Fic; Doctor Who/Life On Mars Crossover.

[mellaithwen]

Title: Rocket Man

Author: mellaithwen

Rating: R, Blue/Brown Cortina. Gen.

Word Count: 6, 146

Disclaimer: Doctor Who and Life on Mars aren’t mine, nope, not even a little bit. But I like to steal them sometimes and fill the world with angsty crap crack.
Warning: Character death mentioned. Spoilers for Doctor Who and Life on Mars generally. Not in the same universe as This Is How We Walk On The Moon

Summary: AU. Life On Mars/Doctor Who crossover. Saxon receives an unexpected visit from an old friend before the election results.

Un-beta'd, don't kill me pleeeease. Apologies if it's slightly confusing, since it goes back and forth. You have been warned.

*-*-*

“Mr. Saxon will see you now.” A voice announces past the distant daydream that crashes to a halt.

The suspicious blonde that let this stranger in is talking. With a pinched nose and a frown, she is quite un-amused at this pensioner’s lack of co-operation. He won’t tell her his name, or his business, but he is to see Mr. Saxon and even she cannot be rid of him.

In the distance the steady clack of constant typing can be heard. In the campaign offices of this would-be-Prime-Minister, the whirr of computers never goes away. The televisions are all set to BBC News 24 with their pre-election coverage and the smell of coffee is strong, it’s aroma thick in the contained space.

The blonde beckons toward the closed door with her slender fingers, perfectly manicured, and leaves the visitor alone in the corridor. His focus is needed; his eyes are no longer glazed with nostalgia for a working-environment. He has a duty, a mission to perform. A man to see.

Friends in high places, the blonde thinks as she walks away. The truth is more like blackmailed politicians in high places, cashing in debts for one meeting. Just one.

His white locks are surprisingly full, though quite uncombed, with wisps of stray hairs falling along the back of his collar and around his ears, down sideburns that he never got rid of. Never one for preening, after all.

But withered and brittle, Gene Hunt, is not.

The city’s noise is dimmer here, behind walls and closed windows; with views of boring brick buildings and busy, busy roads. Black cabs and black cameras with blinking red lights and news reporters scattered along the pavement like the white droppings from birds and trodden-in-chewing-gum. Like flying political posters, propaganda for the 21^st century.

The streets of London are busy today.

A pigeon lands on an outside window-sill. It finds solace in its rest. The young man in the corner, closest to the glass pane, looks up from his computer screen. He blinks and opens   the window cruelly and uncaringly. He smiles as the grey bird is startled from his perch.

This could be the most pointless thing the old man’s ever done, the strangest even, but time is ticking away and it keeps ticking and ticking and ticking, and it won’t stop, not any time soon. Into infinity and back, there’s no denying this is it, this is all there is. And it’s now or never.

There’s something about losing one of your own that makes you seek out others. Fly back to the coop, surround yourself with something, someone, you know. Someone you can trust.

So why the stranger’s here, in this corridor, about to walk through that door, into that room...he has no idea.

He places his aged palm onto the wooden panels. Stares at the veins spread out around his scarred knuckles. He faces the door, faces it head on. Braces himself best he can for what lies within. His back is hunched and he brings out his clenched fists from within his coat pockets.

Knock, knock, and come in.

The door opens.

*-*-*

DI Sam Tyler abandoned ship.

In the middle of a botched undercover operation he vanished into thin air. He was declared legally dead in 1981. As time went by, DCI Hunt was sure something was amiss. Sam wouldn’t run, wouldn’t leave them for dead, not like that.

The kid must have run into trouble, yes that must be it; god knows he made enough enemies for himself. He wasn’t hiding to save his own skin from disciplinary action, or worse, Gene’s fists. He wasn’t that much of a coward, Hunt knew. A complete moron, maybe, a bloody idiot, possibly. But not a coward.

DI Sam Tyler ran for back-up and never returned. Whereabouts unknown, search no longer ongoing.

