She has seen him looking. She has walked away smiling to herself, giving an extra swing to her step because she knows his eyes are following her.
Her tongue duelling with his, dragging over teeth, probing the soft side of his mouth, where their lips are locked in embrace.
Her hand reaches back to find his larger one and plants it on her behind where it automatically clenches against the welcome roundness that it has been given to explore, fondle, grope inappropriately and molester. She can sense in his eagerness a man who has waited for this, dreamed, pondered in his office and fantasised this flesh in his palm.
Skin both soft and rough with calluses win against any rival hands that have in her mixed up past future touched her. The ghost of them pushed aside by all that is this man.
#
The distance changes, it is minute, but a change none the less.
She still cannot move, she tries, but it has to be enough that she can feel some give in the stitches, the glue weakens atom by atom.
From deep under the waves Molly's voice cuts through the static.
"For god sake, just wake up!" Her voice loud, clear and angry.
Alex can hear heavy shuddering breathes, a chair scrapping on linoleum flooring, then the sudden shift of tension as Molly climbs on to the bed next to her. Her face burrows into Alex shoulder, dampening it with tears.
"Please." Her daughter begs, clasps her Mothers hand, tight, nails pushing into her cool palm. "Please, give me something, let me know you're there, Mum."
Alex can feel the sterile light like a hot poker on her eye lids, all she can see is a red glow. The temperature is quickly eaten up by the room so despite the warm nature of such a colour it leaves her cold. It is something though, it really is something.
It gets brighter still. Suffocating some darkness, forces itself against the shutters covering her eyes. She drinks, swallows the light down, stares at the fine web of veins the only things she can see. She does not fight it, she rides on it.
"Please, please, please... If you... If you love me, you'll wake up."
Molly's last ditch attempt makes Alex's heart contract painfully. In that second Alex is convinced if Molly were to look at the monitor at the hospital bedside she would have seen the electric line jump, erratic and high.
The words that are locked within her are soft, motherly, 'I do. I do. Oh, Molls, I do love you. I'd move heaven and earth to be with you, honey."
The light is fading. The darkness does not creep it eats at her, taking some of her strength.
She concentrates on the hand in hers, Molly's sobs washing over her aching mind.
With all the strength her body has retained she wills her brain to spark into making and re-building connections between mind and body.
Her hand flexes and tightens around Molly's.
"Mum?"
#
When she looks directly at him his eyes are knowledgeable, it shocks her nerves like a blow. She cannot swim, she is drowning in the depths of his soul. His eyes are trying to speak to her in a language she cannot decipher.
She sits up and moans slightly at the intimate contact of sitting in his lap. Arching her back Alex pushes her hair from her face, his hands at her rear partially sat on. She breathes deeply before she looks down at him.
He takes her breath away, reaches into her and draws it from her lungs. With his slight fringe flopping over his forehead, the rest of his hair sticking untamed and at all angles over her pillow, eyes hooded with desire, there is nothing quite so exquisitely delicious, as him blissed out after a kiss, an earth shattering, life giving kiss.
She is poised like a wanton goddess reveling in the deep, dangerous waters of love. Each crash of water on her shore's hiss as her ligaments ignite, welding, mending.
The burn of his loves fixing, the calm intensity of his touch a balm on her fragility.
Gene is her constant, her rock when everything else slips from its holding. When her world is untangling, falling apart and exploding before her he is the hand that catches her, comforts and hides her from prying eyes. He keeps her fighting, distracts her from her harrowing grief.
She has to kiss him again, he means so much, too much and she has to have it all while it is here for the taking.
She takes with guilt gnawing at her innards, she knows with sickening truth that she is not enough for him, that she will keep some part of herself from him, words that cannot be shared on either side.
Actions speak louder then words.
She kisses him in a slow gentle greeting. Teasing with nips and the touch of tongues to lips. Daring, but not taking more, she decides instead to enjoy its sensuality. Kissing like it is a memory they will take beyond the grave.
She pulls his shoulder knowing he is her homecoming. Rolls them. He is her postage stamp. Mouth still attached as he arrives above her. Posting her home. His baby soft blond hair brushing her temple.
She knows she loves him, but the words seem stark, real, sat at the front of her mind waiting for her to be brave and unfurl her tongue and let the words slide without fault. But his tongue entwines with hers and thought the moment is still available she pushes it aside.
The regret is immediate and will be so for awhile, forever, but she has skipped over unnoticed chances to get him before and saying, 'I love you' would be the key turning in the lock. She has to stick to her objective, her promise that has laid dormant for over a year.
#
A disco of lights shining into her eyes, she things they are white, but then they flicker at the edges blue, yellow, pink and they sway up and down, side to side as though dancing. She watches them, tries to move her eye with or away with them, there is too much light for her to decide what he is doing with them.
"She squeezed my hand, I'm not lying."
That light snaps off with a click and the blackness returns the imprints of the shine in dazed dots across the back of her eyes lids. It must have been a doctor.
"Is she waking up?"
Alex lays still, on the cusp of consciousness waiting for a reply.
#
She had closed her eyes and again she was in that room with her future waiting for her, but when she opens them, struggles passes a weight heavier then sleep, she is with him.
She hates that she cannot wake up before she falls too deep into this world, too deep into Gene arms. She has to stop thinking of this as real it's must be what keeps her tethered. She had promised herself no attachments, but that is exactly what she has formed with him from the day they met. They had hissed and railed, but in the end settle into a routine of rows, coalitions and alcohol as much alcohol as they could contain before one of them pleaded mercy or passed out.
"I thought we'd sorted all this, Bolls. You're not going anywhere unless I say so. And I don't say so."
His voice echoes back to her from a few weeks ago. She should have paid more attention to what he was saying, should not have allowed herself to become so immersed in him as a person and a man.
All this time. She had believed wholly that she had invented this world, Christ, she had proclaimed that it was of her making too many time to count.
That knowledge that had, is still in his eyes is because he knows. The bastard knows, she tries not to be angry and she is not, well, entirely. She is relieved this world it will continue on without her, it will not blink out and disappear.
She whispers into his mouth, eyes looking up at him beseeching her freedom at the same time as telling him he is wanted, "Let me go."
He snatches his mouth back, it's not done viciously but she can see it has cost him something. "Can't." He looks away and down just like a little girl she knows.
"You know. How long have you know? She's been waiting and it's been killing me, you knew it was killing me. How long?"
He glances down to her mouth and back up again. "The kiss. I didn't.. I..."
"You what? Gene, come on, please." She shakes his shoulder as his mind moves miles away.
"You can go home." He says it like he is reiterating a point, not releasing her.
"Then let me."
"You're not ready yet and neither am I" He says, his last words coming out like his voice is sore and scratchy.
Alex looks at him with something akin to shock and knows an emotion similar has skipped across her face.
She wants to act on the compulsion to disagree, to tell him she is ready, to have and to leave him at a moments notice, but she isn't, not really. If she is ready she would no longer be here.
She is not healed, not fully, not yet. Her heart needs fixing as much as her head.
Alex hopes Molly understands she needs a day or more, and in the end though leaving fixed, her heart will have become two pieces of a whole and each half will be devoted souly to their respective loves; Molly and Gene.
She will be worlds apart from him, her Gene Hunt, but something tells her when she is ready to depart from what she once would have called a dystopia, it will only be a temporary transfer.
"Don't be worried. I'm coming back, I promise you. You have to believe me, Molls"
...A2A...A2A....
Finished.