Intensive Care--Life on Mars, genfic, rated PG-13
Title: Intensive Care
Author: pink_bagels
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A recovering Sam has a run in with old friends while in hospital...
INTENSIVE CARE
Sam strained every muscle in his arms as he pushed himself down the long corridor, his hands firm on the metal rungs that turned the wheels of his wheelchair. If he could sneak a walk without the nurses seeing him he would do it, but after yesterday's fall they weren't about to let him out of their sight for long. He'd already been warned not to push it, the surgeon giving him a good talking to in regards to his physical therapy regime. Bullocks, all of it. He knew he was going to be fine, his body just had to pick up the pace with the rest of him was all.
A month of regained consciousness had worn itself well on Sam Tyler, and he nodded at a pretty young nurse known as Emilie as he pushed his way past her.
“Watch your driving, Mr. Tyler,” she warned him, and gave him a wink. He gave her his most innocent smirk in reply, the one that hid the fact he'd been looking down the bosom confines of her uniform every time she'd delivered his medication for the past month. Gene Hunt be damned, Sam learned a thing or two in the time he'd spent in the man's company after all. Appreciating what tidbits a desperate man could get was one of them.
“Bloody cheek of you, you bastard,” he could imagine Gene slice at his ear. “I had birds dropping their feathers at my feet at every turn. Any tart knows the value of a real man, not some ponce know-all like you. Look at you, all gangly and scrawny like a malnourished frog...Come back when you've gained a few inches and a hundred pounds or so, and then we'll talk about mincing, 'sensitive' men. You're an act of desperation, you are. Not one nut to stand with, you don't. Oh, what's that? Sorry, can't hear a bloody thing you're saying with that squeaky, pubescent malnourished voice box of yours. Oh, so you say you've grown that precious second testicle at long fucking last? Well, bravo for you, Sammy boy, bravo...”
“Sod off,” Sam muttered under his breath. An elderly woman sitting near him gave him an annoyed glare, and he averted his gaze, embarrassed. Utter nonsense, getting pissed off by his imaginary friend. There was a disturbing understanding laying within this inward exchange. Before the accident, he hadn't been an especially likable person, he knew this. It seemed that Sam Tyler was so hard to get along with that even his own creative energy had turned against him.
Looking down nurse's uniforms. Bloody hell, Gene was right, he was pathetic.
He paused in the corridor, taking in the outline of the nursing station just five feet away, then past it to the rows of doors that meandered down the opposing corridor, dark blue against grey walls, each room full of sick and broken people. There were plants at the nurse's station, and the corridors were punctuated with cheerful looking framed prints of flowers and bright abstracts, but these aesthetics couldn't wipe away the stench of antiseptic and piss that permeated the air. Nothing could cheer up the painful moans escaping from an unclosed door here and there, or the more horrible absence of sound, with only the push and hiss of a ventilator suggesting a half-life resided within.
They had told him he couldn't leave, not yet. 'They' were the indomitable team of surgeons, nurses and his own family who proved to be far more challenging forces to deal with than those in his imaginary precinct, adding a few dozen Gene Hunts or so besides. True, he wanted to be well, to get the hell out of the hospital and back to a life that wasn't contaminated with old Clint Eastwood westerns or second hand chain smoking, but a part of him deeply missed the organized chaos his mind had handed him as a coping measure. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the human mind's capacity for details. If he closed his eyes as he sat here in this hospital corridor, its air ripe with dysentery and ammonia, his mind could conjure up the familiar scents of that second home in an instant, filling his thoughtful lungs with the aroma of sweaty polyester and cheap vinegar cologne. The seventies was an era of the senses, its musty plastic entering the body in ways that other decades couldn't duplicate. That time in history was dirty, ignorant, selfish and hopeful. The clothes were hideous, itchy polyester nightmares and the decor...Sam couldn't forget the fuzzy green and gold velvet wallpaper of his imagined flat, a horror that induced migraines should he be foolish enough to attempt following the loud pattern with his eyes.
Sam ran his fingers along the smooth surface of the grey hospital wall beside him. The corridor was crowded today, a din of visitors following a rather loud granny into her room, balloons and presents held in stronger, anxious hands. Hospitals were stressful places, Sam thought. You had exactly two choices when you were brought through those hospital doors. Live or die. Die or live. A simple equation complicated by the utter hatred life and death had for one another. Sam sighed, and grimaced at the taste of the hospital air on his tongue.
“I can't wait to be rid of this place,” he muttered to himself.