Hunt had a system, he would bottle up unresolved anger he held regarding the betrayal of having a Hyde-C-Division-Spy amidst them all until Sam was safe and sound. Then he’d open it up like a 60-year-old bottle of Whisky.

He had also resorted to thinking him as younger than he was; somehow it made him more innocent to keep calling him Sammy-boy and kid instead of Detective Inspector Tyler.

Made it easier to trust him.

But then more time went by, and Sam was still nowhere to be found. And suddenly it was harder and harder to find records or pictures or...well, anything of the man. Of their DI and not some kid with the same name. It was all fading away, like grains of sand that escape to the breeze no matter how tight the fist that holds it is.

After a while, Gene stopped thinking of Sam as hiding from unsavoury men who wanted him dead, and started thinking of Sam, Sammy-boy, his DI, as dead. He just had to accept it and move on like everyone else. Even Annie, stronger than she looks, was staying strong and if a bird could pull it off, Gene Hunt certainly could.

DI Sam Tyler, deceased, made it back to 2006—unbeknownst to his colleagues. He woke up in hospital in the year he belonged and he never returned.

He died there too; a cut off machine and air went away. His eyes blinked open as his lungs shut down and his heart stopped beating.

But then something strange happened, more strange than time travel, more strange than all of the ‘70’s put together.

He came back, sort of.

*-*-*

The old man stares. He can’t help it, he’d tried to brace himself, focus and be ready but...but the man in front of him is...

“An audience with the Prime Minister, you must have pulled quite a few strings, Mr...”

“Hunt.” He adds in as gruff a tone he can muster, “And you’re not the prime minister yet, boy.”

The office isn’t as musty as he thought it would be. Cleaner, crisper, sunlight draping through half-closed blinds. This is his place, his quiet place as he waits for the results with wooden floors and wooden desks, polished clean, squeaky clean.

“Haven’t you heard? They’re calling it an early landslide, Mr. Hunt.” There’s a sickly sweet smile on the MP’s face. It’s too wide, fake. Hunt knows it’s fake.

“I just wanted to see the Prime Minister-to-be in the flesh,” He lies, as though it’s his only motive. “I did vote for you, after all.”

“I’m glad to hear it; you must know a good politician when you see one.”

Just a little PR, that’s all, the Master thinks.

“Or a good liar.” Gene lets that one slip. He can’t keep calm under this duress. A situation like this some years ago would have called for a punch up out back. Hell, one right here. But Gene can’t and it has nothing to do with being thirty years older, forced to face ghosts he’s tried to forget and assaulting memories that haunt him still.

Nothing.

“Excuse me?” He’s still smiling, the bastard. He hasn’t even clocked that he might know his visitor. Not even a glimmer of recognition.

But then, Gene can’t see much of anything in those cold blue eyes of the Minister, and he dare not look for too long. There’s something so hypnotising about it all, but his eyes aren’t what they used to be, not as sharp, not as young. He looks away.

“Funny how there’s no record of you before 2006, isn’t it? Harry.” The old fire of DCI Hunt is rekindled for a moment as his fingers brush the package hidden in his coat. He’s interrogating a suspect. He has to be impartial, he has to step back and not let it be personal.

Ha, he has to clock him one. Give him a bloody great knuckle sandwich.

But how the hell can he do that when...when, when he’s not gone, not dead? When he’s right there and he’s smiling at you like some creep with a dirty lawyer. Like a murderer who knows there’s no proof, no evidence, who knows he’s gonna get off scot-free and kill again.

“I think you’re a little confused, Mr. Hunt, but you’re welcome to check the public records—”

“Already have.” He scratches his nose as he remembers the lies. “Schooled in Cambridge, creator of the Archangel network. You left out the part about being my DI in the seventies though.”

“The people have spoken, Mr. Hunt, the early polls prove it. Why would you question me as I am about to be elected?”

