"Major Tom's A Junkie", Ashes To Ashes, Gene/Alex Evan/Alex
Title: Major Tom’s A Junkie
Fandom: Ashes To Ashes
Character: Alex [hints at Gene/Alex and Evan/Alex]
Challenge/Prompt: 100_women, 007. Present
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1740
Genre: Gen [het]
Copyright: Title is from Ashes To Ashes by David Bowie (of course)
Summary: “My subconscious is fucked-up,” Alex decides aloud. “And you’re puppets.”
Author’s Notes: I totally meant to write some Alex/Shaz (because how cute and manipulative would that be?) and then this came out instead. *blinks* I still don’t really like Alex, but god is she entertainingly screwed up. And therefore great to write. Set after the first series, so random spoilers.
Pray for the people inside your head
For they won’t be there when you’re dead.
- Johnny Flynn
“I suppose you had the end of your story figured out before you actually started.”
Evan is crumpled affably in a chair, wine in his eyes.
She laughs at the words that aren’t quite a question, brushing her left thumb across her lower lip in a gesture that she won’t allow to be nervous. And she doesn’t reply.
+
“I think there’s a distinct possibility that I’m actually insane,” Alex mutters.
Gene turns his attention from his artery-splitting sandwich to her.
“No ‘possibility’ about it, Bollyknickers,” he informs her.
Alex shifts a little in her seat. “I’m not actually wearing knickers today,” she says, feeling rebellious. If she’s stuck in her own head for the foreseeable future, might as well make it some kind of fun porn fantasy.
There’s silence in the Quattro, and Gene hefts out a breath between his teeth.
“Too easy,” he tells her, sounding a little sharp.
It is; much too easy. Alex wonders if she’s going to slip further.
+
“This is my subconscious,” she informs Zippy and Bungle, who tip their heads like they’re actually listening to her. “And I could be dreaming about… pink squirrels or George Clooney whisking me off to some hotel in Paris. But I seem to be trying to seduce both my misogynistic co-worker and my parental-figure.”
Zippy starts laughing, which is scary, and Alex decides that she never really liked Rainbow in the first place. George appears on the screen, long pink eyelashes, and he’s chortling with his hands pressed to his mouth.
“Alex,” he giggles, “Do it. It’s your head.” He laughs for a moment longer, and his voice turns sly. “No one’s going to know.”
“My subconscious is fucked-up,” Alex decides aloud. “And you’re puppets.”
“It could be worse,” Zippy councils, holding up a yellow finger. “We could be clowns.”
+
“I want to go home.”
It’s a childish sigh, touching up her mascara in the women’s toilets, and she wonders why she bothers. Still, it’s the eighties, she’s got her perm and her off-the-shoulder dresses that are in no way practical for work, and she might as well play the part until the script changes.
A toilet flushes; Shaz comes out, looking a little sheepish.
“Only a couple of hours,” she offers. “Then we can all go home.”
Right. Alex fumbles up a smile, and pretends that’s what she meant all along.
+
Little Alex calls Evan upstairs for a story, though she’s a little too old for them. Mummy and Daddy faded away in a car, and only a red balloon rescued her. Alex can’t work out if this is her brain processing a fairytale or if it’s the truth that she never noticed.
Evan’s a bastard. A beautiful bastard.
Alex folds her legs, and wonders exactly which Freudian slip she’s attempting to control here. It’s all getting a little Electra complex, and she makes her decision.
When Evan comes back downstairs, Alex will be gone. And so will the wine.
+
“I could be dead,” she offers the tape recorder. She’s got the calendars still taped to her wall; her parents’ death still marked up and a fresh cross for every day since. Maybe there isn’t a key. Maybe she just has to wait for things to come back together. Maybe they never will.
“Maybe this is Hell,” she suggests, smudging her mascara with a tired hand. Then she thinks about Gene, and decides that although he’s frustrating and confusing he’s hardly the devil.
