and buttered crumpets for tea.
Well! I should be revising, but instead I accidentally wrote this. I'm not sure why, or what I wanted to say with it, but I just - I don't know. The finale of Ashes to Ashes left me with a lot of thoughts and questions and musings and I just needed to get them down, so.
Title: The Sleeping Men
Fandom: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Summary: Difficult to summarise without spoiling the end of A2A 3.08 for those who haven't yet watched it. Just - a Gene-centric story about what The Ending means for him and his world.
William Brook pushes open the swing doors of Fenchurch East CID with a pounding headache and a look of abject disgust, only to discover more of the same - which is to say, yet more 1983. About what he expected, really, but that doesn’t make it any less glaringly insane.
"What the hell is this?" he shouts, looking at the blank-eyed faces around him. He needs to call somebody, he needs to - he has things to do. "Well? Where’s my office?"
Behind the closed door of the room that Will has yet to notice, a lion stirs.
+
Sometimes thoughts connect in Gene’s brain and sometimes they don’t. There are times when he catches a glimpse of his own face - when shaving, perhaps, of a morning - and a nineteen-year-old flatfoot looks back at him. Times when he wonders why not everyone remembers, when he wonders what separates the Alexes, the Sams and the Wills from the Chrises and the Rays. The people who are happy to accept this world from the people who want to tear it down for the sake of the truth. Is it seniority? Experience? Will stops asking for his iPhone after a day and a half; he has more in common with Sam than with Alex, if Gene were forced to choose, but mostly he doesn’t think about it.
Most of the time, of course, there is no flatfoot, no 6-6-20 and no Railway Arms made of light. There is just the law; Gene is deputy to the law and the Sheriff of his city and there are always more doors needing to be kicked down. He gets a new team. He gets a new car. Nobody asks after the old ones and forgetting is the thing that he does best.
Will isn’t very much like either of them, if truth be told. He doesn’t want to fight Gene at every turn, which makes Gene think that he won’t last very long at all, a sentiment which strikes him as odd, because he doesn’t understand it. It’s just a feeling he has. What he remembers is that Sam Tyler was his friend and Sam Tyler died, and Alex Drake was his friend or his colleague or similar and then, yes, and then Alex Drake left, and that is what he knows. Not long after he turns up, Will - whose hair doesn’t suit the fashions of the decade, to be frank; he pushes at it with a disgruntled expression whenever he catches sight of himself - disappears for a couple of days. He says he might throw himself off something, though whether he’s being serious or not it’s difficult to say, and then he walks out. Fenchurch East ticks along well enough without him until he comes back, nobody pops out of existence, which would probably surprise him if he had any way of knowing.
"You’re back, then," Gene says, looking at him over his desk, eyes narrowed, feet propped up on the table. He wonders if he needs new boots. The snakeskins are starting to look worn.
Will looks at him with dark-rimmed eyes, leaning against the doorway to Gene’s office; the T - N - U - H - E - N - E - G behind his head hides choice sections of the room beyond from view. And Will shrugs and looks tired and he murmurs, so quietly that he can barely be heard, "Where else could I go."
+
You were transferred here, Sam, at your own request. I didn't ask for you. You wanted to come.
+
Gene loves all of them in his own way and in the way that they deserve. He wants not to be alone, yes; like all children (because he’s nothing if not still a child inside), Gene fears the darkness and the silence. He still thinks that the best way to scare off monsters under the bed is to be bigger and shout louder than them, and he thinks that he is the god damn sheriff, okay, and he thinks that he deserved better than a shallow grave in a field on his own with the darkness. And the silence.
But it’s about more than just staving off the things he fears - it’s about protection. Protecting other people from those fears. Don’t all of them deserve not to be alone or afraid anymore? Don’t they deserve more than they got?
Some people are twenty-six years old and they just die, which isn’t fair, but such is the way of the world. If twenty-six-year-olds with dark hair and low voices were never stabbed to death by desperate chancers with screwdrivers and unsavoury habits, there wouldn’t be much need for police officers in the first place - and where would Gene Hunt be then?
Alive, possibly. He doesn’t think about it very much. The world is everything that is the case and that is good enough for him.
