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Turner made his usual trip to the station at 3:30 in the afternoon. Two hundred and thirty-two steps from his door to the shop to get a cup of coffee and the late edition of the London Times and then another eighty-six steps from the shop to the door of the station house. His steps from the door to the front desk varied depending on who was there, and how short Thatcher’s skirt was on any given day (she usually changed into her uniform at the station).
So timed and pedantic was his trip that he rarely had to even think about it. Just walk, get his coffee and paper, then on to the station, sipping and reading as he walked. This was his habit and he allowed nothing to distract it.
Until today.
He looked at the rubble around his feet, at the departing firetrucks and ambulances with growing irritation.
“Nobody ever tells me nothin’” Truer words had never been spoken.
**
Being in hospital was horrid. It brought back memories of his mother’s death and his only previous stay at thirteen, when he had his tonsils out. His only visitor then, aside from his mum and dad, had been Doris Thatcher.
Doris had come by again this time, bringing flowers and the latest edition of Batman Comics. As Danny recalled, those were the same things she had brought on her last hospital visit.
The Andes had also stopped by, running upstairs from their own doctor’s visits, and snarking at him for a good fifteen minutes. They brought chocolate that they mostly ate themselves and greetings from Tony and the Walkers and the rest. It was amazingly nice.
What he really waited for though, was evening. That’s when, without fail, Nicholas would come by. He usually didn’t bring anything but himself and stories of what was going on around town and with the trial. The first often made him laugh, because Nicholas, although he wasn’t much with a joke, could tell a story with a dry wit that set Danny off every time.
And damn, that hurt. Laughing after you’ve been shot in the stomach was painful in weird and very not-fun ways, but still it was worth it because Nick got very concerned and comforting. In some ways it was almost like having his mum back, and in others it was nothing like having his mum back.
It was like in Lethal Weapon 2… or was it 3? Or 1? It didn’t really matter which one, because Glover and Gibson were the same in all three (He never counted the fourth film, it was too sappy). They worked together and cared about each other and it was brilliant, just like his friendship with Nick. And when one got hurt the other one hurt too, which was how he had felt when Nick was shot and how Nick felt when he got shot… and blown up.
And unfortunately it had taken getting shot and blown up and his dad in jail along with half the town, AND the semi-destruction of said town, to get where they were going, but Danny figured it was worth it in the end, because not only had he gotten Nick out of the whole thing, but Nick had gotten him. And Nick needed a bit of Danny in his life, he figured, because no one could be better at teaching him how to turn off his brain.
Yes, Nick needed a bit of Danny in his life, and if things kept going the way they were, he’d have a bit of Danny in other places as well.
**
Frank worried about how things would be when he'd left. Not that the station wasn't capable, not really, despite what he'd called them as he ran from the pub, but he still worried. How could a man from London be expected to understand all the delicate little balances between relationships, the best ways to boost (and in the Andes' case, restrain, squash and attempt to pulverize) egos? He didn't know any of their past or families, he didn't know anyone's reasoning.
Frank could see the future clearly, the place taken over by political correctness in all its worst forms and all the joy taken out of it.
And then he got his permission to see Danny, and passed Nicholas Angel in the corridor, and saw pure hatred in his eyes. Not the sort a good copper feels for a murderer, or the sort any man would feel for someone who'd tried to kill him, no, this was the uncomplicated glare of a man whose friend had been hurt because of things his own dad had done, and just didn't understand how anyone could behave like that.
Frank just beamed back at him, out of pure relief to have been wrong.
**
"I hate hospitals." He thought Nick must be really sick of hearing that, because he pretty much said it every evening, but Nick could be really great like that, putting up with things, and always made some kind of response, even if it was just a sort of wordless sympathy grunt-thing.
"Everyone hates hospitals, Danny," he said that particular evening. "It's like a genetic coding or something."
"Well, what about doctors and that?"
"Look at them. Do they look like they like hospitals?"
The answer was definitely a 'no'. They looked more cheesed off than Danny felt.
"Huh."
"Exactly."
Thing was about Nicholas, he could get you to solve mysteries even when you weren't allowed to move more than a foot at a time in case bits of you fell out, or off, or something.
It was bloody brilliant.
**
Nick really didn't understand Danny's viewing priorities. Okay, so he was probably the only person in the world who kept mental catalogues of where things fit and order of precedence, and he didn't actually think anyone else was going to do that, but Danny meticulously alphabetized his shelves and then never went beyond that.
His DVD cupboard was a logician's nightmare.
Aguirre, Wrath of God sat happily in front of Amadeus, which in turn was worryingly cuddled up to Around the World In 80 Days, which was stuck to Arsene Lupin, which was still in its cellophane wrapper and showed no signs of ever emerging.
