nekare

It appears that I'll have to use that horrible 'Cortina' code if I wanna crosspost this. Ew. Oh well. As I was telling kyasuriin, I should probably name it 'pantone #3984 Cortina' for the lols. XD

¡¡Feliz Cumpleaños, sarie_gamgee!!
Perdón que haya tardado tanto en darte tu regalito pero espero que te guste de todos modos. ♥

It somehow helps to know how the series ends before going in, but there are no spoilers whatsoever within the story.

Title: Hysteria
Word Count: 1800
Spoilers: Season 1, to be safe.
Author Notes: Basically, I wanted to take all the 'weird' elements in the series' atmosphere and oversaturate a story with them. This, of course, made it just a joy to write. Betaed by the lovely chrryblssmninja. Written for sarie_gamgee's birthday. ♥



Hysteria

Some days are worse than others.

Girls are dying, one after the other, and all Gene and Ray do is scoff about that bloody bird killer and Sam can’t sleep because the girl in pigtails, the girl with a Care Bear stitched on her shirt, they look too familiar, far too familiar, and for the life of him he can’t remember where it is he knows them from.

“There’s something about them, I know it,” says Sam.

“Stop daydreaming already, Dorothy, there’s a villain to catch,” Gene says, and then he drags him away to arrest one of the witnesses because Gene thinks he looks dodgy. Sam rolls his eyes and stays put and wonders if he’s becoming desensitized to violence after so much time around the Guv.

Girls keep dying, and he keeps on biting his nails and looking anxiously at the forensic reports in search for a clue.

It’s not until the fourth dead girl that he realizes that they’re his old schoolmates, frozen in time at the age they mattered most to him. They have different names and different lives and different crying mothers to the ones he remembers. No one seems to notice that these girls as they are shouldn’t come to being for another six, seven, eight, nine years until little Sam Tyler becomes ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and meets them in his first day of school.

The fifth victim is Sam’s first kiss, thirteen and green-eyed and still wearing that blue cardigan she was wearing the day she waited for him after school and kissed him and then ran away blushing.

He sees the body and stops breathing and there it is, the heart monitor ringing in his ears and it grows and grows until it drowns everything else and he looks up because he can’t stand to look down at the corpse of the girl of his dreams at thirteen. Gene hits him on the shoulder and sends him reeling backwards into reality and then there is silence inside Sam’s head again.

“What have I told you, Tyler, stop daydreaming on the job,” he says and Sam nods and listens as Annie explains how and when and by whom the body was found and yet hears nothing.

“Someone killed your girlfriend, Sam?” the title card girl says, and Sam covers his ears and closes his eyes but still hears the girl laugh. “Or did you do it? Did you, Sam? Did you kill her?”

He wakes up, soaked in sweat and shaking so much it nearly hurts.

He remembers one of his classmates getting killed, remembers how it shook the neighbourhood. He remembers meeting victim number two and number six by chance on the street, both of them with children of their own.

“But you don’t remember enough,” says a voice on the radio. “You forgot about us, you forgot why we mattered.”

“I remember now!” Sam yells right before throwing the radio at the ground where it shatters into a million pieces. He looks up, only to find the rest of the people in the station staring at him. He mumbles something and flees to the bathroom, where he puts his forehead against the cold tiles and wishes it would all go away.

Annie brings him a cup of tea afterwards, pats him on the shoulder and tells him to relax, that he’s taking it all too seriously.

“Yes, Sam, you should probably relax. It’s not as if you’re actively murdering all the girls that once mattered to you in your head, after all,” the title card girl says that night, and Sam curls himself up into a ball, his arms covering his head.

“Leave me alone!” he yells, and when he opens his eyes he’s alone and the neighbour is hitting the wall from the other side and telling him to be quiet for once.

The next girl to die is the one he first slept with, and he thinks he can sense a theme. While Annie is wondering what could have made the killer go after someone so different from his earlier victims and Gene is saying that it’s not like it matters, that they still have a monster on the loose and Chris is writing down everything he thinks is important, Sam can only sit on his desk and rake his brains for every single detail of the girl he once knew and the girl that is now laying on a morgue slab.

Her name was Laura. Is. Will be. She was seventeen and liked to chew mango-flavoured gum and liked the Beatles instead of liking the decade-appropriate Depeche Mode and she drove Sam to insanity for three months. And then, years and years later, he forgot about her, just like he seems to be forgetting everything that has nothing to do with 1973 or his parents or his own madness.