+
"It wasn’t so bad when I thought it was only me."
The conversation, when it comes, is civilised and polite. Gene stirs his tea, which is too weak for his tastes, really, but that’s the way they’ve always made it in the station café. Sam looks at Gene over the hard-scrubbed table top with one hand pressed flat to its surface and the other reached out, fingers intertwined with Annie’s; in her other hand, she holds a balled-up tissue and her eyes are red. It’s a daisy chain. Sam’s hand to Sam to Sam’s hand to Annie’s to Annie to Annie’s other hand.
"It’s knowing - it’s the knowing--" he falters, stops, begins again. "I can’t look at you every day and have, in the back of my mind, the knowledge that your body’s lying in a field somewhere. It’s too difficult. You can’t ask that of me. And Annie - and she--"
"Nobody should have to live with the memory of being kicked to death," says Keats, flatly. "It’s a grammatical nightmare, if nothing else." His hand is on Sam’s shoulder and he’s grinning. Nobody else is grinning.
Sam leans forward, pulling away from that claw-like grip, and spits, "We were happy." It could mean lots of things, but Gene supposes that what it means is the same thing all of them think, in the end: better off not knowing.
Gene reaches out, touches Sam’s forearm and says, "I’m sorry," which is an apology for both of them, for Sam and Annie both. Keats steps backwards, into the shadows; Sam’s eyes are bright when he shakes his head. The gesture means, Gene knows, that no apology is required, because this is the kind of thing you know about a person after you have worked side-by-side with them for seven years.
Gene doesn’t want them to leave, but he has always tried to be a man who does what is right. He says, "Come with me."
"You don’t want to do that," Keats says, icy-cold and insidious.
And Annie, voice hard and quiet with anger, snaps, "How could you even begin to know what we want?" After the initial shock, she had become calm, sedated somewhat by the inescapable weight of, well, of knowing it to be true - calm, but quiet. Now she is beginning to look more like her old self. Ironically, she is beginning, once more, to look alive. "Lead on, Guv," she says, standing up. "We're coming with you."
+
The orphans take whoever they can get to look after them. And that's me.
+
Gene walked DI Mitchell down to the Railway Arms fairly early in the morning. Mitchell, too shell-shocked by the memory of a brick being rammed repeatedly into the back of his skull until everything went black, said nothing on the way - not even, "Won’t it be shut?", which would have been the logical enquiry. Keats stayed a pace or two behind them, so that he appeared to be not quite with them, but not quite separate either.
Some people took the news better than others; Mitchell, a wide-shouldered, square-built man who died in 1978, said he was "just exhausted". He hadn’t wanted to go with Keats, but he hadn’t wanted to do much of anything else either. He just sat with Gene in the shell of their police station with stars spinning by outside the windows, more stars than he had ever seen, and said that he had been happier when he didn't know. They stayed up all night talking and in the morning he was ready to leave.
A grey, sickly dawn greeted them as they stepped out of the station, Manchester looking anaemic in the weak sunlight. From behind Mitchell’s shoulder, Keats said, "Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if this piss-weak offering was the last sunrise you ever saw? Come back inside."
"Not really," Mitchell said. "It looks all right to me. I love this city."
Gene clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Good man."
Nelson was waiting for them outside the pub with a smile on his face and a brilliant light behind him. "Come on in," he said to Mitchell. "Shake yourself down." Mitchell shook Gene’s hand before he left.
After he’d gone, Gene sank down to sit on the curb and smoked, watching the world crawl by; Keats sat beside him. Sometimes Keats was angry about his losses and sometimes he wasn’t, and Gene supposed there’d never been much chance of him getting Mitchell - a simple man with exceedingly simple desires.
"I love this city, Jim," Gene said to Keats, and Keats nodded. A woman passed them, walking her dog. "Its mess. Its noise. Prozzies. Drunks--"
"You love it enough not to mind that it doesn’t exist," Keats interrupted, not a question, though it could have been: just a simple stating of fact. "None of the people you save, Gene, are real. None of the people you help matter."
Gene rubbed a hand across his face, stamped his cigarette out on the floor and said, "I don’t mind."