“Purgatory, anyway,” she amends.
+
“I wanted…” she trails off. “I wanted…”
Luigi washes glasses somewhere behind them, whisky against her lips and teeth and she’s never liked whisky. Gene laughs, soft, his hand too far up on her thigh and it may be meant to be supportive but it seems far worse.
“Sam was as crazy as you,” he mumbles, amused, but doesn’t offer any more.
They don’t talk about Sam Tyler; Alex can’t work out if it’s her line or if it’s Gene’s. Either way, they don’t cross it.
+
Daddy’s a clown and Mummy’s burnt to pieces. Molly’s birthday candles drip wax onto the icing of the cake and no one says a word.
Alex sort of wishes the subconscious of her subconscious would just let her stop dreaming.
+
“She might be a bint,” Ray mutters between cigarette smoke and laughter, and Alex is listening in more out of boredom, “And I still don’t think she’s up to it, but she’s got bloody nice shoulders.”
She knows she does, and these lovely off-the-shoulder dresses and tops do show off more than she thinks is entirely professional.
In the beginning, she would have been angry, marched in and given him an eyeful and demanded if that was what he wanted. Now, she simply smiles, half rueful and half affectionate; men everywhere who use their misogyny as armour, and really, everyone needs something.
Alex just hides behind the fact that all of this is a dream, and tries not to picture herself bleeding apart by the Thames.
+
Evan’s not her father. Sure, he bought her first box of tampons and went to most parents’ evenings and gave her her very first can of beer, but he isn’t her father.
Molly’s father was a dick, but he had great eyes and Alex didn’t work out for a while that there was nothing behind them but empty beds and slamming doors. He left her half a bottle of vodka and a screaming baby in a crib, and Alex told herself that would be the last mistake she would ever make.
…It wasn’t.
Evan stepped in, and somehow he’d failed to find someone else to fill in his life; he became Molly’s father-figure and Alex’s shoulder of support. He’s always been there.
What she must remember is that Evan is neither her father nor her husband.
+
Chris and Shaz giggle their way out of the office, fingers loosely intertwining, hips bumping together. It’s a casual, happy intimacy that Alex isn’t sure she’s ever had, and she stares down at a printed report with her lip caught between her teeth.
And it’s kind of funny, because when she listened to Sam’s garbled explanation on cassette, she always thought Chris was going to turn out to be gay.
Gene sighs obnoxiously, reaching for a cigarette. She frowns, and sort of wants to ask do you miss your wife? but doesn’t.
“What, Bolly?” It’s half snapped but there’s enough give in Gene’s voice to make Alex shrug.
“You should buy me dinner again.”
Gene doesn’t say I’ll never love you, but this is Alex’s head and she hears it anyway. It’s a pity she didn’t read more Mills and Boon as a girl.
+
The television is showing an early episode of CSI, and she knows that it’s some kind of crazed hallucination, but it’s better than watching a clown who may or may not be her father. Mostly, she just feels teased, wondering why she is stuck with computers that don’t even have colour screens, let alone all these other things that the CSIs wield with casual disregard.
She misses the twenty-first century so bloody much.
+
“What are we doing, Alex?” Evan asks.
She has no reply for him.
“Nothing,” she mumbles, reaching for the wine bottle. “We’re not doing anything.”
She knows he knows that she’s lying.
+
If it weren’t for her fixation with Sam Tyler and her determination to write a book on his psychosis, who knows where she’d have ended up.
+
“You’ve stopped shagging pretty tossers,” Gene observes.
It didn’t seem worth it. Not any more.
“If you’re about to imply I’ve got a sexually transmitted disease…” Alex sighs.
“Well, have you?” Gene Hunt is quite the man; utterly unblushing.
You’d still be willing to fuck me even if I did; sometimes, it’s best to keep her mouth shut.
“What’s going on in my knickers is none of your business,” she manages, with vague shreds of dignity.