“I have white walls in my flat,” he says to himself in the morning as he shaves, because it’s good to remember he has a life in 2006. “I have decent clothing in my closet and a picture in my office of me and mum when I was fifteen and a nice DCI title and a television that doesn’t talk to me.”

He cuts himself with the razor, and the rivulet of blood that slides down the drain looks rather too much like the only bloodstain found on the girls’ bodies. Not a single cut on them, but there’s always a trickle of blood.

“In here, I have Annie, Gene, a horde of incompetent coppers and a growing list of dead girls that might just be dead memories,” he says as he massages his temples at the end of a long day at work.

“You said something?” Annie asks, and Sam jumps, startled.

“Nothing, nothing,” he says with a smile. Annie looks at him funny for a moment, but looks away in the end.

He doesn’t say it aloud, but back home he also has a relationship crumbling to pieces and people at the station rolling his eyes at him for being so intense about the job and hardly any friends to speak for.

“And an iPod. That counts as a plus in the twentieth first century, doesn’t it?” says the title card girl. She’s sitting on the telly, legs crossed and elbows on her knees and face between her hands.

Sam throws his pillow at her and hits empty space.

The phone rings while he’s alone at the station the next day. Sam picks up, mind a mile away.

“Um, hello. This is Sarah, you know, from school?” says a childish voice on the other side of the line. He scowls, and the voice goes on. “Um. I wanted to know if you were free on Friday? And if maybe you’d like to go see a movie? I mean, if you want to. Um.” And then it’s all too clear. Sam realizes that those are the exact same words Sarah Walters said to him when he was sixteen and she was fifteen and she had a crush on him and he had a crush on her but hadn’t dared to ask her out first.

“Is this a joke?” His palms are sweating.

“Oh, that’s brilliant! Where should we meet, then?” says the girl on the phone, following the script of a conversation that’s already happened or perhaps it hasn’t yet and Sam hangs up and rubs his face with the heels of his hands and tries to ignore it like he tries to ignore the sound of the doctors saying there’s no hope anymore.

The next day, Sarah Walters is dead, and the ID she was carrying says her name is Julie.

“He’s getting closer to the surface, Doctor,” Sarah Jane Smith says on the telly. Sam blinks but gets closer to the screen, because no matter how much he wants to ignore it all, he just can’t.

Jon Pertwee nods and says “Indeed, Sam is on the verge of waking up. He’s quite… unstable, at the moment.”

Sam shakes the television. “No, no! You don’t get to say that, tell me what’s wrong with me!” he shouts. But then it’s back to saving the world from aliens on the screen and he wishes it could all be as simple in real life.

This world of his is too strange, this world of flared trousers and orange cortinas and rooms filled with smoke because cancer is just a myth here. Sometimes, it makes him feel like he’s about to go mad (or madder than he already is, in any case), and sometimes, he wants nothing else (when he thinks of how his father left him anyway, how everyone left him anyway). He smiles at Annie because it makes her smile in return and he feels peace, for a moment. He argues with Gene because it makes him feel important and Sam’s rage leaves him, for a moment.

He remembers home. Remembers 2006. Sometimes, he doesn’t want to.

The next dead girl is the first girl Sam ever truly loved. He’s sick in a gutter and then he sits on the ground with his knees close to his chest and mutters to himself, “I remember, I remember, I swear I remember.”

“As long as you mean it,” says the title card girl that night, and Sam whispers I do. I really do.

And then, suddenly, there’s a clue. Something they’d missed earlier, something that hadn’t been there before, he doesn’t know. There are only songs on the radio, and the people on the telly only speak to themselves.

Sam goes over his life at nights, right before sleeping, and then he dreams with his best friend from school and the cousin that tried to get him into smoking without success and his favourite concert when he was twenty-two. It’s all real, suddenly, and he realizes he’s been in 1973 for far too long, that he has started to think of it as the reality, and of 2006 as the dream.

He feels as if he’s been granted something.

“And you have,” says someone in the radio, so fast Sam can barely register it.

When they finally find him, the killer looks like Sam and talks to his toaster.

Sam wants to believe it’s a coincidence, but he doesn’t really believe it himself, and Gene and Ray stare at him for the longest time.

“So it’s all over, Sam? Case solved, future victims saved, conscience clean?” says the title card girl, sitting on his chair with her hands twirling her clown doll’s hair.

Sam takes his hands to his head. “You’re just a dream,” he says. He says it again, softer, You’re just a dream, as if wanting to convince himself, and tries to bring himself back into reality.

He doesn’t wake up.