“Sam.”
Dammit, he was too tired for visitors right now. For God's sake, he'd only just started to eat on his own, he couldn't exactly start cartwheeling down the corridor, now could he? He was getting better, he was pushing it when he could, but damn, it was like his family and the medical establishment were all ramming their opinions on his recovery down his throat and forcing him, bullying him. 'Get up and walk', 'Don't walk', 'Sit quietly', 'It'll just hurt for an instant...'
He felt like he was being conned whenever anyone talked to him, like they were holding back some important piece of information, and were fearful of telling him what it was.
“Sam. We need to talk.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, his eyes shut against the inevitable onslaught of physical and mental therapy nagging. His mother had been the worst, he could still see her pleading face before him, her eyes pained and full of worry. It was the begging that did him in. The way she went on her knees begging for him to get better.
Fuck. There really were days he missed that polyester cesspit.
“Sam. Did you hear me?”
He inwardly groaned and opened his eyes, ready to meet his fate. He blinked, not fully understanding what he was seeing standing quietly before him. A little girl. She couldn't be more than six years old.
A little girl with a headband, and a stuffed doll clasped close to her, the thing nearly as large as she was.
No. Not a doll.
A Jack O'Lantern face. A stuffed clown with a green blob of a body and a smile that looked ready to eat human flesh.
“You're...” Sam began. He could feel his body shrinking against the idea of her, and he fought to breathe. Somewhere in the background he could hear a machine beeping, murmuring voices uttering concern. It faded against his horror, and he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, a vain attempt to wipe her presence away.
“You're just an hallucination,” he said.
“I wish you had listened to me, Sam. I can't imagine why you would want to be here. I guess you've always had a fascination with hospitals, only you've always been in the basement, playing with the bones...”
“Shut up,” Sam said. Then, louder: “Shut up!”
A nurse paused, and looked his way. Sam refused to meet her gaze.
“What do you want?” he said through clenched teeth. “I'm free of you, I'm well, you didn't win...”
“I didn't realize we were in a competition,” the girl said, and sulked. “Come on Sam, you have to follow me. You need to see this.” She gave her monstrous clown doll a strangling hug. “It's so very interesting.”
He could feel a bead of sweat escape down the back of his neck, settling in a cold droplet against the middle of his back. “I'm not following you anywhere,” he said.
“You don't have to,” the test card girl said, confident. “You're here.”
The corridor went black, its shape suddenly morphed into a plain ten by ten room. Against the far corner, a tall IV drip blipped its medication out in a series of green light promises, clear medical tubing connecting over a series of other pieces of medical equipment, intertwining in a collection of transparent veins that burrowed into the human form that lay on the gurney beneath them. Holding his breath, Sam wheeled his chair closer, the smell of shit and piss so overwhelming he fought the urge to gag. He swallowed, deeply, his breath echoing in the lonely, dark room, with its softly beeping machines singing this poor sod, whoever he damned well was, into eternal sleep.
The girl was a cruel deliverer, Sam thought. He'd been brought here to bemoan his fate, to see his body for what it was, a broken thing not fit for recovery. She was offering him the illusion of despair. Well, the little devil could crawl right back into hell, he wasn't about to play her game and follow her in.
He turned his wheelchair around and headed for the door. A low groan from the bed stopped him.
“Fucking punter...Bastards...Bloody nancy bastard like that won't get the better of me...That's right, a punch and a kiss darling, get it proper...”
No. No, this wasn't...
“Little twat thinks he got it, but's he's fucked his own self over, hasn't he? Bastards. Get right with it, keep it all quiet. Make sure they don't go hailing Mary, keep that bastard in line...”
Sam was shaking now, fear making him break out in rivulets of sweat that coursed down his temples, his body shaking against the tide. “You can't be,” he said to the incoherent, near corpse in the bed before him. He inched closer, getting a good look at the crusty face with eyes that stared, unseeing, at the plain ceiling above him, his body shrivelled, his mind in a likewise state. His mouth was slack and wrinkled, a hollow maw where teeth should have been.
“Tell you what, Sammy boy, you grow a ball and I'll throw it for you...Bastards. Fucking punters...”
Sam couldn't hold back the tears as they spilled, horror and fear and sorrow all intermingling into one emotional mess that lay at the mercy of Gene Hunt's dying body. “Aw fuck, no,” Sam said. He inched his wheelchair close to the bed. “Gene? Gene Genie, you in there?” Sam choked back a sob and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Sammy?”
