Ashes to Ashes

Of Which Two Worlds?

Disclaimer

'Ashes to Ashes' was created by Kudos Film & Television for BBC Worldwide. All characters and situations from the series are the copyright property of the above. No breach of copyright or trademark is intended. This is a not-for-profit fan work for free distribution through the World-wide Web.

Author's Notes

This is a story that suddenly came to me in a flash of inspiration today. The first chapter is more-or-less a summary of what I think may take place in Season 3 of 'Ashes to Ashes'. The second chapter… is the beginning of the first episode of Season 4.

Censor: T – A little Gene and Alex potty mouth but that is all

Chapter 2 – Is There Life On Mars?

Molly Drake's eyes snapped open and found herself, bizarrely, on a train. The train could not have been more different from those she was used to. The car was dingy, poorly-lit by filament bulbs rather than florescent lights, and was finished in a dull pale yellow Formica-like plastic. The seats were stiff and uncomfortable and there was the all-pervasive smell of tobacco smoke. Molly grimaced in disgust at the full ashtray screwed to the wall just a few inches away from her face.

Molly's mind reeled. She had no idea where she was. The last coherent memory that she had been… the car crash! Mum! Where was her mum?

Molly lurched forward as the train screeched to a stop. She looked out of the window and saw a dirty station sign that informed her that this was 'London Liverpool Street' and thanked her for travelling on something called 'Network South-East'. The girl staggered to her feet, looking around herself in disorientation and panic. She nearly ran for the door and waited for it to automatically open. It didn't and the girl was puzzled until another passenger reached around her with an annoyed grunt, twisted the metal handle embedded in the door's structure and pushed it open. Slam-door train carriages! They were museum-pieces! Molly could just about remember seeing them on the line out of Waterloo when she was still little but…?

Molly stood on the platform, looking around her. She had been to Liverpool Street many times before but this wasn't it. This was an old, decaying, smoke-blackened brick-and-iron tomb, nothing like the clean brightly-lit plate glass-framed station that she was used to.

"Love!" Molly looked around to see an unknown heavily-built Afro-Caribbean woman in a strange, pseudo-military black uniform with blue piping and a weird white emblem like two horizontal lines connected by a central vertical zigzag. The woman waved at her. "Love! Are you Molly Drake?" she asked in a thick Jamaican accent. Molly nodded, nervous. "Love, you forgot your luggage! You shouldn't forget it, you know. You'd be surprised the number of suitcases that end up in lost property that no one ever picks up!"

Molly, feeling weird, thanked the woman after she helped her get the suitcase that had a tag with her name on it down from the overhead luggage rack. It was the most god-awful ugly piece of plaid-patterned canvas-and-nylon that she had ever seen with her two eyes. Molly went back out onto the dingy platform again and looked around herself, feeling utterly lost.

A man in a pinstripe suit roughly pushed past the disoriented teenager and Molly watched as he pitched a newspaper into a wood-framed rubbish bin. On an instinct (maybe Mum's cop training getting to her?) Molly picked up the paper and looked at the date. The date was right, just not the year. According to the paper, it was 3rd July… 1982.

Oh, it had seemed cool in Mum's stories. But being here… then… twelve years before she was born, was utterly terrifying. She had read-up about this time on the 'Net. Almost nothing that she knew existed at this time – MP3 players were two decades away! Hell the Sony Walkman was only just being released for the first time! Computers were stone-aged relics that could do colour graphics if you were patient. You needed hundreds of quid's specialised kit to access a primitive ancestor of the Internet called 'Tel-Net'. What were laughably called 'portable phones' were machines the size of a briefcase! SMS messaging hadn't even been thought of yet. Hell… the first digital watch (no alarm, no stopwatch and no date) had only just been introduced!

Molly felt herself began to shiver. Even when her Mum had been in a coma after being shot, she had never felt so utterly… alone. Half on instinct, she staggered towards the end of the platform. Instead of the automatic ticket barriers, there were booths with scowling and unfriendly-looking inspectors. Molly had no idea what to do, or even whether she had a ticket.

Calm down, she hissed angrily in her head. Think! You don't want to end up getting arrested or anything! Who would you call to get you out?