"You don’t mind because in a few hours, you won’t remember. How fine would it be if you did remember? How much would you like this world then?"
"Are you trying to frighten me?"
"I'm saying, you have to believe that you’re important or you’d fall to bits."
"Well, we all have our parts to play, Jimbo." After a moment’s pause, he added, "Go away. Please."
Gene walked back to the station alone and felt weary in every part of him, weary and sad and pointless. In the office, the air was heavy and thick with smoke, but it all looked ordinary and put-back-together after Keats’ little display last night, and by the time he'd crossed the room he found his memory of it was already hazy. Did something get broken here last night? Was that what he was supposed to be worrying about?
"Skelton," he said. "I had a busy night last night and do not want to be disturbed - understood?" In response to Chris' nod, he added, "Pass the word round, there’s a good lad."
Then he clattered into his office, into his own, private little world, put his feet up on the desk and slept and slept, the comfortable sleep of a man who knows he will wake to discover that all is right with the world once more. He awoke to the sound of shouting and a feeling like a hangover; a sensation that would make no sense to him until the next time he needed to remember.
"This is my department," somebody was yelling. "What have you done with it?"
Gene sat up, lungs itching as Chris’ voice drifted through, urging the other voice to, "Sssh. Keep it down, boss."
He coughed, fumbled for a cigarette, stood up. When Gene opened the door, there was a short-haired, angry-looking man in a leather jacket glaring at him, and the rest of the room was silent. "Okay," said the man. "All right. Surprise me. What year is it supposed to be?"
Gene stared levelly back at him and gave the question due consideration. "Word in your shell-like, pal," he said.
+
DI Brook tackles the shooter to the ground with the reckless insouciance of a man who does not quite believe in his reality, but wherever he came from, he is a hero here. Gene, kicking the gun away with a new black boot, will be best man at his wedding next month.
"You’re under arrest," Will spits, and the villain groans beneath him. He gropes for his handcuffs, lost in the scuffle, and Gene leans over to hand Will his.
As he does so, he says, "Great job, Billy Boy," and Will looks up. They smile at each other and William takes the handcuffs.
+
In his own way, yes, Gene loves them all, and the forgetting helps him love each one anew. Every time his nitpicking DI changes his mind about procedure it is like the first time. All of them are angry, all of them are frightened, and even when Gene knows the truth he loves them, because he sees in them the wasted potential of his own short life. The copper he never was looks upon them and there is still some cowboy part of him that believes in the simple honesty of dying for a cause and for a reason.
Gene Hunt died for no reason, for no reason at all, and the real Gene Hunt never saved anybody, but here he gets to save everyone all of the time, whether he knows it or not. He will love them all and lose them all and forget, because this is the way of the world. His world. Perhaps it is a little less than honest - perhaps he doesn’t give them all the easy answers - but he gives them something that is like the lives they lost and isn’t that better than nothing? Sand on Annie’s hands from where she fell against the fire bucket, the smell of Sharon Granger’s hairspray, the weddings they never made it to, the friends they never had, and pain, yes, and blood, and fear, and sunsets. Being late home for dinner. Burning your toast.
He is a man in love with life and he has known a hundred of them; Gene has been the one constant for a stream of countless individuals with a desire, no, a desperation to be good at what they do. More than that - he has known a hundred deaths. A screwdriver, knives, a swift unexpected drop and guns, always guns, and he is there with them, he is always with them because they belong to him and he to them. He is theirs - their Guv.
He occasionally remembers enough to suppose that somewhere out there, somewhere over the rainbow, there is a real world he left behind, but Gene can’t say he cares for it. The kind of world that let him walk into the path of a shotgun before he’d even turned twenty is not one that he would especially like to live in. Here, he is immortal. Here, Gene Hunt will have Love Me Tender played at his funeral and no mother sitting in the front row of pews with a blotchy face, staring at an empty coffin because no, they never found a body, just blood, just so much blood.
He dreams, sometimes, of Nelson and Keats sitting side-by-side in The Railway Arms as he has never seen them do in life, giving him some manner of appraisal. He wakes up not knowing what it means and mostly he dreams only of the streets of his city and the people whose lives it is his job to protect. Cheques and balances. Every now and then, everything is ripped down and put back together again and this is the way the world doesn’t end.
