above these clouds, these rains, these sleets of lead
I was planning to write a series of five Life on Mars fics this summer. It was going to be called Five Lives That Weren't, and work like this: if we're to accept that Sam was in a coma, why the seventies? Surely he could have woken up anywhere at all? I would have written five Sam Tylers in five alternate universes, but unfortunately, it didn't work out; with one thing and another I just never got around to writing them, and I finally gave up today and admitted to myself that I'm never going to finish the series. I did, however, finish one of the fics, which should hopefully work perfectly well as a stand-alone. So, here I am!
Title: The Thoughts That Hung the Stars, pt. 1
Rating: 12-ish, I'd say.
Pairing: Sam/Gene
Summary: What if Sam hadn’t woken up in 1973? What if he’d woken up in another year like, oh, I don’t know... 1918? Yes, you heard me: Life on Mars during World War One. God help us all.
A/N: Massive thanks go to strangeumbrella for her beta, not to mention all her help and encouragement, and also to my heterosexual life partner, maestro1123. I apologise in advance for all that occurs; all mistakes are mine (but, hey, it's all in his head, I can do what I like! Suck it, history!).
When Sam Tyler wakes up, the first thing he notices is the sky: there are angry black clouds of smoke curling up towards it and it looks bruised, miserable, as if in mourning over someone or something. The next thing he notices is that he can’t seem to stop noticing the sky.
“Oh God,” he cries. “Oh God, someone help, please help me I can’t move, I can’t-”
His legs are numb, one of his arms is trapped under something, and the other, well, he’s not quite sure - is he lying on it? It’s certainly true to say that he’s at a very awkward angle, like he fell into this position from an impressive height. Something shatters and explodes painfully closeby, so that the world shimmers for a moment with heat and sound, and Sam is terrified. With all the suddenness of a blanket being lifted from his head, Sam realises that it’s far from the only worrying noise; machine-gun fire rips through the air overhead, the force of each explosion like the smack of a car knocking him off his feet, unexpected and familar all at once. Somehow he has managed to be involved in an accident in Manchester, in 2006, and wake up in the middle of a battlefield.
It has to be a dream. A nightmare. Without meaning to, Sam recalls the war poems he studied in his late teens and vaguely begins to wonder if he’s dead, if the car killed him and this, this place, if this is hell.
“Please, please help me, please.” Even to his own ears his voice is weak against the sound of gunfire, shelling and men shouting. If his hands were free he’d use them to cover his eyes and tell himself that none of this was real, only they aren’t, and this? He isn’t sure. But there’s inches of mud clinging relentlessly to the small amount of skin he can really feel, and he’s trying not to think about it.
Someone’s shouting closeby, urgent and concerned - “Hello? Anyone alive down there?” - and Sam almost cries at the relief of it, at just hearing another voice.
“Yes! I’m here. Help me, please, I can’t move my legs.”
There is a scrambling close to his head before he senses another person crouched nearby, someone grunting with the effort of carrying out an unseen task, and suddenly Sam’s other arm is free; he sits up, gasping for air and wrapping his arms around himself just for something to do, just to move them, but very quickly stops moving when he notices the reason he can’t feel his legs. Beside him, the man who saved Sam’s life follows his gaze.
“Oh Platt, you poor sod,” the voice intones, sadly, and it’s all Sam can do not to throw up.
There is a body. On his legs. Actually splayed across his legs is a person, or what probably used to be a person a very short amount of time ago, and Sam recognises the uniform with a growing sense of dread - hopelessly, he recalls again the old poems he studied miles away and years ago. It’s a Tommy. He’s seen the uniform in pictures, and war films. There is a World War One soldier lying across Sam’s legs and it’s all too insane to bear, but, just when he thinks he might pass out, the man starts tugging at his shoulder; helpfully distracting. All it takes is a little bit of support and Sam can struggle to his feet.
So he leans on this man, this whoever, as they struggle out of the shell-hole Sam woke up in and across No Man’s Land - he doesn’t watch where they’re going, too busy trying to notice absolutely as little as possible because the less he sees, the less likely it is that this is real, and he’s seen death before, of course he has, but somehow this is different. If he doesn’t let himself remember the dead man’s face, if he doesn’t see the other scattered and mutilated bodies, if he doesn’t think of words like mutilated... It’s about coping. And Sam has no idea how to cope with this, so he leans into the stranger’s grip and allows himself to be half-dragged and half-supported to relative safety.
The next thing he knows he’s being lowered into a seat, or some semblance of it, and when he notices that people around him are cheering, he looks up to see the man being greeted like a hero.
(He is a hero, Sam reminds himself, thinking of the absolute nothing in that young boy’s eyes and what could so easily have happened to him.)
The man is tall-ish, relatively thick-set but obviously malnourished; he has the look of someone who has fallen on hard times, all of the men do, but in a previous life he might have been anything. He holds up his hands for them to stop, modest, checking faces, noticing who isn’t there anymore. No-one has spoken to Sam yet, but someone has their hand on his shoulder and he is most definitely welcome.