Keeping away from the ticket booth, she searched her possessions. Apart from her hideous suitcase, she also had a bright pink canvas shoulder bag. She unzipped it and sorted through the archaic miscellaneous stuff inside. This included a make-up bag, two well-thumbed paperback novels with unfamiliar titles and a first-generation Sony Walkman audio tape player (with two 16-track tapes whose titles she only knew from the racks of antediluvian 'music' that Uncle Evan had by his home entertainment station back in 2007). Then, she saw something that she'd seen her paternal grandmother use once - a clip-top purse! She snapped the plaid-coloured faux-leather plastic horror open and found unfamiliar-sized coins and notes inside (a… £1 note? Weren't they supposed to be coins? Who would want something as worthless as a pound as a note?). She also found a roll of paper with dim blue printing on it that announced it was printed by 'British Railways'. She figured that this was probably what she wanted.

With an expression of triumph, she brandished the ticket at the inspector, who barked at her in an annoyed tone when she tried to pass through the barrier. The man stuck out his hand and collected the ticket before gesturing peremptorily for her to keep moving.

Half-carrying, half-dragging her heavy suitcase (no wheels on this thing), Molly walked out into the dull, drab concourse of Liverpool Street Station in the year 1982. She had no idea where to go. She had no idea who (if anyone) she could call or even how she would operate the public 'phones in this era (one look at the nightmares with rotor dials and coin slots in filthy cigarette butt-filled metal booths with more broken glass than windows had dissuaded her from experimentation).

Molly realised that she had been through this station more times than she could remember.

But, right now, it was as comforting and as familiar to her as if it were on Mars.

Alex Drake snapped awake on her bed over Luigi's with a heart-wrenching scream of dread. "Molly!"

The black-haired woman nearly fell out of her bed. Her mind was reeling with the memories of the crash, of Molly's scream. It seemed that, as with Sam, disaster in one time had sent her crashing to her refuge in another. However… Molly didn't have that refuge… "Oh God!" she moaned. "Oh God no! Why? Haven't I done enough? What do you want from me?!?"

Bleep-bleep-bleep

Alex turned to her hi-fi, (an irrelevant memory intruded of Ray's being impressed about Alex having a unit with integrated tape player and radio as well as record player) and stared at it, listening to the sounds coming from its speakers. That sounded like… a heart monitor…?

Alex listened, horrified, to the voices of doctors fighting… fighting to save her life! She silently and then, increasingly, vocally, begged herself to hold on, to keep fighting. However, with an increasing cold sense of dread, she realised that it wasn't working. She knew enough about medicine to know it wouldn't be enough. Adrenaline wasn't keeping the heart beating regularly, bleeding couldn't be stopped quickly enough and too many bones were broken… As time went by, the voices grew quieter and quieter, increasingly drowned out by static.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…!

"Time index?"

"Three minutes, fifty seconds."

"It's no good, Doctor. She's gone."

There was a long pause. "Record time of death; 9:15am."

"No…" The sound quality had degraded almost to inaudibility now, static filling the channel. Horrified, on the edge of hysteria, Alex grabbed the hi-fi unit and began to shake it in either fury or terror. "No! NO! NO!"

Even through the roar of static the final voice was quite clear to Alex's ears before the machine suddenly went silent.

"It is probably for the best. She wouldn't have wanted to live with her little girl dead. The emergency contact said that she was all she had in the world."

Then the machine went silent and, in her heart, Alex knew that there would never be the mysterious voices from another time ever again.

"No! NO! MOOOLLLLLLYYY!!!"

"Chris, you pillock! We're late! What if we've missed her?"

"Look, Shaz, it wasn't my fault that there was a bloody traffic jam on the ring road!"

As she munched on her crisps (an unfamiliar brand that she still couldn't believe had only cost her 15p), Molly had to admit that her mother was very good at word pictures. She had described Chris Skelton and Sharon Granger so clearly that she had no doubt in her mind that was who she had standing in front of her. If there was any remaining doubt that this was real it was with the appearance of these two. After all, if this were a dream, she would have had her Mum and that funny Ray guy waiting to meet her rather than leave her waiting for a quarter of an hour for Fenchurch East CID's comedy romance duo. "Um… er… excuse me?"

Chris and Shaz turned to look at a fairly typical example of British Teenage Girl, circa 1982. Seeing her reflection in the concourse newsagent's window had shocked the hell out of Molly. The frizzy, over-permed blonde hair, the dark blue eye-shadow, the bright pink blush on her cheeks making her cheekbones look unfeasibly high and the dangling crucifix earrings were something right out of her research of teen fashions of this era. Frankly, she thought she looked like a freak… or a fan of that weird pop singer… what was his name…? Oh yeah, 'Adam Ant'. Of course, this 'New Romantic' look was all the rage amongst girls of her age in this time period but that didn't make Molly, a fairly conventional and middle-of-the-road girl, feel any better being dressed in a style that verged on the Goth.