+
“You don’t frighten me any more,” she tells the clown with his white fingers pressed to the glass of the television screen, like any moment he could walk straight through to her room and rip the sheets from her legs.
He blinks, and he is creepy. She refuses to shiver, and changes the channel.
Zippy, Bungle and George are singing a song whose main lyrics seem to be Alex is a coward, and she’s not in the mood to process her emotions through the filter of a childish show she never liked all that much to begin with.
“Up yours,” she mutters, sounding unsettlingly like Gene for a moment, and turns off the set altogether.
+
The candles burn out and Molly throws her cake across the room, icing flecking the carpet Alex and Evan picked out two years ago.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she insists, consistently unheard, and: “I’m so sorry.”
… For a moment, she thinks she hears the river splashing, but that’s probably only false hope.
+
“You can talk to me, you know,” Evan offers, “Maybe I could help.”
Alex thinks about her mother ground naked into the living room carpet and her father blowing up the car to take the sickness out of the centre of his family. He read her the Narnia books as a child, but she never realised how seriously he took them.
“Maybe,” she murmurs, twisting her fingers tight together. She makes no promises, and, interestingly, neither does he.
None of this is going to work. She wishes that she felt more relieved.
+
“I got shot in the head,” she sighs to herself, fingers skipping through files.
Gene smirks, his mouth twisting in his face.
“It’s just as well you’re pretty and act like a tart most of the time, Bolly,” he informs her calmly, “Because you’re out of your sodding mind.”
“Mmmm.” Alex considers this. She’s more in her sodding mind, but she doesn’t take the time to explain this to the construct. After all, the construct doesn’t know it’s a construct. She sighs, tired, pressing cold fingers to her hot cheeks. “I’m good at my job, though.”
Gene shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“All the time,” Alex pushes.
Gene laughs softly. “Not tonight, Bolly,” he murmurs, and there’s something else there in his tone. Alex blames herself; he’s her manifestation of her conscience, after all.
“No,” she agrees on a sigh, “Not tonight.”
+
Fandom: Ashes To Ashes
Character: Alex [hints at Gene/Alex and Evan/Alex]
Challenge/Prompt: 100_women, 007. Present
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1740
Genre: Gen [het]
Copyright: Title is from Ashes To Ashes by David Bowie (of course)
Summary: “My subconscious is fucked-up,” Alex decides aloud. “And you’re puppets.”
Author’s Notes: I totally meant to write some Alex/Shaz (because how cute and manipulative would that be?) and then this came out instead. *blinks* I still don’t really like Alex, but god is she entertainingly screwed up. And therefore great to write. Set after the first series, so random spoilers.
Pray for the people inside your head
For they won’t be there when you’re dead.
- Johnny Flynn
“I suppose you had the end of your story figured out before you actually started.”
Evan is crumpled affably in a chair, wine in his eyes.
She laughs at the words that aren’t quite a question, brushing her left thumb across her lower lip in a gesture that she won’t allow to be nervous. And she doesn’t reply.
+
“I think there’s a distinct possibility that I’m actually insane,” Alex mutters.
Gene turns his attention from his artery-splitting sandwich to her.
“No ‘possibility’ about it, Bollyknickers,” he informs her.
Alex shifts a little in her seat. “I’m not actually wearing knickers today,” she says, feeling rebellious. If she’s stuck in her own head for the foreseeable future, might as well make it some kind of fun porn fantasy.
There’s silence in the Quattro, and Gene hefts out a breath between his teeth.
“Too easy,” he tells her, sounding a little sharp.
It is; much too easy. Alex wonders if she’s going to slip further.
+
“This is my subconscious,” she informs Zippy and Bungle, who tip their heads like they’re actually listening to her. “And I could be dreaming about… pink squirrels or George Clooney whisking me off to some hotel in Paris. But I seem to be trying to seduce both my misogynistic co-worker and my parental-figure.”