“I’ve just seen First Lieutenant Platt lying out in one of the shell-holes,” the man says, with more gravitas than you’d think him to possess, and the men make appropriate noises. He has strange, striking eyes that, now, carry a genuine amount of guilt and sorrow; Sam wonders what they’d look like if he was laughing, and tries not to think about what a strange thing that is to wonder.
“You didn’t bring his body back?” someone asks, and it’s part-accusation, part-question.
With a glance at Sam, his first since they made it here, the man shakes his head. He has taken off his helmet to reveal fair hair, cut short, but then all of their hair is cut short - their clothes, their hair, their expressions all are painfully similar, like they’ve been conditioned. By regulations, Sam thinks, or maybe by fear.
“What’s your name, lad?”
Sam blinks, because he’s being addressed by someone. He says, “Tyler,” but that’s only his last name and he doesn’t know why he’s done that. “Sam,” he adds.
The man with his hand on Sam’s shoulder says, “Er, Captain Hunt?” and the fair-haired one, who looks about as in charge as anybody - Hunt? - nods to show that he is listening. “Sorry Sir, but, but look at this.”
Sam is being spoken about rather than to, but he still cranes to get a look at what they’re looking at, and, as if for the first time, properly notices his clothes. Somehow he hasn’t quite realised before now that he’s dressed the same as them. Uniform. Perhaps some subconscious part of his brain had registered the difference, or perhaps not, but now that he’s aware of it he wants to rip these alien clothes off in the vague hope of finding his own underneath. This tunic, these trousers, they belong here. He doesn’t.
When he remembers to start listening again, he realises Hunt had been addressing him and says, “Sorry, what?”
“I said, how long were you out there for?” His face softens with the air of someone who always seems to be delivering bad news, but has to make each time as sincere as the last. “Most of your company haven’t been found, Tyler, word’s been out to look for you. Your push was... it was a massacre.”
“My company?” Sam says dumbly, because he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but they seem to accept this as an appropriate response.
Hunt’s looking at him with a mixture of pity and something almost akin to admiration, but there is a loud bang, another shell landing far too close for comfort, and the boy whose hand is on Sam’s shoulder draws everyone’s attention by flinching painfully.
“Badge says he’s a First Lieutenant,” the boy mumbles, clearly wanting to put the focus back on Sam. “Just like Platt.”
Oh, god - a First Lieutenant, that’s what they think he is? That’s what they think he is. But what if he’s expected to do something important, something warlike? Sam has to try and explain, he doesn’t know what he’s doing here, has no idea what to do, what if he gets these men killed? He tries telling himself that none of this is real, but the smells and sights and sounds, well, they all seem perfectly tangible, and he ends up hating himself for all the thoughts in his head. He hates the respect in Hunt’s eyes. He wants to say, don’t look at me like that, I’m a fraud, I’m an imposter, please. Instead he says, “My head hurts.”
“You’ve got a nasty looking graze,” nods Hunt. He turns his gaze on the boy, then, and adds, “Private Skelton?”
“Sir?”
“Get me some bandages and water, will you?”
****
Dab. Dab dab dab.
“That hurt?”
Sam winces and nods that, yes, it hurts rather a lot, thank you. The small crowd of vaguely interested soldiers have dispersed so that he and Hunt are alone - or have at least some semblance of privacy, considering how packed this section of trench is. Sam feels a wave of nausea at remembering that he is in a trench, having his injuries examined by an officer in the middle of the Great War, but pushes it down. Better to focus on little details, the wet cloth on his skin, Hunt’s steadying hand on his cheek, the hardbacked bench under him and the mud below his feet, because that’s far easier than looking at the big picture.
“Aren’t there supposed to be medics to do this sort of thing?” Sam asks, more out of curiousity than any kind of insolence, and Hunt snorts.
“For this? It’s only a graze, they’re stretched enough as it is.”
Sam shrugs because, either way, he wouldn’t have imagined it was an officer’s job to do this sort of thing; but then, truthfully, this man isn’t exactly how he’d imagine a typical officer to be.
Hunt adds, as if he can read Sam’s thoughts, “Anyway, what better way is there to get the measure of a man than by treating his head-wound?”
Sam laughs and, although it makes his brain throb in a too-large-for-his-skull way, this simple action earns a smile. It’s strange to see Hunt smiling; it makes him seem more real, easier to talk to, and for a moment it’s all Sam can do not to grab him by the shoulders and shout that he has to go home. But it also makes Hunt look less gaunt, less tired; that something behind his eyes, like he’s seen too much, disappears - if only for a dizzying split-second - and in that briefest of moments he could be any normal man, any man on the street. And not a Captain.
“What were you?” Sam finds himself asking. “Before the war started, I mean.”