"Yeah, love?" Shaz asked. Seeing the nervous girl immediately activated her 'policewoman' instincts. "Are you lost, love? Looking for someone?" Automatically, Shaz was reviewing the procedures for a lost minor in her head. There were always some at the train stations, runaways most of them. The Guv hated kids ending up on their own; he knew only too well what the toe-rags in this city would do with them.

"I… Are you looking for someone?" the girl countered. "I… I suppose that there should be someone meeting me, I guess…" Molly knew that her mother would never allow her to travel alone without having someone meet her. That her mother might not know she was here in the 1980s had not occurred to the girl… yet.

"Actually, yeah," Chris said. "We're here to pick up Molly Drake. Do y'know her, love?"

"Know her?" Molly grinned and jumped to her feet. She hugged a surprised and blushing Chris hard. "She's me! I'm Molly! You're Chris aren't you? Mum's told me all about you! It's so freaky to actually finally meet you! But it's cool too! Woah! This is so going to make a blog entry for Facebook!"

Shaz didn't know exactly how to react to the vivacious teenager suddenly manhandling her fiancé. "Um… Molly?"

"Yeah? You're Sharon, right! Shaz! That's right! That's what Mum says they call you! Weird! It's like… something out of Birds of a Feather! Everything is just so freaky back here! But, this is so wicked cool! Er… I mean… brill!"

Chris and Shaz looked at each other in a knowing way. Very loudly dressed, slightly disoriented and saying things that, whilst in English, didn't actually seem to mean anything that they understood. This is DI Drake's little girl all right, they thought simultaneously. Shaz turned back to the girl. "Well, your Mum's told us to pick you up and take you to meet her at the station," Sharon said. She noted the girl's sudden closed expression with worry. "Molly?"

"Um… What's my Mum's name? I mean, like, I know it's uncool to be suspicious, but Mum always told me…"

"Her name is Alex Drake," Chris said switching to his 'serious authority figure' face. "Detective Inspector Alexandra Drake, in full."

Shaz laughed at her fiancé's serious expression and turned to Molly, seeing bits of the DI's face through that overdone make-up that girls today seemed to like. "She'll be pleased to know that you're a clever girl who is careful about these things!"

Molly seemed slightly offended. "Hey! I'm getting straight-As in all my GCSEs!"

Her whats? Both coppers wondered.

Chris shook his head and offered to take Molly's suitcase. He grinned at the way the bubbly girl was bombarding Shazza with questions. Something told him that Molly Drake would profoundly change things around the patch.

Alex didn't know how long she had laid on the carpet in front of the silent hi-fi, weeping for her daughter. Surprisingly, she found that she didn't mind so much about losing her life in the 21st Century; hell, she had felt like an alien there from the first moment she had woken up in the hospital bed. Molly was innocent, though. Whoever was responsible for this should have left Molly alone.

Finally, almost on autopilot, she went to prepare some coffee and breakfast for herself. She still had her day ahead of her, even though she had a hard time focussing on her plans for this day, just a week from Chris and Shaz's wedding. She decided that, if she were going to commit suicide, it would not be until afterwards, when they were on their honeymoon. Don't let their happiness be spoilt by her despair.

As Alex sat on her couch, staring blindly ahead of her. No matter how desperately she wanted to be free of the pain, she couldn't do it. Not right now. She couldn't spoil Chris and Shaz's day with her selfishness. She tried to visualise Gene's reaction and the agony in her heart nearly broke her all over again. No… she couldn't do that to Gene either. Not to a man who had been betrayed and hurt so many times before. Not to a man who she had started to… to love. Molly had been right about that. Perhaps… in a way, she owed it to her little girl to find out if he would be as good for her as Molly thought he would…

Molly!

Alex made a sound between a sob and a shriek of pain and lost herself for a moment again.

After a few moments, she staggered to her feet and wandered towards her bedroom. Despite her firmest efforts, her eyes drifted towards the big calendar she had on the notice-board between the doors to the bedroom and the kitchen nook. Once, that calendar had counted down the days to her parents' deaths. In more recent times, when Alex found herself alternating between times, she had used it to keep track of what was going to be happening in her other life. She looked at the clear blue line ruling through the next two weeks marked 'Holiday with Mols' and felt the need to cry start to build up again. "I won't forget you," she grated out. "I won't forget… you…?"