The innocence fools no one.

Nor does the condescending smile or the subtle evasion of the question.

Damn patronising bastard. Every retort Gene has ever used mesh together in his head, but he doesn’t say one of them. Not one. Not aloud.

“Smoke?” Gene asks, pulling out the squished and tattered pack from his top pocket.

Saxon shakes his head with that smile and Gene snorts. “Oh that’s right; you only like the ones from the sweet shop.”

*-*-*

Saxon first finds out when a man comes rushing forward out of the adoring crowds. “Sammy! My Sammy!” He says, thrusting himself past the barricades and reaching out. Saxon snarls and moves out of the way.

Vic Tyler, deciding to come out of hiding after nearly 30 years upon seeing his boy on TV—and he knows damn well it’s his little Sam—is manhandled back, and dumped in an alleyway.

He fades back into the shadows, and thinks, “This is for the best.”

Saxon has researchers looking up Sammy; it’s nothing, a first name—barely anything to go on. But they’ll know when they find it, and they’re paid to do what he tells them.

But Vic Tyler isn’t the last. Not by a long shot.

The Master can’t admit he’s wrong, he’s stubborn like that. Sam Tyler can’t either, but it’s usually because he’s so used to being right rather than a complex that leads to murder.

A woman with dark skin and long pretty hair tears through his campaign offices and demands an explanation to Mr. Saxon’s existence. She doesn’t call him that at all and the tears in her eyes are only too real.

She mouths off for too long, she annoys him and amidst the screams of what the Master assumes to be Sam Tyler’s voice begging him to stop, she dies by his hand.

If anyone asks, he lets his fingers tap a little drum-beat on the wall, and he stares them straight in the eye without blinking.

They stop asking.

*-*-*

“You’re wrong.” He breathes heavily. “Dark, but your face...you used to be the good guy.” The man’s emotions no longer in check, not that they really were to begin with.

“Pardon?” Still smiling, still bloody grinning like a puppet on strings. Worn and frayed strings that were cut in 1973 but have been taped together with lies and deception and duplicity of the worst kind.

Mr Saxon’s head tilts to the left in curiosity.

“You can drop the act, Tyler, I may be old but I’m not bloody senile.”

“That’s quite an attitude you have there, Mr. Hunt, but I think you have me confused with someone else.” Saxon turns to the men by the doors, who have bristled at every word so far. “Escort Mr. Hunt back to his car, would you? Unless...” He turns to Gene, white haired Hunt with a slight hunch in his frame but otherwise just as tall. “You came via public transport, perhaps?”

The dig is a subtle one, a quiet implication that this once intimidating man (though still with an ability to shout to high heaven) owns an old age pensioner’s bus pass.

“You gonna man-handle an old man like me, boys?” Gene asks the two bodyguards who stray forward with their sharp suits and thick jaws. They each take hold of Gene’s arms, pulling him towards the door, infuriating the retired DCI.

He’s suddenly reminded of Crane’s thugs on a rooftop in his memories. Head forced over a wall with a blood corpse at the bottom. Sam by his side in as much danger as he.

“If you’d have backed me from the start then maybe—”

“I bloody did! We would have got the evidence to lead us to Crane eventually! It was done by the book until you decided to rewrite it!”

“What choice did I have? I was on my own! I’m always on my own!”

“Oh it’s my turn is it? Oh lucky me!”

“We thought you’d like to die together.”

In the distance, Harry hears whistling. Bring me sunshine...

“What are you thinking, Mr. Hunt?” Saxon asks as he sees the man’s pupil’s glaze over somewhat. He’s forward in an instant, the curiosity within getting a better of him. His palm strays, his arm reaches and as they touch, as hand meets head; Saxon sees. Sam feels.

“It’s over now; you’re no longer the hero. Look at you, you’re powerless, you couldn’t save Eve and no one will save you. This is it, Tyler.”