Hunt glances up at him, face set and emotionless again, before his eyes flick back to the task at hand. He chews for a moment on his bottom lip, considering the answer, before he mumbles, “Policeman.”
Instantly Sam’s eyes widen and, almost without meaning to, he grabs hold of the arm that’s holding a cloth to his temple; Hunt stops dead, looking surprised. Sam’s mind is racing. Do all policemen come here? Is that it? This really is hell or, or perhaps purgatory, or something else, but the idea that it’s a kind of hell designed just for policemen is... ridiculous, Sam decides. No matter; he can already tell that this man is an ally, and maybe they’ve more in common than he first thought.
If Hunt knows what’s happening, he doesn’t say anything; to his credit he doesn’t pull away, either, but there’s something almost cautious about him and Sam realises after a moment that he should probably try to explain. Only he can’t, so instead he just mumbles, “Me, er. Me too.”
He can’t quite bring himself to let go yet, although he doesn’t know why, and Hunt looks like he’s about to say something when-
“Captain.”
It’s one of his battery, a moustachioed man with a thick northern accent. If Hunt looked cautious before, this man is nothing short of downright mistrustful, and doesn’t seem afraid to show it. His eyes follow a line from Sam, to Sam’s hand, to Hunt’s arm, to Hunt and, for reasons he cannot explain, Sam quickly lets go and pulls away.
“Carling,” Hunt answers, and it’s sort of a question.
“Sir, I’m worried about... about Private Skelton. Wondered if I could have a word.”
Hunt nods, but Carling - a Second Lieutenant, Sam notes, from the look of his uniform - glances at Sam and frowns almost imperceptibly. “In private,” he adds.
“Well, alright. Listen, I’ll be back in a minute, so keep that pressed tight to your head, Tyler. No, tight. Tight. There. Okay, Carling, with me-”
As Hunt walks away, Sam - while trying not to reflect on how gruff his voice sounds in front of his men, how serious, and how different it had sounded just moments ago - realises that he is alone. For the first time since he got pulled out of the shell-hole, no-one is looking at him or talking to him or anything, and he can’t work out if he’s relieved or terrified. With one hand pressed to the side of his head there’s very little he can do, although he’d quite like to search his pockets or, rather, the pockets of the uniform he’s wearing; he’s trying to not mentally connect anything to himself, to not possess anything or be possessed by anything, because he doesn’t belong here. It’s harder than it sounds.
The near-constant blare of shelling, the pain in his head, the fear, the disorientation - they're all beginning to press in on him, and Sam wonders what would happen if he went to sleep. Perhaps, like a dream, doing so would cause him to wake up in his own bed, his own flat and his own time? He has the sinking feeling he’d be more likely to wake up in six inches of freezing cold mud, but nonetheless the world’s starting to go dark, and he can’t help thinking that maybe if he just lies back-
“Oi, you, I told you to keep it on tight. You’re letting it slip.”
Sam blinks himself back into the real world, clinging to the mild annoyance in Hunt’s voice as if it’s keeping him alive, and maybe it is. “Sorry.”
He’s vaguely aware of Hunt sitting back down beside him, waking himself sufficiently in time to notice a roll of the man's eyes, hand against Sam’s as he moves to take the cloth away. Obediently, Sam lets him.
“Ah, you’ll live. Feel alright?” It’s offhand, but there’s something under the surface that's reminiscent of genuine concern, or something like it, and it makes Sam want to tell him everything. He gets the feeling, though, that telling this man the truth - whatever that is - won’t do any good, for the moment at least. So instead he murmurs, “Sort of. I felt a bit like I might pass out for a second or two.”
“You girl,” Hunt says cheerfully, but narrows his eyes all the same before adding, “Alright, let me look at you.”
Fingertips brush against Sam’s jaw as he tilts his head up towards the light, peering into his eyes. Up close, Sam can smell the cigarettes on Hunt’s breath and, like this, he looks quite young; Sam sees once again the human being that was there before the soldier, which makes something in his heart hurt. He wonders absent-mindedly if he’s ever seen Captain Hunt’s name on a war memorial.
“Bit of concussion, nothing to lose any sleep over,” he says, but again there’s that lingering contact, and Sam feels a certain bizarre sense of loss when he finally pulls away. Although, he supposes, since he woke up here he’s been hurt and manhandled and pulled along, so it was really quite nice to just be touched, like normal people touch each other, and then with a jolt he thinks of Maya and feels sick.
Sam sits back in his seat, leaning against the wall - if you can call it a wall - with such force that he might just fall through it. He makes sure that no part of him is touching Hunt, who has an odd look in his eye.
“I’d better let you get on,” he says to the ground (although, honestly, there’s probably nothing more important that it needs to be doing). Hunt makes a gruff noise of agreement, but Sam doesn’t really notice because he’s focusing on just breathing in, out, in. Not that breathing helps very much when the world smells like earth and smoke and decay.
Hunt makes as if to move but, before he goes, he holds out a hand.
