A/N – This one has changed wording and structure so many times that I don't even know anymore. I've never written Ruth's POV and it ended up being quite different to what I have done before. I think that is a good thing but I guess you guys will let me know all about that.
And in my dreams, I meet the ghosts of all the people who have come and gone…
Ruth had never been to Cyprus, and on that day when she needed to make a split second decision that would affect her entire future, she chose that little, unassuming, sun-soaked island. It came to her, out of the blue, just as she was considering telling the woman at the airport in Oslo that she wanted to buy a ticket for Bratislava.
Cyprus.
It would be warm there, she thought afterwards, as she climbed the steps to the aeroplane. She had never lived anywhere so warm before.
The man in the seat next to her was French, young and pretty, and entirely delighted that she could speak his language.
"It is a beautiful place," he said excitedly, when she told him she had never been to Cyprus before, "Out, away from the towns, it is like something from a dream."
He hadn't been wrong, that boy on the plane. Ruth found a little house, away from the town with the hospital that was only too willing to employ her, and she began again. Life began again. New friends, new colleagues, new everything.
Except that she could not quite let go of the old one.
When she first started at the hospital, Ruth found her solace in identifying new colleagues who reminded her of the old ones. No one person was really that similar to another but there was a tall, handsome doctor who had a smile like Adam; a nurse who shared Zaf's endearing love for cars he could never hope to afford; a fellow secretary who was as kind as Jo; an IT guy who was as shy and sweet as Malcolm. Ruth surrounded herself with these people, made an effort to speak to them, because they eased the blow of losing the others.
It was only after a month, when handsome doctor made a horribly sexist remark, the kind of remark Adam would never make, that she realised she would not be able to replace her friends. It would never be enough to have substitutes.
So she tried to make new friends, to appreciate people for who they were rather than who they could be, and eventually the sharp pain lessened and she learned to smile again.
Then the dream began.
She is on the Grid, an ordinary day promising to unfold, and the team are with her. Zaf and Jo tease one another and Adam, his first coffee of the day in his hand, listens patiently as Malcolm babbles excitedly about some new piece of tech he has managed to get hold of. Colin and Fiona are there too, slotting into the scene as though they had never left it, and that is when Ruth knows she is dreaming. No one is ever allowed to stay.
The pods whir behind her and she turns, just in time to see Harry stepping out of them. He looks at her and he smiles, that little smile that she has realised he keeps only for her. The rest of the team must be able to see them, to see the look they exchange, but in the dream Ruth does not mind.
She is on the verge of standing, of going to him, when all hell breaks loose and his hardened mask snaps back into place. He doesn't even have time to bark an order; the lights go out on the Grid and there is a gunshot and Fiona falls to the floor.
Jo screams and then Ruth is alone, running through the streets of London. There are footsteps behind her but she cannot see her pursuers.
She blinks and she is in her house, in a hallway shrouded in eerie half-darkness, and Malcolm is there, on his knees, stroking Colin's hair. Colin is dead, an angry red wound stark against the pale skin of his neck. The footsteps run up to the door and Ruth tries to make Malcolm come, to leave Colin and run with her, but he won't move. Then Zaf appears and drags her away and she holds onto his hand, warm and solid and something she knows. She held his hand before, that night they stayed out on the dock and waited. He promised he would smile if he ever saw her again, on the street in a foreign country. Sweet, sweet Zaf. He drags her through the house and out of the back door and they are on the dock, the dock where she left it all behind.
She doesn't want to go, doesn't want to live this moment all over again, but she has to. Zaf is gone and then Harry is there and she kisses him, his taste a familiar one now. She climbs on the boat and she looks back to the shore but he is gone. She hears his voice though, crying her name, calling for her, and then the dream fades and she wakes.
The dream was a recurring one, one that she wished was anything but. In the early days, she would be sobbing as she awoke, terrified and disorientated and convinced that she could hear footsteps outside of her door. As it happened more, she learned to control it a little better and soon there was only a dull ache, a deep felt longing that made her curl up on her side and squeeze her eyes as tightly closed as she could.
Ruth always thought that the part in Jane Eyre, where Jane hears Mr Rochester calling for her across the moors, was rather melodramatic, but in the early hours of the morning when the dream lurked and she could not go back to sleep, she often found herself pondering that moment and wondering if Harry had been calling for her that night. He was not the sort to howl at the moon, to make sure that the world knew precisely how he had been wronged, but he might, in the safety of his own house, his own room, he might allow himself to bemoan her loss.
She was certainly bemoaning his, silently of course, in the privacy of her own heart. Bronte had a much less dramatic metaphor, of the cord that tied Jane and Mr Rochester's hearts together, so that one would always feel the loss of the other as a tug. Ruth understands that metaphor now. She is not so pathetic to compare herself to Jane Eyre and Harry is no Rochester, but Charlotte Bronte is a close friend of Ruth's and so, of late, the comparison stands. In a choice between Jane and Rochester and Cathy and Heathcliff, there's only one choice any half-sane woman would make. Harry is even less a Heathcliff than he is a Rochester and Ruth is as different from Cathy as it is possible to be. Ruth has never been as fond of Emily as she is of Charlotte. For Emily, the darkness seemed to be all-consuming, a world from which she could never escape. Ruth prefers the tremulous optimism of Charlotte's writing, the small but powerful idea that one need only look to find hope.
She found the hope in Cyprus, when she met George and Nico. She loves George, loves him very much. Her hope is that, one day, she might even fall in love with him.
He asks about the dream, when she awakes in the middle of the night, frozen in a brief moment of terror. She does not tell him. He deserves to keep his hope too. She cannot tell him who she was or what she did or that she is still desperately in love with Harry.
She cannot tell George that Harry is strong, that the world has tried to break him and it hasn't succeeded.
She cannot tell George that Harry can make decisions no one else would be able to make but she loves that he still feels the consequences of them.
She cannot tell George that Harry's heart, buried under layers of scars and bluster, is a gentle one; that he would never dream of hurting someone who didn't deserve it and that he would defend his friends until his last breath.
She cannot tell George about that look that Harry got when he looked at her, when those hazel eyes softened and she felt as though there was absolutely nowhere else in the world he would want to be, other than looking at her.
She cannot even tell George about Harry's flaws; his passionate temper and his occasional irritating conviction that he knows best and everyone else is wrong. His stubbornness and how he jumps to conclusions about people before he knows them and how he has a terrible past with women, a past that produced two children he barely knows.
George cannot know any of this.
Ruth knows it all.
She thinks Harry is beautiful, just the way he is. A hundred times better than Mr Rochester.
So when she wakes from the dream and George asks her what she saw, she tells him that she saw old friends, friends that she misses very much, that she has lost contact with and will never see again. He nods, understanding, and kisses her shoulder. Sometimes she wonders if he has worked it out, at least worked out that there was someone significant she left behind, but she never asks. To ask would be to take away his hope and that is not hers to take.
So she turns over and kisses him back, and allows him to wrap her in his arms and she drifts back to sleep safe in the knowledge that she, for now at least, does not have to be alone. For one treacherous moment, she pretends that she is resting in Harry's embrace, and then she boxes it up and goes back to George.
Ruth has long come to the conclusion that one must make one's own hope, if one is to have any chance of survival.