Hopelessness fills his being and he takes a deep breath and pushes it back, pushes it away. But he can’t seem to do the same for Mr. Hunt.

“Leave us.” He mutters, surprising the two men flagging Gene. They let go of his arms, and look ready to protest but Saxon waves them away with distaste for their existence. As Gene watches them go with a glare of his own, dusting down the sleeves of his coat, Mr. Saxons beckons him to sit.

Stubborn Hunt refuses.

Typical, Sam mutters. Saxon growls, but keeps his smile tight and wide.

*-*-*

“We need a campaign song.” A woman tells him. He should know her name but really he just doesn’t care. She’s in charge of...something or other. Marketing perhaps?

“A song?”

“Yes, something positive, popular, fresh.”

A murmur of agreement spreads like wild fire around the room while the Master tries not to think of slaughter when faced with that particular f-word. He hides a smile with a flare of his nostrils and hides his disdain with a smile.

“Any suggestions?”

Amongst the boring plays, he hears, I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife, it’s lonely out in space...

“He always played this” A voice in his head reminds him. “He thought it was really about exile.” She says.

...on such a timeless flight...

Her large earrings sway with the small movements of her head, and her long hair is draped across her shoulder. It’s as dark as her eyelashes and...the dark abyss he’s tried to forgot. Oh god, oh god, not again, oh god.

...And I think it’s gonna be a long long time, till touch down brings me round again to find...

“Whichever strange place you find yourself in, make that your home.”

...I’m not the man they think I am at home, no, no, no I’m a rocket man, rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone...

“Sir?”

His face is flat against the cool surface of the table. He blinks wearily, never one normally one to be dazed. He pinches his face as though deep in thought, like a caricature of a man with power, in power. He keeps listening and hopes he’ll see her again, but he doesn’t.

He misses her and he can’t remember her name. His right hand shakes and amidst the uncontrollable clink that his nails make against the smooth metal, there’s a distinct tap...a drumming he knows too well.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell and there’s no one there to raise them if you did. And all of the science I don’t understand, it’s just my job five days a week ‘cause I’m a rocket-man, rocket man.

“Next.”

*-*-*

“Don’t you even care about what you left behind? When you left?” Gene asks, unwilling to sit across the table from Mr. Saxon who squares his shoulders. “Don’t you even care about Annie?”

Saxon turns and glares with enough of a ferocity to make Gene flinch, the Gene-Genie flinch. His breathing’s heavier, sporting out through flared nostrils with fists clenched by his sides. This anger Gene sees is the most human Mr. Saxon has seemed since first Hunt saw him on an early podium.

“Those’ll kill you, you know.” Saxon says without affection as Gene takes a long drawl of his cigarette. He lets in the nicotine with a curl of his lips and watches the smoke filter in the air. Stay still amongst the oxygen before fading away through the draft in the door.

“They haven’t managed it yet.” Hunt tells him quietly as he takes the stick out of his mouth between his forefingers. The line of smoke leaves a trail as it rises. They’re both too busy to notice, or care.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I don’t have time for this, Mr. Hunt.”

“Well you better bloody make time, Sammy-boy.”

“Don’t call me that. It’s not my name.” He spits and Gene chuckles despite the glares he’s been thrown, like daggers heading straight for his head.

“They call you Saxon back in Hyde then?”

Saxon grins.

“I’m not him, not really.” He strolls around his own desk. “Something went wrong in the process.” Hunt frowns and Saxon, never to one to avoid a chance to tease, explains. “Regeneration.”

Gene thinks Sam’s using fancy metaphors, but it’s the most honest thing that’s passed Mr Saxon’s lips since he first started this whole charade in 2005. Speaking out as a new politician, who gave the opinion of the many as his own. Gained trust and affection, and will now win the election.

Saxon turns his hands over. Knuckle to palm, he stares.