“Gene,” he says. Then he adds, with a flicker of uncertainty, “I’m not giving you licence to use it, but you might aswell know it, eh?”
Cautiously, Sam takes hold of his hand, feeling worn skin and a firm grip - and a rush of fear (or possibly relief, he can't decide) when Gene Hunt remains stubbornly and resolutely real.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says. He almost means it.
***
The next day, Sam wakes up in a dead man’s bed - more of a thin, damp mattress than anything, but all things considered that seems the least of his problems - and everything is still there. He’d hoped that, as in a dream, the walls of the trench would fall in and dissolve away while he slept, replaced with the perspex and polystyrene of 2006 as easily as one sweeps chalk from a blackboard. He gets up, stumbles up the ladder of the officer’s dug-out and into the main trench, just for the luxury of looking up.
It is early in the morning on a crisp, clear day. Above the smoke and the bombs and the death, strokes of orange have been painted across the sky by some giant unseen hand, and Sam wonders why the same hand couldn’t have seen fit, in its omniscience, to sweep away all of the destruction. There is a Private sat smoking on a sandbag somewhere off to his left.
Sam thinks of the phrases he heard bandied about by careless tongues when he couldn’t really appreciate them, and some gruff and long-forgotten history teacher at the back of his mind helpfully supplies that this is the war that wiped out an entire generation, that changed the world. Then he thinks of all those old clichés, like we thought it’d be over by Christmas, and wonders what year it is.
Logically, Sam knows this can’t be real, and if it can’t be real it must be some kind of dream. So, if it is a dream - and, God, it absolutely has to be - why on earth can’t he just wake up? Does he need to learn something, prove something?
In a fit of reckless abandon he realises that there’s nothing to stop him climbing up over the lip of this trench and giving up, letting the sniper rifles pick him out, the soon-to-be-dead amongst the dead. It seems almost like too dramatic a way for him to die, a man who’s always been so neat and precise and meticulous, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
And so he thinks, well, fine. Leap of faith, climb of faith, whatever, it doesn’t matter, I can step over the top and go home. He really believes it’s that simple. Sam decides to count down, give it a sense of purpose, and picks thirty seconds because it seems like a nice round number and, like a rocket, it’s thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
Then a voice nearby says, “Tyler?” Sam stops counting, too busy realising that he’s leaning back against the wall with his eyes shut, silently moving his lips as if in prayer, and Gene Hunt is staring at him. Part of his brain says foiled, but the other part says saved.
Sam, on the other hand, says, “Er. Morning.”
Gene looks tired and rumpled from the kind of sleep where it’s not quite enough, not deep enough or long enough, and you wake up feeling worse than you did when you went to bed. He’s smoking, too, eyes as dark and unreadable as his blank expression. After a few moments’ visible deliberation, he takes the few steps needed to stand next to Sam, and leans back beside him.
“Nice day for it,” he says, and Sam smiles in spite of himself.
He wants to talk to Gene, desperately, but struggles to phrase his thoughts in a way that will make sense. What would Gene do if he just came out and told him that he was within twenty-seven seconds of killing himself? He tries to recall what he knows about the mental health service in the early 20th century and realises that he doesn’t really know anything, although he’s relatively certain that they still used electric shock treatments, so: not a good idea.
“I dreamt I was back home,” he says in a rush, even though it isn’t true, and he tries not to be surprised by how easily the lie came to him. How much of his real life would be acceptable in this day and age, anyway? Should he attempt to describe Maya, tell them she’s his wife, that they’re ‘courting’? Is Maya too exotic a name? He’s not sure he even wants to talk about her at all.
Gene’s looking at him, the smoke drifting up from his lips with a laziness that doesn’t seem to fit in here, and he says, “Go on.”
“I could smell breakfast,” Sam lies, speaking quietly, and he shuts his eyes to picture it. “It was summer, and it was beautiful. But I woke up, Captain Hunt, I woke up and I was still here. And no matter where else I went, you know, it didn’t matter. Because I just didn’t want to be here anymore. Does that... make any sense?”
For a moment neither of them say anything, Sam looking at Gene so intently that it’s as if his answer means everything, and then Gene inclines his head ever so slightly. Sam knows he understands.
“It feels like there’s nothing left out there,” Sam continues, saying anything and everything just to get it out. “Like I could walk and walk and keep walking until I got to the end of this trench, and everything’d be gone. You know how they used to think earth was flat, like you’d go all the way to the horizon and just fall off? That’s how I feel.”
“There’s a whole world at the end of these trenches, Sam.” Gene’s voice is quiet, gravelly from the tiredness and the cigarette, but there’s such certainty in it that it feels as real and as practical as the ground beneath Sam’s feet; logically, he knows that neither of these things can exist.
“Is there, though? We might never see it again. Which is a shame, really, when you consider the fact that the only thing I want to see is somewhere, anywhere that isn’t here.”