Pinned up underneath the calendar was a neat typed letter. The letterhead identified it as being from the Local Education Authority of the London Borough of Islington, the local authority for this area of London. The letter was addressed to her and was in the usual dry, bureaucratic language that Alex was used to in official communications of both eras. However, the content could not be more surprising.

"We are pleased to confirm the transfer of your daughter, Molly Drake, to Grange Hill Secondary Comprehensive School from the start of the Autumn Term, 1982. All records from her previous school have now been received as have her course choices for her GCE and O-Level studies.

"Attached to this letter is a list of uniform and textbook requirements for Molly. If you require any fiscal assistance in obtaining uniform items or if you wish to claim for Single Parent's Child Benefit, please contact the borough's Department of Health and Social Security at the Town Hall Annexe…"

Alex's mouth dropped open. What was this? She hadn't applied to transfer Molly to any of the local schools. How could have she? Why would she have done so anyway? It wasn't as if she had any of the necessary documents like birth certificates! She didn't know what miracle gave her such perfect documents in this era for a woman with her name allegedly born in 1947. However, it had certainly made life a lot easier.

With a strange sense of inevitability, Alex went to the kitchen and opened the bottom cupboard where she kept important documents. Exactly as she predicted, in the padlocked briefcase, was a birth certificate for one Molly Caroline Drake, born in 1969. Alex sat cross-legged on the cold linoleum and pressed the mysterious document to her breast, not knowing what to think, not knowing whether to dare to hope.

Alex's paralysis was broken by the irritating whirring ring tone of her Trimfone. After a few moments, she stood up and, not daring to let go of the birth certificate, went to pick up the phone. "Dr… Drake."

"Ma'am! It's Shaz!"

Remembering her earlier resolution, Alex kept her tone light. "Shaz, hi! What can I do for you!"

"Just letting you know that we picked her up at the train station like you asked and we'll be meeting you over at the station so you can introduce her to everyone!"

"What?" Alex shook her head. What the hell was going on here? Alex overrode Shaz's confused repetition of her previous words. "Shaz, please listen for a moment." Alex sucked in a deep breath. "Shaz, it's important that you answer this question as clearly and completely as possible. Who have you picked up?"

"You know! Molly! Your little girl! Oh, Ma'am! Thank you for agreeing to let her be my bridesmaid! It's going to be so wonderful!"

"M… Molly… Molly is with you?"

"Yeah, that's right! She's a right lively one too! Talking our ears off she is!" Shaz's voice changed as she held the 'phone receiver away from her face. "'Ere, Mol! Say 'allo to your Mum!"

"Hey Mum!" Molly's excited voice blared from the speaker. "It's great here! Grim but great, just like you said! You will not believe how cheap stuff is! Mostly old stuff, but that's okay really. Oh, this is so cool!"

Alex was on the verge of laughter… or tears… or both… She had no idea! "M… Molly, could… could you give the 'phone back to Shaz, please love? Thank you."

"Shaz?" Alex smiled, suddenly feeling lighter and younger than she had ever felt before. "Shaz, I'll see you at the station. And Shaz, keep her away from Ray! I… I don't want her scaring him. Yes, I'm sure that I got that the right way around."

After hanging up, Alex practically launched herself at her wardrobe. She had places to be, after all, and more to do in this holiday than she had ever expected. She had a lot to explain to her daughter. She didn't know how the girl would react to being time-lost. Hell, she wasn't sure how she herself would react after she had come to terms with the fact that their family had been flung a quarter of a century into the past. However, together, they would make it work.

Alex grinned, suddenly looking forward to seeing how Gene reacted to two intelligent, forceful Drake females in the room at the same time.

Maybe, she mused, there was such a thing as second chances.

The Beginning...

Afterword

I might have some ideas for future stories of Alex and Molly in the 1980s, but no promises for now. These ideas include Molly's interactions with the team and Molly's own involvement in the pressing teenage issues of this era. These include the increasing illegal drug problems in inner cities, the fear of this era that lived under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction and a time when sex was, perhaps, just losing its taboo.

For the record, 'Grange Hill' was a soap opera set in an Inner London Comprehensive School. It has only just recently been cancelled after a run of something like 30 years. As Ashes to Ashes itself is not really the 1980s but an exaggerated televisual version thereof, I thought it be appropriate that Molly's new school be Britain's most famous TV school.

How she'll survive without the Internet, text messaging and Facebook, I've no idea. However, Alex adapted and something tells me that Molly is as every bit as tough as her mum.

If anyone wants to tell a story of Alex and Molly's new lives, please feel free but I would be grateful for a mention in the author's note.