Nicholas hoped.
He had no idea how the rest of the system looked, because at that point his brain had staged a bid for freedom, and he'd found himself half-way through his third can of beer and one of the Robocop films before he could start thinking about anything again without wanting to scream.
He was getting really good at the mental partition of things he was never going to ask because he seriously didn't want to know. It was almost consoling.
**
Nick was amazing, Danny thought. He’d driven all the way over to Buford Abbey and rented a portable DVD player and half a dozen action/adventure films for them to watch. Right now it was King Arthur, but not the whole knights in shining armor thing… more real with people getting dirty and all.
“That’s like you, isn’t it?” Danny grinned.
“What?”
“Arthur. He does what he thinks is right and best even if other people think he’s crazy.”
“I’d hardly compare myself to someone as famous as Arthur, Danny.” Nick frowned.
He might not do it, but Danny could still see the similarities. They were both the strong and steadfast type, with a high sense of honor.
And that meant he got to be Lancelot, broody and playful all at the same time. Of course, in this version, he was almost certain that Lance and Artie were ‘doing it’, which made it all even greater.
“They’re doin’ it.”
“Of course they are. Arthur and Guinevere are always together in these stories.”
Danny just snorted, because Clive Owen was looking at Keira Knightley with all the passion of a damp dishrag. “I think Arthur is pretty fond of Lance, myself.”
And hmmmm… Nick was blushing. Just a bit around the ears, but it was a blush. Damn, he wanted to be out of this stupid hospital bed and home in his own bed and--
His brain rebelled at that point, because he wasn’t sure quite how he felt about what might happen if Nick came home with him… but damn it, he wanted the chance to find out.
**
When Nicholas said he liked it in Sandford, he knew exactly how insane he sounded. Especially as he was sitting by the remains of a decimated model village at the time, random sprinklers still going off all over the place and most of the inhabitants of the real village about to get incredibly long prison sentences for the most pointless killing spree anyone could ever have thought up or heard of.
On the other hand, Sandford was the only place that didn't think he was insane. They thought he was a complete arse (the Andes, and that was the polite version), they thought he was amazing (Danny, and Nick still didn't really get that), they thought he was the answer to every bureaucratic problem they'd ever failed to solve (Tony) and they thought he needed loosening up in a way that only involved his clothes (Doris, and that didn't count, because she was either not serious and meant it anyway, or not serious and curious, or just thought it was funny that he went red and couldn't look at her. Not serious, anyway). He had no clue what Walker thought, since that would have involved him saying something that wasn't a random insult or was actually comprehensible, either of which seemed a bit of a long shot.
But they didn't think he was really a lunatic, except in a sort of half-admiring way that was really rather pleasant, and they didn't think his putting the job first was wrong, and they didn't think his obsession with paperwork and making things neat was a bad thing, because it just meant they didn't have to do it.
He knew that really, Janine had been right, that he had needed someone to mean more to him than the job before he could really claim to be a human being. And he had kind of thought he'd find that. Maybe. One day.
He'd just never expected it to be a whole lot of someones that the Met would never even look at, the Hoodies, and a dog that seemed to know more about things than the whole police station put together. He'd never expected it to be a friend who thought life came out of films instead of the other way around, and had the patience to show him how to switch off, instead of just telling him to, like everyone else had.
The best thing was, no-one would ever believe him even if he tried to explain it. So he was quite safe shooting off cryptic one-liners and having London write him off all over again.
All in all, his life had turned out to be pretty amazing.
And that was without the guns.
**
Before the new station got built, the main problem was finding somewhere to be that would accommodate various casts, crutches, the hedgehog, Saxon, and the Andes' moustaches, and not break too many of the Health and Safety regulations or be so crowded that murdering would become a normal way of life all over again.
Basically, it boiled down to the library.
And then it really was summer, not just the fake-promise start of it, and they all found out the amazing ability of libraries to contain heat and trap sun and send you straight to sleep. Even the amusement factor of it affecting Nicholas just as badly as everyone else wore thin after a while, especially since it was no good teasing someone who was patently not sleeping any other time due to breaking hospital rules every night to keep Danny company.
Since Danny could (and did) then sleep all day without questions being asked, it was a bit unfair to poke fun at the reason the nursing staff hadn't all resigned due to an overdose of action film quotes.
Doris bought a large electric fan, which blew all the paperwork across the room and gave her a frozen shoulder, and otherwise did no good at all. It also made a hell of a racket, and really, everyone was glad when Andy threw it out of the window.
Partly because he hadn't opened the window first, so there was a nice permanent breeze for a couple of days until Nicholas found someone to fix it. It being Sandford, they all complained far more about the fact the breeze was gone than about the loss of the fan.