Sam stopped in mid sniff, his hand paused at his own cheek. He could see Gene's eyes, suddenly unclouded, full of recognition. “Sammy boy, is that you?”
Sam nearly leapt from his chair to go to Gene's side, though the action certainly caused a good amount of stumbling and a need to hold on tight to Gene's bed rails as he stood over him. “Yeah, gov, it's me. It's Sam.” His tears of horror and sorrow quickly melted into relief. “I thought you were gone for good. I had you figured as just some old codger on his way out, and I'd just added your rambling to my dreams of the seventies. You have no idea how much you've helped me.”
A gnarled, painfully arthritic hand covered in liver spots and broken blood vessels motioned to Sam.
“Sammy, Sammy boy. Come closer.”
Holding tight on the cold steel bed rail so as to not lose his balance, Sam bent over the form of the frail man he'd known in his dreams as the indomitable Gene Hunt. “What is it, gov?”
The gnarled hand met its mark on Sam's throat, the unexpected strength within it taking Sam by surprise. His weakened state prevented him from pulling away, or trying to pry the killing hand off of him. It was all he could do to hold onto the rails of the bed to keep himself standing.
“Fucker,” Gene Hunt's dementia addled corpse hissed at him. “Look what you did, you little pisser...”
He couldn't breathe. He tried to let go of the rails to clutch at the claw tearing away at his throat, but the effort made him lose his balance.
He could hear the snap of his own neck.
In the corner of the dark room, behind the heart monitor, she had neatly hidden within the shadows of the machine. Her face was dark, but her hideous clown doll seemed to glow in what little light there was, its evil, grinning face mocking his terror.
“I warned you, Sam,” she said, as the very last breath of his life was siphoned from him by Gene's unholy will, “Remember. I am your only friend.”
***
Sam sat upright, drawing in an audible gasp that echoed throughout the room. He blinked beneath the halo of a sixty watt light bulb, his hands finding a stack of papers which fell like a waterfall to the dingy floor beneath the desk. His heart was hammering in his chest, and that had to be a good thing. He was alive, this was certain.
Right?
“Don't you think the chair would have been more comfortable? Or better yet, your bed at home?”
Sam was startled fully awake. He swung his legs over the edge of his desk, and gratefully took in the kind face of Annie, who was now looking at him with a bemused concern. Confused, he pushed a pencil to one side, along with a file he'd been reading before he'd fallen asleep on the top of the desk.
“I know you won't believe this,” he said, “but I'm happy as hell to be here right now.”
“Well, I hope you haven't gotten too used to it. Gene is coming back today, they released him from hospital.”
A sick feeling plunged its way into Sam's gut. “Hospital?”
“He got shot last week, remember?” Annie said. “You were the one who dragged him into the emergency room, the two of you covered in blood.”
Sam remained blank. Annie playfully smacked him gently on the cheek with the palm of her hand. “Come on Sam, wake up. He got shot taking down that punter on the run, the one who beat his wife into a coma, you remember...”
“Oh. Sure, yeah, of course” Sam said, but he was a lousy liar. The admission seemed to appease Annie, however, though this may have been because a loud, familiar voice was making its way down the hall, heavy footsteps strong and able pulling the man's weighty pride along with them.
The door to the office slammed open and Gene Hunt stood in its frame, looking perfectly healthy save for the slightly sweaty skin betraying high blood pressure and a gut suggesting one too many pints. His right arm was in a sling. Gene sniffed the air with a slight snarl, like a dog scouting out his own territory and discovering a mangy cat had pissed in the corner of the yard. “I see the place is ready to crumble without me,” he said to Sam, who was still sitting on a pile of papers and ignoring the mess of further files littering the floor.
“You're back already? After being shot?” Sam said. He fought to keep the relief out of his voice, and kept the smile threatening to explode out of him reigned into a thin smirk.
“Please, that bastard was only good for bashing up the girlies. Lot more than a scratch from a stray bullet is going to top me off, so don't go getting hopeful, Sammy boy. I'm actually surprised to see you here...” He paused at his office door his back turned to Sam as he spoke, “ From what I understand, in the blessed land of Hyde, a copper gets a paper cut he lands himself four days paid leave...”
Sam really did smile this time. He couldn't help it, for despite the polyester backdrop and the ridiculous machismo, Gene Hunt was healthy and coherent. He wasn't alone in a dark room, slowly, painfully dying.
“Welcome back, gov,” Sam said to him.
Gene paused at his office door, and then turned to Sam, his eyes surprisingly full of accusation.