“You see normally, we don’t steal others. Their faces, their being. It’s too troublesome, but it would seem Mr. Tyler wasn’t where he belonged at all. It was almost serendipitous that I should...meet him.”

“What? You’re insane now too?” Hunt asks, dropping the cigarette to the floor and stamping it out. “I’ve been following the campaign ever since I first saw you on the news. I know it’s dirty, doesn’t even need a smear campaign for Christ sake!”

“Watch your mouth, Mr. Hunt.”

“You watch your mouth! Don’t you dare talk to me like that, Tyler! All you do is complain about the aliens, raging on about how equality only applies to the human race—foreigners of Earth beware, defence is imperative, but you’re the one who somehow managed to make it thirty years without aging a day!”

“Is that what you think happened? Have you listened to anything I’ve said?”

“I thought you’d had a son at first, Annie too. But you didn’t. Did they take you? Is that it? Probed you like their own little rent-boy? Sodomised you into being this cheap politician who’s dark as they come? Because I’ve been racking my brain for days trying to think, what would send a goody two shoes like Sam Tyler over the edge—?”

“Man has the capacity to change. There’s always a choice, and everyone has a dark side, Gene.”

Hunt stops, and looks at the politician fondly, whose voice is softer now, quiet, cautious and wary, eyes down, fingers no longer tapping a beat; the sound of drums. Now they’re sheepish, catching on the tiny rips in the desk’s wood.

“So it is you.”

*-*-*

In the dark abyss his essence is caught. A snag caught on the unseen, unheard. Rattling in his ears, the nothing pulls at his skin. He doesn’t belong here, and stuck between worlds as he is, he floats among the empty spaces. Lost in time. Lost in space. Lost in...everything and nothing at the same time.

He’s dead, he thinks, though thought is not something he truly has.

But he must be. Maybe this is Hell; maybe this is the price he has to pay for taking a second to be happy. Maybe he should have just settled with what he had when he had it.

There’s no sense of time here, just time. Immeasurable but never-ending. More and more, endlessness and hopelessness. It doesn’t go away and Sam can’t leave. Because Sam isn’t really Sam anymore.

But then he feels something, though in truth he can feel nothing at all. A tug forward and it’s the first feeling he’s felt in god knows how long. He embraces it, and falls into an even darker abyss, filled with a steady beat that’s so loud and so frequent and everlasting that his heart mimics it in this new world of the living.

The sound of drums haunts him, but at least he can feel and at least he’s alive.

He stops being grateful when he hears what his own voice orders others to do with a politician’s power he never had before.

He stops being grateful when he sees himself in the mirror, and the smile he smiles all hours of the day doesn’t reach his eyes—that aren’t his own— not ever, not even once.

*-*-*

“What do you want?”

“Annie convinced me to come. Even if it was just to knock some sense into you.”

“How is she?”

“Why should you care? Up in your ivory tower. Better yet, why should I even tell you?”

“Tell me how she is.” Saxon repeats, firmly.

“You’re married!”

“That never stopped you!”

“Tut tut, not setting a very good example, are we?” Gene smirks as Saxon snarls. “You can’t even say her name, can you Sam?”

*-*-*

“Something’s wrong.” Saxon mutters as he takes too much solace in the cold surface of the wall he’s leaning against. Is this sickness? Is he ill? “Something’s wrong.”

“Master, Master, what is it? What’s wrong?” The utopian refuges ask, entombed within their metal spheres—reduced to children, aimless and united for all the wrong reasons.

“This isn’t right.” Saxon says, pushing fingers deep into the bridge of his nose to make the headache go away. A headache. God, it didn’t even feel this bad after he regenerated. Pounding in his head, worse than any drum-beat or call to war. It’s a migraine.

The toclophane continue in the background, their tinny voices reminding him of a 70’s test-card-girl attacking in the night, in the depth of his nightmares she’s there smiling. Clown in hand. Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry. You try it, Sam. Red wire, yellow wire, red wire, yellow wire.