But it was all right in the end, because one of the Turners (presumably the one people told things to) found a loophole in the Health and Safety Act that said the person in charge of the building was responsible for keeping those working there out of danger of heatstroke. This being Sandford, of course, it meant they had a constant supply of icecreams, and charged it to the library.
Danny got off most of the drugs, and Nicholas actually went home and got some sleep once in a while.
Doris found a random bloke that she wouldn't talk about, which gave the Andes another target, and one that happily fought back with added innuendo.
The pub re-opened, and the cash register broke down on the first day and didn't get fixed for a fortnight.
All in all, when they looked back on it, usually when people asked them how they had managed, it was a pretty good summer, despite everything.
Or maybe because of it.
**
If there was one thing that Nicholas Angel understood on most days it was why he was a police officer. He had a strong sense of right and wrong. He knew the satisfaction of bringing evil doers to justice and seeing that they paid for their crimes. He knew the pride of being able to combine motivation and justification and minutia, and bringing them all together to figure out who-dunnit and why.
“Inspector Angel.”
“Yes, Doris.”
“Mr. Staker just called to say the swan has escaped again.”
On other days, he had no idea why he was a police officer.
**
It was amazing, Doris Thatcher sometimes thought, how a ‘nice’ town like Sandford could have such a dearth of ‘nice’ men. Oh, the Andes were good looking enough but so into each other that they hardly had a look to spare for a girl. Tony, well, just no and the same for Walker , as much as she liked both of them.
Danny would have been a good choice, but they had known each other since childhood and thinking of him that way just felt, dirty, bad, wrong. And although a bit of the dirty, bad, wrong could be fun now and again, mental incest wasn’t high on the good side of the list.
She’d had a bit of a go at Skinner once, long ago, but really, he never seemed to consider her in his social class. And now, what with him being a murderer and all, and in jail, she really wasn’t in his social class.
If she’d had any idea that Nicholas Angel would make Stanford his home, she might have made her move in that direction much sooner, but she had the impression that they were just a stopping off point for the ‘supercop’. A place where he’d do what he could to get back to London or someplace equally as urban. When it was finally clear that he was, indeed, going to stay, it was too late, his affections were already firmly placed in another direction.
Really, it was enough to make a girl despair… or well, maybe she could chat up Mr. Staker the next time she saw him round the pub. Anyone who lavished that much affection on a snarky bird like the swan, might definitely be ready for something a bit more soft and human.
**
The swan had a vendetta against the police. Actually, it had several personalised vendettas that no-one had really been brave enough to work out - except against Doris, who refused to have anything to do with it.
The Andes blamed Danny, who still honked at it in what was either an attempt to encourage it to stay away or a mark of solidarity, and Nicholas still didn't care which - and Danny blamed the Andes, who had once fed it a pack of cigarettes and given it a nicotine high and subsequent nicotine hangover that made it even more vicious than usual.
Tony, like Nicholas, just hated the swan right back, though in his case it was shown more by making endless cups of tea (for himself) and saying things to people when they came in covered in mud like 'No luck catching that swan yet, then?'
Nicholas had already told him that the next time, he wouldn't even try to stop whoever-it-was from decapitating him with a bin. After all, they all knew a lot, these days, about effective ways of hiding bodies.
In his case, he stayed polite, stayed calm, and thought wistfully about ways of disguising gelignite in ways that would be terribly, terribly attractive to the bloody thing.
**
Danny and the Andes had always had a kind of rivalry going on, whether it was about the swan or about catching speeders or even how many squares of tile the hedgehog in the evidence room would defecate on. It there were two sides of a question, they would be on the opposite ends.
There were only two things in the world that they all agreed on. One, that there was nothing better on a hot afternoon than a caramel Cornetto. Soft and sweet with a crunchy outside, they could all sing its praises.
The second thing was a bit more difficult to pin down, because they all agreed on the point while disagreeing on the reason. The point was simply that their lives had, somehow, improved when Nicholas Angel had arrived on the scene. Not all at once of course, but a bit at a time as time passed. The Andes contended that it was because they actually had crimes to detect, and since they actually were detectives, it was most satisfying.
Danny, however, knew the reason was much more complex. For him it was because he now had a friend, a real friend who listened to him and didn’t think he was stupid, or clumsy, or boring. But he also knew that as much as he needed Nick, Nick needed them – all of them. Their special brand of insanity, somehow, kept Nick sane. Sure, he was still constantly ‘on the job’, but now he laughed about it, rather than stressing over it. It was good all around.
And if the Andes now had a pool going about how long it would take for Danny to mess up and lose Nick as a friend, it was just another thing for them to argue over. Because Danny? He was more than ready for that to happen… as long as it wound up meaning that Nick became something else… something closer.
And because the make up sex would be brilliant.
**