“Who said I'd ever left?”
END
Author: pink_bagels
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A recovering Sam has a run in with old friends while in hospital...
INTENSIVE CARE
Sam strained every muscle in his arms as he pushed himself down the long corridor, his hands firm on the metal rungs that turned the wheels of his wheelchair. If he could sneak a walk without the nurses seeing him he would do it, but after yesterday's fall they weren't about to let him out of their sight for long. He'd already been warned not to push it, the surgeon giving him a good talking to in regards to his physical therapy regime. Bullocks, all of it. He knew he was going to be fine, his body just had to pick up the pace with the rest of him was all.
A month of regained consciousness had worn itself well on Sam Tyler, and he nodded at a pretty young nurse known as Emilie as he pushed his way past her.
“Watch your driving, Mr. Tyler,” she warned him, and gave him a wink. He gave her his most innocent smirk in reply, the one that hid the fact he'd been looking down the bosom confines of her uniform every time she'd delivered his medication for the past month. Gene Hunt be damned, Sam learned a thing or two in the time he'd spent in the man's company after all. Appreciating what tidbits a desperate man could get was one of them.
“Bloody cheek of you, you bastard,” he could imagine Gene slice at his ear. “I had birds dropping their feathers at my feet at every turn. Any tart knows the value of a real man, not some ponce know-all like you. Look at you, all gangly and scrawny like a malnourished frog...Come back when you've gained a few inches and a hundred pounds or so, and then we'll talk about mincing, 'sensitive' men. You're an act of desperation, you are. Not one nut to stand with, you don't. Oh, what's that? Sorry, can't hear a bloody thing you're saying with that squeaky, pubescent malnourished voice box of yours. Oh, so you say you've grown that precious second testicle at long fucking last? Well, bravo for you, Sammy boy, bravo...”
“Sod off,” Sam muttered under his breath. An elderly woman sitting near him gave him an annoyed glare, and he averted his gaze, embarrassed. Utter nonsense, getting pissed off by his imaginary friend. There was a disturbing understanding laying within this inward exchange. Before the accident, he hadn't been an especially likable person, he knew this. It seemed that Sam Tyler was so hard to get along with that even his own creative energy had turned against him.
Looking down nurse's uniforms. Bloody hell, Gene was right, he was pathetic.
He paused in the corridor, taking in the outline of the nursing station just five feet away, then past it to the rows of doors that meandered down the opposing corridor, dark blue against grey walls, each room full of sick and broken people. There were plants at the nurse's station, and the corridors were punctuated with cheerful looking framed prints of flowers and bright abstracts, but these aesthetics couldn't wipe away the stench of antiseptic and piss that permeated the air. Nothing could cheer up the painful moans escaping from an unclosed door here and there, or the more horrible absence of sound, with only the push and hiss of a ventilator suggesting a half-life resided within.
They had told him he couldn't leave, not yet. 'They' were the indomitable team of surgeons, nurses and his own family who proved to be far more challenging forces to deal with than those in his imaginary precinct, adding a few dozen Gene Hunts or so besides. True, he wanted to be well, to get the hell out of the hospital and back to a life that wasn't contaminated with old Clint Eastwood westerns or second hand chain smoking, but a part of him deeply missed the organized chaos his mind had handed him as a coping measure. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the human mind's capacity for details. If he closed his eyes as he sat here in this hospital corridor, its air ripe with dysentery and ammonia, his mind could conjure up the familiar scents of that second home in an instant, filling his thoughtful lungs with the aroma of sweaty polyester and cheap vinegar cologne. The seventies was an era of the senses, its musty plastic entering the body in ways that other decades couldn't duplicate. That time in history was dirty, ignorant, selfish and hopeful. The clothes were hideous, itchy polyester nightmares and the decor...Sam couldn't forget the fuzzy green and gold velvet wallpaper of his imagined flat, a horror that induced migraines should he be foolish enough to attempt following the loud pattern with his eyes.
Sam ran his fingers along the smooth surface of the grey hospital wall beside him. The corridor was crowded today, a din of visitors following a rather loud granny into her room, balloons and presents held in stronger, anxious hands. Hospitals were stressful places, Sam thought. You had exactly two choices when you were brought through those hospital doors. Live or die. Die or live. A simple equation complicated by the utter hatred life and death had for one another. Sam sighed, and grimaced at the taste of the hospital air on his tongue.
“I can't wait to be rid of this place,” he muttered to himself.
“Sam.”