“What did you say?” Saxon bellows, the room spinning as he faces them and screams.

“Master? Master? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“When oh when will all this end? I am your friend, your only friend.”

“Something’s wrong.” He tells them as children’s television plays on the television behind him.

*-*-*

“My name is Harold Saxon, not Sam Tyler.” He spits in response. “I’m a politician, not a police officer. I’ll be the god damn Prime Minister in less than three hours!”

“Sam I knew hated politicians. Hated the Prime Minister. Used his name to get in to a wife swapping party.”

Saxon laughs, but it isn’t the same, it starts off warm—reminding Gene of a time where aliens weren’t barely on the damn telly let alone walking the streets outside and crashing into monuments. Invading, attacking, with bloody metal robots trying to get into the living room—but then the laugh, it ends sounding hollow.

Breaking off into a cough and Sam—Saxon, he doubles over, heaves a deep breath that rattles in his chest.

“Play nice, Sammy.” Gene doesn’t hear. But he actually steps forward, frowning. He sees his right-hand man nearly fall and every instinct inside tell him to go, go, help Sam.

But then Saxon rises. Like Lazarus from the grave, he stands. His expression, of such acceptance in moderate guilt that might fool another into thinking he was innocent...it reminds Gene of a time he’d rather forget. Duplicity instead of trust.

Running from the cries of “Tyler!” and “Sam! Help us!” and the bullets raining down on the path across the rail-tracks. Running for back up, running toward the light. Leaving, darkness. Death. Decay.

Hooked, and yanked, and pulled back, to this.

“The Sam you knew betrayed you. And he’s dead, sort of. I’m just borrowing him for a little bit.”

“But you’re not, are you Sammy-boy?”

“I said,” Saxon growls. “Don’t call me that!”

The Master lunges, filled with fury and what he doesn’t understand to be guilt. He aims to barrel into the old man, but Gene surprises them both when he side-steps faster than he thought he still could. He pushes Saxon into the wall, slams him against it as he once did with scumbags back in the day.

Saxon’s eyes, for the tiniest moment, seem darker and afraid. But then it’s gone, and he’s laughing in the mild choke-hold Gene has him in.

“Remember what he said, Gene? Harry?” Harcourt, not Harold. “Every son kills his father.”

“You threatening me, Tyler?”

“I think it’s rather fitting—”

“Oh, Freud would have a field day with you.”

“Do you remember him, Gene? Your mentor? The one you shot? Betrayed? Will you do the same to me? Your prodigy? The boy-wonder? Are you going to turn it around? Father kills the son?”

In the recesses of his memory, Gene hears a shot being fired. He watches his mentor crumble and fall and he lets Sam go. He doesn’t know it’s Saxon spouting poison through lips once wise of 21^st century policing.

“You don’t have the balls for it.” Saxon whispers. “Sam’s blood on your hands, you can’t do it, and we both know it.”

*-*-*

Former DCI—now retired, though not by choice—Gene Hunt, steps into the campaign offices of Harold Saxon. He has an appointment. And no, it’s not a joke. Saxon covers anything he doesn’t know, or understand with a heavy black blanket of hatred. He hides it away, locks it away. Locks him away.

But somewhere along the line, Hunt and Saxon blame each other and begin to shout. Suddenly, the line between Tyler and The Master blurs until it’s unrecognizable. Indistinguishable.

Neither knows where one begins and the other ends, but for these moments it really doesn’t matter anymore.

*-*-*

“He spent months trying to get home.” Saxon dusts himself off as Gene tries to catch his breath. “Trying to leave that damn place and I finally feel like I belong, I have friends, I have something to hold on to and they take it away. They make me destroy it all with a promise they don’t keep!”

Hunt doesn’t call him on the change from He to I. Sam, Saxon, whoever the hell he is, he’s losing it. Losing the vice like grip that keeps his emotions in a box in the darkness of his mind. Locked away with bloody memories of the seventies he should never have seen.