Gene’s smiling the tiniest of smiles as he mutters, “You’re inciting desertion, there. I could report you.” He takes a last drag, then drops the cigarette and crushes it beneath his boot.
Sam looks at him, frowning. Eventually he says, “Are you going to?”
Gene shakes his head.
continued in part two.
Title: The Thoughts That Hung the Stars, pt. 1
Rating: 12-ish, I'd say.
Pairing: Sam/Gene
Summary: What if Sam hadn’t woken up in 1973? What if he’d woken up in another year like, oh, I don’t know... 1918? Yes, you heard me: Life on Mars during World War One. God help us all.
A/N: Massive thanks go to strangeumbrella for her beta, not to mention all her help and encouragement, and also to my heterosexual life partner, maestro1123. I apologise in advance for all that occurs; all mistakes are mine (but, hey, it's all in his head, I can do what I like! Suck it, history!).
When Sam Tyler wakes up, the first thing he notices is the sky: there are angry black clouds of smoke curling up towards it and it looks bruised, miserable, as if in mourning over someone or something. The next thing he notices is that he can’t seem to stop noticing the sky.
“Oh God,” he cries. “Oh God, someone help, please help me I can’t move, I can’t-”
His legs are numb, one of his arms is trapped under something, and the other, well, he’s not quite sure - is he lying on it? It’s certainly true to say that he’s at a very awkward angle, like he fell into this position from an impressive height. Something shatters and explodes painfully closeby, so that the world shimmers for a moment with heat and sound, and Sam is terrified. With all the suddenness of a blanket being lifted from his head, Sam realises that it’s far from the only worrying noise; machine-gun fire rips through the air overhead, the force of each explosion like the smack of a car knocking him off his feet, unexpected and familar all at once. Somehow he has managed to be involved in an accident in Manchester, in 2006, and wake up in the middle of a battlefield.
It has to be a dream. A nightmare. Without meaning to, Sam recalls the war poems he studied in his late teens and vaguely begins to wonder if he’s dead, if the car killed him and this, this place, if this is hell.
“Please, please help me, please.” Even to his own ears his voice is weak against the sound of gunfire, shelling and men shouting. If his hands were free he’d use them to cover his eyes and tell himself that none of this was real, only they aren’t, and this? He isn’t sure. But there’s inches of mud clinging relentlessly to the small amount of skin he can really feel, and he’s trying not to think about it.
Someone’s shouting closeby, urgent and concerned - “Hello? Anyone alive down there?” - and Sam almost cries at the relief of it, at just hearing another voice.
“Yes! I’m here. Help me, please, I can’t move my legs.”
There is a scrambling close to his head before he senses another person crouched nearby, someone grunting with the effort of carrying out an unseen task, and suddenly Sam’s other arm is free; he sits up, gasping for air and wrapping his arms around himself just for something to do, just to move them, but very quickly stops moving when he notices the reason he can’t feel his legs. Beside him, the man who saved Sam’s life follows his gaze.
“Oh Platt, you poor sod,” the voice intones, sadly, and it’s all Sam can do not to throw up.
There is a body. On his legs. Actually splayed across his legs is a person, or what probably used to be a person a very short amount of time ago, and Sam recognises the uniform with a growing sense of dread - hopelessly, he recalls again the old poems he studied miles away and years ago. It’s a Tommy. He’s seen the uniform in pictures, and war films. There is a World War One soldier lying across Sam’s legs and it’s all too insane to bear, but, just when he thinks he might pass out, the man starts tugging at his shoulder; helpfully distracting. All it takes is a little bit of support and Sam can struggle to his feet.
So he leans on this man, this whoever, as they struggle out of the shell-hole Sam woke up in and across No Man’s Land - he doesn’t watch where they’re going, too busy trying to notice absolutely as little as possible because the less he sees, the less likely it is that this is real, and he’s seen death before, of course he has, but somehow this is different. If he doesn’t let himself remember the dead man’s face, if he doesn’t see the other scattered and mutilated bodies, if he doesn’t think of words like mutilated... It’s about coping. And Sam has no idea how to cope with this, so he leans into the stranger’s grip and allows himself to be half-dragged and half-supported to relative safety.
The next thing he knows he’s being lowered into a seat, or some semblance of it, and when he notices that people around him are cheering, he looks up to see the man being greeted like a hero.
(He is a hero, Sam reminds himself, thinking of the absolute nothing in that young boy’s eyes and what could so easily have happened to him.)
The man is tall-ish, relatively thick-set but obviously malnourished; he has the look of someone who has fallen on hard times, all of the men do, but in a previous life he might have been anything. He holds up his hands for them to stop, modest, checking faces, noticing who isn’t there anymore. No-one has spoken to Sam yet, but someone has their hand on his shoulder and he is most definitely welcome.