+
Pub?
Pub.
Title: The Sleeping Men
Fandom: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Summary: Difficult to summarise without spoiling the end of A2A 3.08 for those who haven't yet watched it. Just - a Gene-centric story about what The Ending means for him and his world.
William Brook pushes open the swing doors of Fenchurch East CID with a pounding headache and a look of abject disgust, only to discover more of the same - which is to say, yet more 1983. About what he expected, really, but that doesn’t make it any less glaringly insane.
"What the hell is this?" he shouts, looking at the blank-eyed faces around him. He needs to call somebody, he needs to - he has things to do. "Well? Where’s my office?"
Behind the closed door of the room that Will has yet to notice, a lion stirs.
+
Sometimes thoughts connect in Gene’s brain and sometimes they don’t. There are times when he catches a glimpse of his own face - when shaving, perhaps, of a morning - and a nineteen-year-old flatfoot looks back at him. Times when he wonders why not everyone remembers, when he wonders what separates the Alexes, the Sams and the Wills from the Chrises and the Rays. The people who are happy to accept this world from the people who want to tear it down for the sake of the truth. Is it seniority? Experience? Will stops asking for his iPhone after a day and a half; he has more in common with Sam than with Alex, if Gene were forced to choose, but mostly he doesn’t think about it.
Most of the time, of course, there is no flatfoot, no 6-6-20 and no Railway Arms made of light. There is just the law; Gene is deputy to the law and the Sheriff of his city and there are always more doors needing to be kicked down. He gets a new team. He gets a new car. Nobody asks after the old ones and forgetting is the thing that he does best.
Will isn’t very much like either of them, if truth be told. He doesn’t want to fight Gene at every turn, which makes Gene think that he won’t last very long at all, a sentiment which strikes him as odd, because he doesn’t understand it. It’s just a feeling he has. What he remembers is that Sam Tyler was his friend and Sam Tyler died, and Alex Drake was his friend or his colleague or similar and then, yes, and then Alex Drake left, and that is what he knows. Not long after he turns up, Will - whose hair doesn’t suit the fashions of the decade, to be frank; he pushes at it with a disgruntled expression whenever he catches sight of himself - disappears for a couple of days. He says he might throw himself off something, though whether he’s being serious or not it’s difficult to say, and then he walks out. Fenchurch East ticks along well enough without him until he comes back, nobody pops out of existence, which would probably surprise him if he had any way of knowing.
"You’re back, then," Gene says, looking at him over his desk, eyes narrowed, feet propped up on the table. He wonders if he needs new boots. The snakeskins are starting to look worn.
Will looks at him with dark-rimmed eyes, leaning against the doorway to Gene’s office; the T - N - U - H - E - N - E - G behind his head hides choice sections of the room beyond from view. And Will shrugs and looks tired and he murmurs, so quietly that he can barely be heard, "Where else could I go."
+
You were transferred here, Sam, at your own request. I didn't ask for you. You wanted to come.
+
Gene loves all of them in his own way and in the way that they deserve. He wants not to be alone, yes; like all children (because he’s nothing if not still a child inside), Gene fears the darkness and the silence. He still thinks that the best way to scare off monsters under the bed is to be bigger and shout louder than them, and he thinks that he is the god damn sheriff, okay, and he thinks that he deserved better than a shallow grave in a field on his own with the darkness. And the silence.
But it’s about more than just staving off the things he fears - it’s about protection. Protecting other people from those fears. Don’t all of them deserve not to be alone or afraid anymore? Don’t they deserve more than they got?
Some people are twenty-six years old and they just die, which isn’t fair, but such is the way of the world. If twenty-six-year-olds with dark hair and low voices were never stabbed to death by desperate chancers with screwdrivers and unsavoury habits, there wouldn’t be much need for police officers in the first place - and where would Gene Hunt be then?
Alive, possibly. He doesn’t think about it very much. The world is everything that is the case and that is good enough for him.
+
"It wasn’t so bad when I thought it was only me."