Zippy starts laughing, which is scary, and Alex decides that she never really liked Rainbow in the first place. George appears on the screen, long pink eyelashes, and he’s chortling with his hands pressed to his mouth.
“Alex,” he giggles, “Do it. It’s your head.” He laughs for a moment longer, and his voice turns sly. “No one’s going to know.”
“My subconscious is fucked-up,” Alex decides aloud. “And you’re puppets.”
“It could be worse,” Zippy councils, holding up a yellow finger. “We could be clowns.”
+
“I want to go home.”
It’s a childish sigh, touching up her mascara in the women’s toilets, and she wonders why she bothers. Still, it’s the eighties, she’s got her perm and her off-the-shoulder dresses that are in no way practical for work, and she might as well play the part until the script changes.
A toilet flushes; Shaz comes out, looking a little sheepish.
“Only a couple of hours,” she offers. “Then we can all go home.”
Right. Alex fumbles up a smile, and pretends that’s what she meant all along.
+
Little Alex calls Evan upstairs for a story, though she’s a little too old for them. Mummy and Daddy faded away in a car, and only a red balloon rescued her. Alex can’t work out if this is her brain processing a fairytale or if it’s the truth that she never noticed.
Evan’s a bastard. A beautiful bastard.
Alex folds her legs, and wonders exactly which Freudian slip she’s attempting to control here. It’s all getting a little Electra complex, and she makes her decision.
When Evan comes back downstairs, Alex will be gone. And so will the wine.
+
“I could be dead,” she offers the tape recorder. She’s got the calendars still taped to her wall; her parents’ death still marked up and a fresh cross for every day since. Maybe there isn’t a key. Maybe she just has to wait for things to come back together. Maybe they never will.
“Maybe this is Hell,” she suggests, smudging her mascara with a tired hand. Then she thinks about Gene, and decides that although he’s frustrating and confusing he’s hardly the devil.
“Purgatory, anyway,” she amends.
+
“I wanted…” she trails off. “I wanted…”
Luigi washes glasses somewhere behind them, whisky against her lips and teeth and she’s never liked whisky. Gene laughs, soft, his hand too far up on her thigh and it may be meant to be supportive but it seems far worse.
“Sam was as crazy as you,” he mumbles, amused, but doesn’t offer any more.
They don’t talk about Sam Tyler; Alex can’t work out if it’s her line or if it’s Gene’s. Either way, they don’t cross it.
+
Daddy’s a clown and Mummy’s burnt to pieces. Molly’s birthday candles drip wax onto the icing of the cake and no one says a word.
Alex sort of wishes the subconscious of her subconscious would just let her stop dreaming.
+
“She might be a bint,” Ray mutters between cigarette smoke and laughter, and Alex is listening in more out of boredom, “And I still don’t think she’s up to it, but she’s got bloody nice shoulders.”
She knows she does, and these lovely off-the-shoulder dresses and tops do show off more than she thinks is entirely professional.
In the beginning, she would have been angry, marched in and given him an eyeful and demanded if that was what he wanted. Now, she simply smiles, half rueful and half affectionate; men everywhere who use their misogyny as armour, and really, everyone needs something.
Alex just hides behind the fact that all of this is a dream, and tries not to picture herself bleeding apart by the Thames.
+
Evan’s not her father. Sure, he bought her first box of tampons and went to most parents’ evenings and gave her her very first can of beer, but he isn’t her father.
Molly’s father was a dick, but he had great eyes and Alex didn’t work out for a while that there was nothing behind them but empty beds and slamming doors. He left her half a bottle of vodka and a screaming baby in a crib, and Alex told herself that would be the last mistake she would ever make.
…It wasn’t.
Evan stepped in, and somehow he’d failed to find someone else to fill in his life; he became Molly’s father-figure and Alex’s shoulder of support. He’s always been there.
What she must remember is that Evan is neither her father nor her husband.