“I’ve just seen First Lieutenant Platt lying out in one of the shell-holes,” the man says, with more gravitas than you’d think him to possess, and the men make appropriate noises. He has strange, striking eyes that, now, carry a genuine amount of guilt and sorrow; Sam wonders what they’d look like if he was laughing, and tries not to think about what a strange thing that is to wonder.
“You didn’t bring his body back?” someone asks, and it’s part-accusation, part-question.
With a glance at Sam, his first since they made it here, the man shakes his head. He has taken off his helmet to reveal fair hair, cut short, but then all of their hair is cut short - their clothes, their hair, their expressions all are painfully similar, like they’ve been conditioned. By regulations, Sam thinks, or maybe by fear.
“What’s your name, lad?”
Sam blinks, because he’s being addressed by someone. He says, “Tyler,” but that’s only his last name and he doesn’t know why he’s done that. “Sam,” he adds.
The man with his hand on Sam’s shoulder says, “Er, Captain Hunt?” and the fair-haired one, who looks about as in charge as anybody - Hunt? - nods to show that he is listening. “Sorry Sir, but, but look at this.”
Sam is being spoken about rather than to, but he still cranes to get a look at what they’re looking at, and, as if for the first time, properly notices his clothes. Somehow he hasn’t quite realised before now that he’s dressed the same as them. Uniform. Perhaps some subconscious part of his brain had registered the difference, or perhaps not, but now that he’s aware of it he wants to rip these alien clothes off in the vague hope of finding his own underneath. This tunic, these trousers, they belong here. He doesn’t.
When he remembers to start listening again, he realises Hunt had been addressing him and says, “Sorry, what?”
“I said, how long were you out there for?” His face softens with the air of someone who always seems to be delivering bad news, but has to make each time as sincere as the last. “Most of your company haven’t been found, Tyler, word’s been out to look for you. Your push was... it was a massacre.”
“My company?” Sam says dumbly, because he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but they seem to accept this as an appropriate response.
Hunt’s looking at him with a mixture of pity and something almost akin to admiration, but there is a loud bang, another shell landing far too close for comfort, and the boy whose hand is on Sam’s shoulder draws everyone’s attention by flinching painfully.
“Badge says he’s a First Lieutenant,” the boy mumbles, clearly wanting to put the focus back on Sam. “Just like Platt.”
Oh, god - a First Lieutenant, that’s what they think he is? That’s what they think he is. But what if he’s expected to do something important, something warlike? Sam has to try and explain, he doesn’t know what he’s doing here, has no idea what to do, what if he gets these men killed? He tries telling himself that none of this is real, but the smells and sights and sounds, well, they all seem perfectly tangible, and he ends up hating himself for all the thoughts in his head. He hates the respect in Hunt’s eyes. He wants to say, don’t look at me like that, I’m a fraud, I’m an imposter, please. Instead he says, “My head hurts.”
“You’ve got a nasty looking graze,” nods Hunt. He turns his gaze on the boy, then, and adds, “Private Skelton?”
“Sir?”
“Get me some bandages and water, will you?”
****
Dab. Dab dab dab.
“That hurt?”
Sam winces and nods that, yes, it hurts rather a lot, thank you. The small crowd of vaguely interested soldiers have dispersed so that he and Hunt are alone - or have at least some semblance of privacy, considering how packed this section of trench is. Sam feels a wave of nausea at remembering that he is in a trench, having his injuries examined by an officer in the middle of the Great War, but pushes it down. Better to focus on little details, the wet cloth on his skin, Hunt’s steadying hand on his cheek, the hardbacked bench under him and the mud below his feet, because that’s far easier than looking at the big picture.
“Aren’t there supposed to be medics to do this sort of thing?” Sam asks, more out of curiousity than any kind of insolence, and Hunt snorts.
“For this? It’s only a graze, they’re stretched enough as it is.”
Sam shrugs because, either way, he wouldn’t have imagined it was an officer’s job to do this sort of thing; but then, truthfully, this man isn’t exactly how he’d imagine a typical officer to be.
Hunt adds, as if he can read Sam’s thoughts, “Anyway, what better way is there to get the measure of a man than by treating his head-wound?”
Sam laughs and, although it makes his brain throb in a too-large-for-his-skull way, this simple action earns a smile. It’s strange to see Hunt smiling; it makes him seem more real, easier to talk to, and for a moment it’s all Sam can do not to grab him by the shoulders and shout that he has to go home. But it also makes Hunt look less gaunt, less tired; that something behind his eyes, like he’s seen too much, disappears - if only for a dizzying split-second - and in that briefest of moments he could be any normal man, any man on the street. And not a Captain.
“What were you?” Sam finds himself asking. “Before the war started, I mean.”
Hunt glances up at him, face set and emotionless again, before his eyes flick back to the task at hand. He chews for a moment on his bottom lip, considering the answer, before he mumbles, “Policeman.”