The conversation, when it comes, is civilised and polite. Gene stirs his tea, which is too weak for his tastes, really, but that’s the way they’ve always made it in the station café. Sam looks at Gene over the hard-scrubbed table top with one hand pressed flat to its surface and the other reached out, fingers intertwined with Annie’s; in her other hand, she holds a balled-up tissue and her eyes are red. It’s a daisy chain. Sam’s hand to Sam to Sam’s hand to Annie’s to Annie to Annie’s other hand.
"It’s knowing - it’s the knowing--" he falters, stops, begins again. "I can’t look at you every day and have, in the back of my mind, the knowledge that your body’s lying in a field somewhere. It’s too difficult. You can’t ask that of me. And Annie - and she--"
"Nobody should have to live with the memory of being kicked to death," says Keats, flatly. "It’s a grammatical nightmare, if nothing else." His hand is on Sam’s shoulder and he’s grinning. Nobody else is grinning.
Sam leans forward, pulling away from that claw-like grip, and spits, "We were happy." It could mean lots of things, but Gene supposes that what it means is the same thing all of them think, in the end: better off not knowing.
Gene reaches out, touches Sam’s forearm and says, "I’m sorry," which is an apology for both of them, for Sam and Annie both. Keats steps backwards, into the shadows; Sam’s eyes are bright when he shakes his head. The gesture means, Gene knows, that no apology is required, because this is the kind of thing you know about a person after you have worked side-by-side with them for seven years.
Gene doesn’t want them to leave, but he has always tried to be a man who does what is right. He says, "Come with me."
"You don’t want to do that," Keats says, icy-cold and insidious.
And Annie, voice hard and quiet with anger, snaps, "How could you even begin to know what we want?" After the initial shock, she had become calm, sedated somewhat by the inescapable weight of, well, of knowing it to be true - calm, but quiet. Now she is beginning to look more like her old self. Ironically, she is beginning, once more, to look alive. "Lead on, Guv," she says, standing up. "We're coming with you."
+
The orphans take whoever they can get to look after them. And that's me.
+
Gene walked DI Mitchell down to the Railway Arms fairly early in the morning. Mitchell, too shell-shocked by the memory of a brick being rammed repeatedly into the back of his skull until everything went black, said nothing on the way - not even, "Won’t it be shut?", which would have been the logical enquiry. Keats stayed a pace or two behind them, so that he appeared to be not quite with them, but not quite separate either.
Some people took the news better than others; Mitchell, a wide-shouldered, square-built man who died in 1978, said he was "just exhausted". He hadn’t wanted to go with Keats, but he hadn’t wanted to do much of anything else either. He just sat with Gene in the shell of their police station with stars spinning by outside the windows, more stars than he had ever seen, and said that he had been happier when he didn't know. They stayed up all night talking and in the morning he was ready to leave.
A grey, sickly dawn greeted them as they stepped out of the station, Manchester looking anaemic in the weak sunlight. From behind Mitchell’s shoulder, Keats said, "Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if this piss-weak offering was the last sunrise you ever saw? Come back inside."
"Not really," Mitchell said. "It looks all right to me. I love this city."
Gene clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Good man."
Nelson was waiting for them outside the pub with a smile on his face and a brilliant light behind him. "Come on in," he said to Mitchell. "Shake yourself down." Mitchell shook Gene’s hand before he left.
After he’d gone, Gene sank down to sit on the curb and smoked, watching the world crawl by; Keats sat beside him. Sometimes Keats was angry about his losses and sometimes he wasn’t, and Gene supposed there’d never been much chance of him getting Mitchell - a simple man with exceedingly simple desires.
"I love this city, Jim," Gene said to Keats, and Keats nodded. A woman passed them, walking her dog. "Its mess. Its noise. Prozzies. Drunks--"
"You love it enough not to mind that it doesn’t exist," Keats interrupted, not a question, though it could have been: just a simple stating of fact. "None of the people you save, Gene, are real. None of the people you help matter."
Gene rubbed a hand across his face, stamped his cigarette out on the floor and said, "I don’t mind."
"You don’t mind because in a few hours, you won’t remember. How fine would it be if you did remember? How much would you like this world then?"
"Are you trying to frighten me?"