Dammit, he was too tired for visitors right now. For God's sake, he'd only just started to eat on his own, he couldn't exactly start cartwheeling down the corridor, now could he? He was getting better, he was pushing it when he could, but damn, it was like his family and the medical establishment were all ramming their opinions on his recovery down his throat and forcing him, bullying him. 'Get up and walk', 'Don't walk', 'Sit quietly', 'It'll just hurt for an instant...'
He felt like he was being conned whenever anyone talked to him, like they were holding back some important piece of information, and were fearful of telling him what it was.
“Sam. We need to talk.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, his eyes shut against the inevitable onslaught of physical and mental therapy nagging. His mother had been the worst, he could still see her pleading face before him, her eyes pained and full of worry. It was the begging that did him in. The way she went on her knees begging for him to get better.
Fuck. There really were days he missed that polyester cesspit.
“Sam. Did you hear me?”
He inwardly groaned and opened his eyes, ready to meet his fate. He blinked, not fully understanding what he was seeing standing quietly before him. A little girl. She couldn't be more than six years old.
A little girl with a headband, and a stuffed doll clasped close to her, the thing nearly as large as she was.
No. Not a doll.
A Jack O'Lantern face. A stuffed clown with a green blob of a body and a smile that looked ready to eat human flesh.
“You're...” Sam began. He could feel his body shrinking against the idea of her, and he fought to breathe. Somewhere in the background he could hear a machine beeping, murmuring voices uttering concern. It faded against his horror, and he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, a vain attempt to wipe her presence away.
“You're just an hallucination,” he said.
“I wish you had listened to me, Sam. I can't imagine why you would want to be here. I guess you've always had a fascination with hospitals, only you've always been in the basement, playing with the bones...”
“Shut up,” Sam said. Then, louder: “Shut up!”
A nurse paused, and looked his way. Sam refused to meet her gaze.
“What do you want?” he said through clenched teeth. “I'm free of you, I'm well, you didn't win...”
“I didn't realize we were in a competition,” the girl said, and sulked. “Come on Sam, you have to follow me. You need to see this.” She gave her monstrous clown doll a strangling hug. “It's so very interesting.”
He could feel a bead of sweat escape down the back of his neck, settling in a cold droplet against the middle of his back. “I'm not following you anywhere,” he said.
“You don't have to,” the test card girl said, confident. “You're here.”
The corridor went black, its shape suddenly morphed into a plain ten by ten room. Against the far corner, a tall IV drip blipped its medication out in a series of green light promises, clear medical tubing connecting over a series of other pieces of medical equipment, intertwining in a collection of transparent veins that burrowed into the human form that lay on the gurney beneath them. Holding his breath, Sam wheeled his chair closer, the smell of shit and piss so overwhelming he fought the urge to gag. He swallowed, deeply, his breath echoing in the lonely, dark room, with its softly beeping machines singing this poor sod, whoever he damned well was, into eternal sleep.
The girl was a cruel deliverer, Sam thought. He'd been brought here to bemoan his fate, to see his body for what it was, a broken thing not fit for recovery. She was offering him the illusion of despair. Well, the little devil could crawl right back into hell, he wasn't about to play her game and follow her in.
He turned his wheelchair around and headed for the door. A low groan from the bed stopped him.
“Fucking punter...Bastards...Bloody nancy bastard like that won't get the better of me...That's right, a punch and a kiss darling, get it proper...”
No. No, this wasn't...
“Little twat thinks he got it, but's he's fucked his own self over, hasn't he? Bastards. Get right with it, keep it all quiet. Make sure they don't go hailing Mary, keep that bastard in line...”
Sam was shaking now, fear making him break out in rivulets of sweat that coursed down his temples, his body shaking against the tide. “You can't be,” he said to the incoherent, near corpse in the bed before him. He inched closer, getting a good look at the crusty face with eyes that stared, unseeing, at the plain ceiling above him, his body shrivelled, his mind in a likewise state. His mouth was slack and wrinkled, a hollow maw where teeth should have been.
“Tell you what, Sammy boy, you grow a ball and I'll throw it for you...Bastards. Fucking punters...”
Sam couldn't hold back the tears as they spilled, horror and fear and sorrow all intermingling into one emotional mess that lay at the mercy of Gene Hunt's dying body. “Aw fuck, no,” Sam said. He inched his wheelchair close to the bed. “Gene? Gene Genie, you in there?” Sam choked back a sob and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Sammy?”