Instantly Sam’s eyes widen and, almost without meaning to, he grabs hold of the arm that’s holding a cloth to his temple; Hunt stops dead, looking surprised. Sam’s mind is racing. Do all policemen come here? Is that it? This really is hell or, or perhaps purgatory, or something else, but the idea that it’s a kind of hell designed just for policemen is... ridiculous, Sam decides. No matter; he can already tell that this man is an ally, and maybe they’ve more in common than he first thought.
If Hunt knows what’s happening, he doesn’t say anything; to his credit he doesn’t pull away, either, but there’s something almost cautious about him and Sam realises after a moment that he should probably try to explain. Only he can’t, so instead he just mumbles, “Me, er. Me too.”
He can’t quite bring himself to let go yet, although he doesn’t know why, and Hunt looks like he’s about to say something when-
“Captain.”
It’s one of his battery, a moustachioed man with a thick northern accent. If Hunt looked cautious before, this man is nothing short of downright mistrustful, and doesn’t seem afraid to show it. His eyes follow a line from Sam, to Sam’s hand, to Hunt’s arm, to Hunt and, for reasons he cannot explain, Sam quickly lets go and pulls away.
“Carling,” Hunt answers, and it’s sort of a question.
“Sir, I’m worried about... about Private Skelton. Wondered if I could have a word.”
Hunt nods, but Carling - a Second Lieutenant, Sam notes, from the look of his uniform - glances at Sam and frowns almost imperceptibly. “In private,” he adds.
“Well, alright. Listen, I’ll be back in a minute, so keep that pressed tight to your head, Tyler. No, tight. Tight. There. Okay, Carling, with me-”
As Hunt walks away, Sam - while trying not to reflect on how gruff his voice sounds in front of his men, how serious, and how different it had sounded just moments ago - realises that he is alone. For the first time since he got pulled out of the shell-hole, no-one is looking at him or talking to him or anything, and he can’t work out if he’s relieved or terrified. With one hand pressed to the side of his head there’s very little he can do, although he’d quite like to search his pockets or, rather, the pockets of the uniform he’s wearing; he’s trying to not mentally connect anything to himself, to not possess anything or be possessed by anything, because he doesn’t belong here. It’s harder than it sounds.
The near-constant blare of shelling, the pain in his head, the fear, the disorientation - they're all beginning to press in on him, and Sam wonders what would happen if he went to sleep. Perhaps, like a dream, doing so would cause him to wake up in his own bed, his own flat and his own time? He has the sinking feeling he’d be more likely to wake up in six inches of freezing cold mud, but nonetheless the world’s starting to go dark, and he can’t help thinking that maybe if he just lies back-
“Oi, you, I told you to keep it on tight. You’re letting it slip.”
Sam blinks himself back into the real world, clinging to the mild annoyance in Hunt’s voice as if it’s keeping him alive, and maybe it is. “Sorry.”
He’s vaguely aware of Hunt sitting back down beside him, waking himself sufficiently in time to notice a roll of the man's eyes, hand against Sam’s as he moves to take the cloth away. Obediently, Sam lets him.
“Ah, you’ll live. Feel alright?” It’s offhand, but there’s something under the surface that's reminiscent of genuine concern, or something like it, and it makes Sam want to tell him everything. He gets the feeling, though, that telling this man the truth - whatever that is - won’t do any good, for the moment at least. So instead he murmurs, “Sort of. I felt a bit like I might pass out for a second or two.”
“You girl,” Hunt says cheerfully, but narrows his eyes all the same before adding, “Alright, let me look at you.”
Fingertips brush against Sam’s jaw as he tilts his head up towards the light, peering into his eyes. Up close, Sam can smell the cigarettes on Hunt’s breath and, like this, he looks quite young; Sam sees once again the human being that was there before the soldier, which makes something in his heart hurt. He wonders absent-mindedly if he’s ever seen Captain Hunt’s name on a war memorial.
“Bit of concussion, nothing to lose any sleep over,” he says, but again there’s that lingering contact, and Sam feels a certain bizarre sense of loss when he finally pulls away. Although, he supposes, since he woke up here he’s been hurt and manhandled and pulled along, so it was really quite nice to just be touched, like normal people touch each other, and then with a jolt he thinks of Maya and feels sick.
Sam sits back in his seat, leaning against the wall - if you can call it a wall - with such force that he might just fall through it. He makes sure that no part of him is touching Hunt, who has an odd look in his eye.
“I’d better let you get on,” he says to the ground (although, honestly, there’s probably nothing more important that it needs to be doing). Hunt makes a gruff noise of agreement, but Sam doesn’t really notice because he’s focusing on just breathing in, out, in. Not that breathing helps very much when the world smells like earth and smoke and decay.
Hunt makes as if to move but, before he goes, he holds out a hand.
“Gene,” he says. Then he adds, with a flicker of uncertainty, “I’m not giving you licence to use it, but you might aswell know it, eh?”
Cautiously, Sam takes hold of his hand, feeling worn skin and a firm grip - and a rush of fear (or possibly relief, he can't decide) when Gene Hunt remains stubbornly and resolutely real.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says. He almost means it.