“This isn’t you, Sam.”

“That’s not my name! Sam Tyler didn’t just disappear in 1973, he didn’t just die there! He died in St. James’ hospital in 2007, he never woke up. He got run over and stayed in a coma until it was diagnosed that he was in a permanent vegetative state. His friends and family left him there to rot until they finally made the bloody decision to switch him off. To let THEM win.”

“That’s why you hate them? That’s why you want to wage a war in the sky? You think aliens did this?”

“How the hell else would you explain it Gene? I was born in 1969!”

The Master could explain it, could discuss the fragile wisps of time that he’s understood since he was a child, but he won’t.

“You were born in the 30’s, Sam.”

“Look at me, look at me Gene! Do I look over 70 to you?”

“Then how are you standing here? Huh? If Sam Tyler died, how the hell are you here at all?”

Saxon falters, because in all honesty, he really doesn’t know.

*-*-*

The first time he’s shown the Valiant, it’s just a tour for the Minister of the Archangel network, not the Prime Minister. He’s shown the intricate details of each corner of the ship that he helped commission. A defender of the skies.

His guide, as it were, is called away and in those moments a phone rings in the distance.

A red phone on a black desk and no one else seems to want to answer it.

If they can hear it at all.

He picks it up warily and expects to be told to hang on; the mind’s a fragile thing, Sam, we hope you’re strong enough for this.

Instead, it’s just a switchboard and he hangs up without a care, drumming his fingers until his tour-guide returns.

*-*-*

“Annie’s dead, Sam.” Gene interjects before he can convince himself that this man doesn’t deserve to know.

“You’re lying.”

“You look me in the eyes and tell me I’m lying you sorry sack of shit!” Gene clutches Sam’s collar in his arthritic palms. He grabs the stiff material until his fingers are screaming but he never lets it show. He pulls Sam close until they’re both a breath away. “Do it!”

Sam tries. Saxon tries. He looks into his own hardened heart and dares Gene’s eyes to give the game away. But they never do.

“No,” Sam whispers as a cold chill brushes the hairs on the back of his neck and his hands shake uselessly at his side.

“She died this morning.”

“And you thought I ought to know?”

“No, Sam, in fact I was completely against it. She loved you, for whatever reason. Whenever you were on the news spouting your political bullshit, making the country swallow your propaganda, even then she said you were still there, but I don’t see it. I really don’t.” He’s spitting his words at the man in front of him. His eyes are wide and his eyebrows arched high in unbelievable fury. How dare you, he thinks. How dare you!

Saxon looks down, shakes his head in confusion while Sam closes his eyes and shakes his head in grief.

“Was it...did she...?” He stops, and Saxon won’t let him continue.

“She’s been ill a while. She was sleeping. She called me up a year or two ago. Wanted to know she wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t seeing things every time your face popped up on the television.”

No reply.

“Talk me out of it, Sam. Pull your spin-doctor crap and tell me this isn’t your fault, that none of this, these lies, are your doing..”

For a moment, the Master’s hands twitch and his eyes glow unnaturally. He could. He could.

He won’t. He blinks. He snarls.

“Are you done yet?”

Gene feels it all slip away. Any connection, any feeling is gone. Only numbness remains in the empty space between them. A stalemate that no weapons could break. No niceties or polite gestures. Forgiveness has no place here, not anymore.

“You’re a nasty piece of work, and I’ll have a bottle of scotch for the man who finally brings you down. Saxon,” Hunt spits. “Yeah, you’re definitely Saxon.”

He’s trying to bait him, bring out an angry Sam, because it’s better than nothing. But silence stretches and Gene turns to leave. He’s done, he’s done.

Hand resting on the door-knob, he’s stopped.

“I had your unwavering trust once.” Sam blurts as he moves and stands in front of the man. Towering over him, young and unchanged with age despite the passing decades that once were.