+
Chris and Shaz giggle their way out of the office, fingers loosely intertwining, hips bumping together. It’s a casual, happy intimacy that Alex isn’t sure she’s ever had, and she stares down at a printed report with her lip caught between her teeth.
And it’s kind of funny, because when she listened to Sam’s garbled explanation on cassette, she always thought Chris was going to turn out to be gay.
Gene sighs obnoxiously, reaching for a cigarette. She frowns, and sort of wants to ask do you miss your wife? but doesn’t.
“What, Bolly?” It’s half snapped but there’s enough give in Gene’s voice to make Alex shrug.
“You should buy me dinner again.”
Gene doesn’t say I’ll never love you, but this is Alex’s head and she hears it anyway. It’s a pity she didn’t read more Mills and Boon as a girl.
+
The television is showing an early episode of CSI, and she knows that it’s some kind of crazed hallucination, but it’s better than watching a clown who may or may not be her father. Mostly, she just feels teased, wondering why she is stuck with computers that don’t even have colour screens, let alone all these other things that the CSIs wield with casual disregard.
She misses the twenty-first century so bloody much.
+
“What are we doing, Alex?” Evan asks.
She has no reply for him.
“Nothing,” she mumbles, reaching for the wine bottle. “We’re not doing anything.”
She knows he knows that she’s lying.
+
If it weren’t for her fixation with Sam Tyler and her determination to write a book on his psychosis, who knows where she’d have ended up.
+
“You’ve stopped shagging pretty tossers,” Gene observes.
It didn’t seem worth it. Not any more.
“If you’re about to imply I’ve got a sexually transmitted disease…” Alex sighs.
“Well, have you?” Gene Hunt is quite the man; utterly unblushing.
You’d still be willing to fuck me even if I did; sometimes, it’s best to keep her mouth shut.
“What’s going on in my knickers is none of your business,” she manages, with vague shreds of dignity.
+
“You don’t frighten me any more,” she tells the clown with his white fingers pressed to the glass of the television screen, like any moment he could walk straight through to her room and rip the sheets from her legs.
He blinks, and he is creepy. She refuses to shiver, and changes the channel.
Zippy, Bungle and George are singing a song whose main lyrics seem to be Alex is a coward, and she’s not in the mood to process her emotions through the filter of a childish show she never liked all that much to begin with.
“Up yours,” she mutters, sounding unsettlingly like Gene for a moment, and turns off the set altogether.
+
The candles burn out and Molly throws her cake across the room, icing flecking the carpet Alex and Evan picked out two years ago.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she insists, consistently unheard, and: “I’m so sorry.”
… For a moment, she thinks she hears the river splashing, but that’s probably only false hope.
+
“You can talk to me, you know,” Evan offers, “Maybe I could help.”
Alex thinks about her mother ground naked into the living room carpet and her father blowing up the car to take the sickness out of the centre of his family. He read her the Narnia books as a child, but she never realised how seriously he took them.
“Maybe,” she murmurs, twisting her fingers tight together. She makes no promises, and, interestingly, neither does he.
None of this is going to work. She wishes that she felt more relieved.
+
“I got shot in the head,” she sighs to herself, fingers skipping through files.
Gene smirks, his mouth twisting in his face.
“It’s just as well you’re pretty and act like a tart most of the time, Bolly,” he informs her calmly, “Because you’re out of your sodding mind.”
“Mmmm.” Alex considers this. She’s more in her sodding mind, but she doesn’t take the time to explain this to the construct. After all, the construct doesn’t know it’s a construct. She sighs, tired, pressing cold fingers to her hot cheeks. “I’m good at my job, though.”
Gene shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“All the time,” Alex pushes.
Gene laughs softly. “Not tonight, Bolly,” he murmurs, and there’s something else there in his tone. Alex blames herself; he’s her manifestation of her conscience, after all.
“No,” she agrees on a sigh, “Not tonight.”
+