***
The next day, Sam wakes up in a dead man’s bed - more of a thin, damp mattress than anything, but all things considered that seems the least of his problems - and everything is still there. He’d hoped that, as in a dream, the walls of the trench would fall in and dissolve away while he slept, replaced with the perspex and polystyrene of 2006 as easily as one sweeps chalk from a blackboard. He gets up, stumbles up the ladder of the officer’s dug-out and into the main trench, just for the luxury of looking up.
It is early in the morning on a crisp, clear day. Above the smoke and the bombs and the death, strokes of orange have been painted across the sky by some giant unseen hand, and Sam wonders why the same hand couldn’t have seen fit, in its omniscience, to sweep away all of the destruction. There is a Private sat smoking on a sandbag somewhere off to his left.
Sam thinks of the phrases he heard bandied about by careless tongues when he couldn’t really appreciate them, and some gruff and long-forgotten history teacher at the back of his mind helpfully supplies that this is the war that wiped out an entire generation, that changed the world. Then he thinks of all those old clichés, like we thought it’d be over by Christmas, and wonders what year it is.
Logically, Sam knows this can’t be real, and if it can’t be real it must be some kind of dream. So, if it is a dream - and, God, it absolutely has to be - why on earth can’t he just wake up? Does he need to learn something, prove something?
In a fit of reckless abandon he realises that there’s nothing to stop him climbing up over the lip of this trench and giving up, letting the sniper rifles pick him out, the soon-to-be-dead amongst the dead. It seems almost like too dramatic a way for him to die, a man who’s always been so neat and precise and meticulous, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
And so he thinks, well, fine. Leap of faith, climb of faith, whatever, it doesn’t matter, I can step over the top and go home. He really believes it’s that simple. Sam decides to count down, give it a sense of purpose, and picks thirty seconds because it seems like a nice round number and, like a rocket, it’s thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
Then a voice nearby says, “Tyler?” Sam stops counting, too busy realising that he’s leaning back against the wall with his eyes shut, silently moving his lips as if in prayer, and Gene Hunt is staring at him. Part of his brain says foiled, but the other part says saved.
Sam, on the other hand, says, “Er. Morning.”
Gene looks tired and rumpled from the kind of sleep where it’s not quite enough, not deep enough or long enough, and you wake up feeling worse than you did when you went to bed. He’s smoking, too, eyes as dark and unreadable as his blank expression. After a few moments’ visible deliberation, he takes the few steps needed to stand next to Sam, and leans back beside him.
“Nice day for it,” he says, and Sam smiles in spite of himself.
He wants to talk to Gene, desperately, but struggles to phrase his thoughts in a way that will make sense. What would Gene do if he just came out and told him that he was within twenty-seven seconds of killing himself? He tries to recall what he knows about the mental health service in the early 20th century and realises that he doesn’t really know anything, although he’s relatively certain that they still used electric shock treatments, so: not a good idea.
“I dreamt I was back home,” he says in a rush, even though it isn’t true, and he tries not to be surprised by how easily the lie came to him. How much of his real life would be acceptable in this day and age, anyway? Should he attempt to describe Maya, tell them she’s his wife, that they’re ‘courting’? Is Maya too exotic a name? He’s not sure he even wants to talk about her at all.
Gene’s looking at him, the smoke drifting up from his lips with a laziness that doesn’t seem to fit in here, and he says, “Go on.”
“I could smell breakfast,” Sam lies, speaking quietly, and he shuts his eyes to picture it. “It was summer, and it was beautiful. But I woke up, Captain Hunt, I woke up and I was still here. And no matter where else I went, you know, it didn’t matter. Because I just didn’t want to be here anymore. Does that... make any sense?”
For a moment neither of them say anything, Sam looking at Gene so intently that it’s as if his answer means everything, and then Gene inclines his head ever so slightly. Sam knows he understands.
“It feels like there’s nothing left out there,” Sam continues, saying anything and everything just to get it out. “Like I could walk and walk and keep walking until I got to the end of this trench, and everything’d be gone. You know how they used to think earth was flat, like you’d go all the way to the horizon and just fall off? That’s how I feel.”
“There’s a whole world at the end of these trenches, Sam.” Gene’s voice is quiet, gravelly from the tiredness and the cigarette, but there’s such certainty in it that it feels as real and as practical as the ground beneath Sam’s feet; logically, he knows that neither of these things can exist.
“Is there, though? We might never see it again. Which is a shame, really, when you consider the fact that the only thing I want to see is somewhere, anywhere that isn’t here.”
Gene’s smiling the tiniest of smiles as he mutters, “You’re inciting desertion, there. I could report you.” He takes a last drag, then drops the cigarette and crushes it beneath his boot.
Sam looks at him, frowning. Eventually he says, “Are you going to?”
Gene shakes his head.
continued in part two.