“And now look what’s happened.” Hunt finishes.

“I didn’t ask for any of this!”

“Don’t give me the spoilt brat act. I didn’t ask to be born. We don’t choose the pain we endure Sam! We fight it! We prove ourselves and we show the bastards what we’re made of!”

“That’s what I’m doing!”

“No, Sammy-boy, you gave in, you let the dark win and now you’re no better than it is.”

Gene turns, and walks away with his collar flicked upward rubbing against his now-white hair. Sam, as Saxon, as a politician who has indeed given in to the darkness, feels the rage boil inside of him. But with a single breath it simmers down into the hollow feeling of rejection.

“If you cared about Sam Tyler at all you’d stop!”

“Cruel card to play, boy.”

“They brought me back and they shouldn’t have. I died and when I woke up things weren’t the same. I was gone, I was done, and I was dead. They were trying to cover their tracks because they made a mess of everything but I am making the best of it, Gene. This is my city; I won’t let those scumbags destroy it.”

“You sound like me.”

“Learnt from the best.”

“I didn’t teach you to be a bastard, Sam.” Gene slips up. He finds it harder and harder to look at this man, Saxon, and not see Sam staring back at him. Failure glaring in his desperate gaze. Because even though he was sent by another, Gene’s longing to hear that it wasn’t his fault. That this all wasn’t his influence. His doing.

He remembers a cell death and that same look coming from Ray. The look that craves acceptance from an unfit role model—but he’s all they’ve got. Gene thought Sam was better than that, he thought he could do without the hero-worship. He thought wrong.

“They killed my mother. Destroyed her. Destroyed everyone she knew. Metal. So much turned to dust, soldered, left to rust. Her son should have protected her.” His voice takes on an edge that Gene doesn’t recognize. It isn’t reminiscent of the good copper he knew and it certainly hasn’t been used by Mr. Saxon.

“But he was away with the fairies.” He grins at Gene, looks him up and down. “He didn’t wake up on his own, not through some medical marvel. He was brought back from the brink and oh it’s so dark there. So lonely, so hollow. Pain latches onto you like chains in the abyss. There’s no escaping it and you don’t have the will to even try.”

“Who are you?”

“I am everything you remember. I had no choice. Left to die, left to rot, plunged into nothingness and plucked back like an unlucky fish on the wrong end of the damn rod.”

“Never was a fan of fishing myself.”

“It’s even worse to be the catch of the day.” He coughs violently, and the tiniest morsel of blood that graces his lips is discoloured. This man, this dying form, truly was dead long ago.

“Let him go.”

Gene doesn’t know if he’s talking to whatever outside influence has darkened his officer or his own Sam in search of vengeance where there can be none.

“Let who go?” Saxon asks, voice wavering through an ironic tone as he recalls the horrors he has seen...felt. Sarcasm dripping like venom from the young man’s whitened teeth. Like putrid blood upon an unsteady smile, once gleaming, with the ability to trick the public like children at a magic show. Smoke and mirrors.

But broken, cracked and dangerous shards are all that remain hanging on with all it’s might. It’s the only thing that keeps the Master in existence when long ago he was destroyed. The drums, the drums. It’s the only thing keeping Sam Tyler from decomposing in front of his former-superior’s very eyes.

It won’t be long now, Gene thinks. He turns, leaves and Saxon lets him though he can’t think why.

But Gene Hunt keeps walking, a package hidden in his long overcoat. Filled with floppy disks and pen-drives and print-outs; evidence, he drops it off at the press offices of the Sunday Mirror and leaves it for one of the journo’s to find. He can’t bring Saxon down, he can’t do that to Sam, but maybe someone else can.

“Don’t leave me.” Sam Tyler whispers to the empty room as the door shuts behind his former DCI.

“Well, well, must crack on!” Harold Saxon finishes. Wins.

-Fin