Sam stopped in mid sniff, his hand paused at his own cheek. He could see Gene's eyes, suddenly unclouded, full of recognition. “Sammy boy, is that you?”
Sam nearly leapt from his chair to go to Gene's side, though the action certainly caused a good amount of stumbling and a need to hold on tight to Gene's bed rails as he stood over him. “Yeah, gov, it's me. It's Sam.” His tears of horror and sorrow quickly melted into relief. “I thought you were gone for good. I had you figured as just some old codger on his way out, and I'd just added your rambling to my dreams of the seventies. You have no idea how much you've helped me.”
A gnarled, painfully arthritic hand covered in liver spots and broken blood vessels motioned to Sam.
“Sammy, Sammy boy. Come closer.”
Holding tight on the cold steel bed rail so as to not lose his balance, Sam bent over the form of the frail man he'd known in his dreams as the indomitable Gene Hunt. “What is it, gov?”
The gnarled hand met its mark on Sam's throat, the unexpected strength within it taking Sam by surprise. His weakened state prevented him from pulling away, or trying to pry the killing hand off of him. It was all he could do to hold onto the rails of the bed to keep himself standing.
“Fucker,” Gene Hunt's dementia addled corpse hissed at him. “Look what you did, you little pisser...”
He couldn't breathe. He tried to let go of the rails to clutch at the claw tearing away at his throat, but the effort made him lose his balance.
He could hear the snap of his own neck.
In the corner of the dark room, behind the heart monitor, she had neatly hidden within the shadows of the machine. Her face was dark, but her hideous clown doll seemed to glow in what little light there was, its evil, grinning face mocking his terror.
“I warned you, Sam,” she said, as the very last breath of his life was siphoned from him by Gene's unholy will, “Remember. I am your only friend.”
***
Sam sat upright, drawing in an audible gasp that echoed throughout the room. He blinked beneath the halo of a sixty watt light bulb, his hands finding a stack of papers which fell like a waterfall to the dingy floor beneath the desk. His heart was hammering in his chest, and that had to be a good thing. He was alive, this was certain.
Right?
“Don't you think the chair would have been more comfortable? Or better yet, your bed at home?”
Sam was startled fully awake. He swung his legs over the edge of his desk, and gratefully took in the kind face of Annie, who was now looking at him with a bemused concern. Confused, he pushed a pencil to one side, along with a file he'd been reading before he'd fallen asleep on the top of the desk.
“I know you won't believe this,” he said, “but I'm happy as hell to be here right now.”
“Well, I hope you haven't gotten too used to it. Gene is coming back today, they released him from hospital.”
A sick feeling plunged its way into Sam's gut. “Hospital?”
“He got shot last week, remember?” Annie said. “You were the one who dragged him into the emergency room, the two of you covered in blood.”
Sam remained blank. Annie playfully smacked him gently on the cheek with the palm of her hand. “Come on Sam, wake up. He got shot taking down that punter on the run, the one who beat his wife into a coma, you remember...”
“Oh. Sure, yeah, of course” Sam said, but he was a lousy liar. The admission seemed to appease Annie, however, though this may have been because a loud, familiar voice was making its way down the hall, heavy footsteps strong and able pulling the man's weighty pride along with them.
The door to the office slammed open and Gene Hunt stood in its frame, looking perfectly healthy save for the slightly sweaty skin betraying high blood pressure and a gut suggesting one too many pints. His right arm was in a sling. Gene sniffed the air with a slight snarl, like a dog scouting out his own territory and discovering a mangy cat had pissed in the corner of the yard. “I see the place is ready to crumble without me,” he said to Sam, who was still sitting on a pile of papers and ignoring the mess of further files littering the floor.
“You're back already? After being shot?” Sam said. He fought to keep the relief out of his voice, and kept the smile threatening to explode out of him reigned into a thin smirk.
“Please, that bastard was only good for bashing up the girlies. Lot more than a scratch from a stray bullet is going to top me off, so don't go getting hopeful, Sammy boy. I'm actually surprised to see you here...” He paused at his office door his back turned to Sam as he spoke, “ From what I understand, in the blessed land of Hyde, a copper gets a paper cut he lands himself four days paid leave...”
Sam really did smile this time. He couldn't help it, for despite the polyester backdrop and the ridiculous machismo, Gene Hunt was healthy and coherent. He wasn't alone in a dark room, slowly, painfully dying.
“Welcome back, gov,” Sam said to him.
Gene paused at his office door, and then turned to Sam, his eyes surprisingly full of accusation.
“Who said I'd ever left?”
END