Author's Note: Another attempt at dealing with the finale! If you've read "The Little Things", bits of this will sound familiar - that was written in the middle of writing this one, and in some ways could be considered "missing scenes" from this. But they stand independently as well.
Many thanks to J and C for their feedback, even though they don't watch Spooks. And many, many thanks to smtfhw for the Britpick!
The title comes from the C.S. Lewis book of the same name, which I haven't read but seemed appropriate. :) All the italicized quotes are from Spooks itself.
A final, "technical", note: I've used the term "terminal leave" to refer to that period of time when a person has left their job permanently but is still receiving pay - basically using up all their accumulated vacation time. I know this is true of the American military, and a quick Google search has indicated the British military does this as well. So I took the leap and stretched it to include British civil servants.
All that said, enjoy!
"I just don't want to feel like I'm covered in blood anymore."
He has no idea how he got home.
He woke up in his bed, shoes off but otherwise fully clothed. He supposes someone – Erin or Calum or Dimitri – drove him, but the last thing he remembers is kneeling in the wet grass, the quiet crash of waves going suddenly silent as his world ended, his right hand growing cool and sticky. He glances at it now and shudders. He can still see the red stain of blood. Her blood.
Breathing hard, he launches himself toward the washroom, fumbling with the taps. He scrubs and scrubs but the water runs as clear as ever. Swearing, he scours harder, until red droplets begin swirling in the sink and he realises they are his own. He vomits, then, and wishes the pain was as easily purged from his body as the contents of his stomach.
He goes back to bed, still fully clothed, and sleeps again.
"Oh, shut up, you pompous old fool! He wasn't just some geek who did crossword puzzles; he was my bloody best friend!"
He runs through them in his mind again, a litany of the dead, like a rosary. Rubbing them between the fingers of his mind over and over, as if the ritual will smooth the edges of the pain.
Helen. Danny. Fiona. Colin. Zaf. Ben. Connie. Adam. Jo. Ros. Lucas. Tariq…
He always stops at Tariq.
Each one accompanied by some combination of sadness, guilt, anger, and bitterness. With some pride mixed in, for Danny and Adam and Ros, and a healthy dose of pity for Lucas.
This is different.
The anger is familiar. Anger at Sasha, of course, at Ilya Gavrik, at Elena, at Dimitri and Erin and Calum, at the cursed sloth of air ambulances, at himself. But it's as if he's only angry out of habit. It's not the cold, burning anger that followed Helen and Adam, that led to the deaths of Kachimov and Blake. He can't hate Sasha, much as he would like to. And he doesn't truly blame his team. The anger is there, but it is dull, background.
What is odd, what is new, is the lack of guilt. He was rather expecting to be crushed by the weight of it, but he finds that there is none, or very little. Instead there is regret, mourning for the life that could have been. There is no 'what if' – what if one or both of them had been braver, sooner – just deep, debilitating sadness for 'what isn't'.
"What do you think a psychologist will say about that?"
"No idea, but I have a feeling it might be in Latin."
He sees her everywhere.
The flash of a black skirt disappearing around a corner. A pair of startlingly blue eyes meeting his for a split second on the street. Dark hair brushing the shoulders of a woman on the bus.
He's started taking the bus. It's stupid, he knows, desperate, and a little pathological, but he can't help himself.
It's the same reason he went to Suffolk to see the house, the same reason he had to leave when it was so obviously, achingly empty.
It's part of the reason he spends so much time in the basement of Thames House, even though he is on terminal leave. He stares at her name for hours, willing her to appear.
Sometimes she does.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm waking at five a.m., seeing her."
"That'll go on for a while."
Some days he thinks he can remember what it's like to be a normal person, a whole person. Some days he thinks he'd be able to 'move on', whatever that means, if it weren't for the dreams.
She is there, every night. Most often, he dreams of her lying on the grassy hillside by the coast. He tries a different way to save her each time, but it never works. There are no tears, though. Even in his dreams.
Sometimes, though, the dreams are more pleasant – if anything that makes his chest ache so can be called pleasant. Walking into the briefing room for the first time, dropping files everywhere. Meeting his eyes across the Grid, late at night. Brushing his hand as she passes him a USB on a bus. White burgundy. A door with peeling green paint, and his office.
He doesn't want to 'move on' if it means losing those dreams.
"I guess you were just unlucky, because somehow you've lost your humanity and now have no kindness or pity left in you. But I still have those things."
He doesn't want to go back to work.
It's not because her desk will be empty (again), or because his team will look at him with pity and walk on eggshells around him. It's not because everything will be different and wrong.
It's because it won't. Everything will be normal, and he cannot stand that idea. Something beautiful, something irreplaceable had gone out of the world. How could it possibly carry on as if nothing had happened? How could he just continue doing the job he had done for the past eighteen years?
But it becomes increasingly apparent that, despite his wishes, his body is going to carry on living. Old habits die hard. And as much as he can't stand the idea of going back to normal, it is the only thing he can think of that might keep the memories and dreams alive.
He calls the Home Secretary.
"Dad doesn't know anything about dogs. He's more of a cat man."
He has always been a dog person, in more ways than one.
He is a simple man with simple desires. He can't stand cats, the way the wretched things blow hot and cold and sell their loyalty to the highest bidder.
Which is why – to his eternal shame – he broke his promise to her, so many years ago, and asked Malcolm to take them in. He told himself it was because of Scarlet, though in truth the poor creature could have used the company. But they would have been an ever-present reminder of her, of what he had lost.
She didn't ask about them when she came back. He didn't know if she had forgotten her request, or was just too angry with him to bring it up. He doesn't know if Malcolm told her, if she took them back from him, if they were even still alive. Scarlet had died in the interim, after all. That's what animals do; they get old and they die. Not like people. People don't get the chance to get old.
He has never considered getting another dog.
"These are the choices I didn't want to have to make anymore."
"These are the choices we need you to make."
He still goes down to the basement.
He still runs through the litany in his head.
He still dreams.
He still sees her everywhere.
He still goes to work every day.
He still picks up the phone.
He still stands on the wall.
"We should be with our loved ones. Even if we've only got a cat."
He finds it on his doorstep.
It's a bank holiday and he is just headed out to the newsagent's to get the paper. Opening the door, he has one of those moments: a dark skirt flicking out of sight, a lingering familiar scent in the air. It almost doesn't faze him anymore, he's so used to it. It does distract him long enough not to notice the bundle of fur on the mat until he's almost trodden on it.
It yowls loudly and stares at him reproachfully but, strangely, doesn't run away. He stares back at the tiny kitten, its dark fur outlining bright blue eyes. Almost before he realises, he is stepping aside and opening the door wider.
"So you're rattling around this place all alone."
"Well, not for long."
It is a month after adopting Phoebe that it happens.
He has just come home from work, at a surprisingly decent and sunlit hour. As he shrugs off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves, his watch catches the light streaming in from a window.
Phoebe goes mad, leaping at the elusive reflection on the wall. It takes him a moment to realise what she's doing, but when he does, he rotates his wrist to direct the small patch of light. The cat twists and turns in midair, frustrated.
He chuckles, and it startles him.
And then laughter is pouring out of his mouth, seizing his body so that he slides down the wall to sit on the floor. Still he laughs, as if his body has been storing all the unused laughter from the last months. (Has it only been months?)
He laughs until tears stream from his eyes, and then the laughter transitions seamlessly to wracking sobs.
Phoebe creeps into his lap, surprisingly unperturbed by his heaving chest. He strokes her, comforted by the rhythm and the softness of her fur, and he weeps until there are no more tears.
"Can't go on. Must go on."