"I'm saying, you have to believe that you’re important or you’d fall to bits."
"Well, we all have our parts to play, Jimbo." After a moment’s pause, he added, "Go away. Please."
Gene walked back to the station alone and felt weary in every part of him, weary and sad and pointless. In the office, the air was heavy and thick with smoke, but it all looked ordinary and put-back-together after Keats’ little display last night, and by the time he'd crossed the room he found his memory of it was already hazy. Did something get broken here last night? Was that what he was supposed to be worrying about?
"Skelton," he said. "I had a busy night last night and do not want to be disturbed - understood?" In response to Chris' nod, he added, "Pass the word round, there’s a good lad."
Then he clattered into his office, into his own, private little world, put his feet up on the desk and slept and slept, the comfortable sleep of a man who knows he will wake to discover that all is right with the world once more. He awoke to the sound of shouting and a feeling like a hangover; a sensation that would make no sense to him until the next time he needed to remember.
"This is my department," somebody was yelling. "What have you done with it?"
Gene sat up, lungs itching as Chris’ voice drifted through, urging the other voice to, "Sssh. Keep it down, boss."
He coughed, fumbled for a cigarette, stood up. When Gene opened the door, there was a short-haired, angry-looking man in a leather jacket glaring at him, and the rest of the room was silent. "Okay," said the man. "All right. Surprise me. What year is it supposed to be?"
Gene stared levelly back at him and gave the question due consideration. "Word in your shell-like, pal," he said.
+
DI Brook tackles the shooter to the ground with the reckless insouciance of a man who does not quite believe in his reality, but wherever he came from, he is a hero here. Gene, kicking the gun away with a new black boot, will be best man at his wedding next month.
"You’re under arrest," Will spits, and the villain groans beneath him. He gropes for his handcuffs, lost in the scuffle, and Gene leans over to hand Will his.
As he does so, he says, "Great job, Billy Boy," and Will looks up. They smile at each other and William takes the handcuffs.
+
In his own way, yes, Gene loves them all, and the forgetting helps him love each one anew. Every time his nitpicking DI changes his mind about procedure it is like the first time. All of them are angry, all of them are frightened, and even when Gene knows the truth he loves them, because he sees in them the wasted potential of his own short life. The copper he never was looks upon them and there is still some cowboy part of him that believes in the simple honesty of dying for a cause and for a reason.
Gene Hunt died for no reason, for no reason at all, and the real Gene Hunt never saved anybody, but here he gets to save everyone all of the time, whether he knows it or not. He will love them all and lose them all and forget, because this is the way of the world. His world. Perhaps it is a little less than honest - perhaps he doesn’t give them all the easy answers - but he gives them something that is like the lives they lost and isn’t that better than nothing? Sand on Annie’s hands from where she fell against the fire bucket, the smell of Sharon Granger’s hairspray, the weddings they never made it to, the friends they never had, and pain, yes, and blood, and fear, and sunsets. Being late home for dinner. Burning your toast.
He is a man in love with life and he has known a hundred of them; Gene has been the one constant for a stream of countless individuals with a desire, no, a desperation to be good at what they do. More than that - he has known a hundred deaths. A screwdriver, knives, a swift unexpected drop and guns, always guns, and he is there with them, he is always with them because they belong to him and he to them. He is theirs - their Guv.
He occasionally remembers enough to suppose that somewhere out there, somewhere over the rainbow, there is a real world he left behind, but Gene can’t say he cares for it. The kind of world that let him walk into the path of a shotgun before he’d even turned twenty is not one that he would especially like to live in. Here, he is immortal. Here, Gene Hunt will have Love Me Tender played at his funeral and no mother sitting in the front row of pews with a blotchy face, staring at an empty coffin because no, they never found a body, just blood, just so much blood.
He dreams, sometimes, of Nelson and Keats sitting side-by-side in The Railway Arms as he has never seen them do in life, giving him some manner of appraisal. He wakes up not knowing what it means and mostly he dreams only of the streets of his city and the people whose lives it is his job to protect. Cheques and balances. Every now and then, everything is ripped down and put back together again and this is the way the world doesn’t end.
+
Pub?
Pub.