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In the days after it's all over, Adam Carter is the hero. The man from Six with the reputation that precedes him, and it's a reputation impressive enough to have him looked upon with fear as well as respect. He won them all over in a day with careful calculation – flirting, quiet asides, casual practicality. Easy smiles and hard eyes. If it had turned out a more beneficial outcome for the service, he would have proved Tom guilty instead and still slept at night.
In Tom they're looking for scars. It's inconceivable that anyone could survive what he did without scars, and so they imagine them in the way he moves, speaks, cradles the coffee cup in his hands. Ask how he is. Smile sympathetically.
He hasn't shown a single crack and he knows it. But to force them to admit that would mean he had come through hell unscathed, like some sort of alien meteor, and they would be frightened of him, and repulsed, and jealous maybe. Colder and harder and stronger than Adam. Oh yes, he knows it, and he suspects, in the occasional blank stare, that Adam knows it too.
Adam has demons. Tom sees them on the night after Carmen Joyce, when Adam gets chips with the beers and suddenly Tom's out the back of the pub chucking his guts up. The triggered memory is usually satisfied with a brief acknowledgement, a moment's silence on the grave of a friend, but tonight, after a week of being brutal to his mind and body, it's all backfired and his subconscious has revolted by taking him a lot further than is comfortable down that particular memory lane. And then Zoe and Danny are crowding, comforting; concern enough to make him want to lash out like a caged animal. The realisation hits him like a kick in the guts that they still don't know what happened on that op. They'd asked him, of course, tentatively, already knowing the vague truth by his dismissal. But there'd been files and reports and Christ if it isn't their job to find stuff out behind each other's backs.
They used to allow each other moments of weakness. Moments the others would look away. This is just one of those moments and it has nothing to do with what has happened and he is sick with horror at the way they are looking at him. It's nothing, he wants to shout. It isn't this. It's exhaustion, it's memory, it's just a moment –
But the man from Six understands. Their eyes meet for a second and there are demons in both of them. Demons which Tom has a respectful relationship with – even this current exception, he knows, is part of the deal; you fuck with us and we'll fuck with you, but just a warning, just a reminder, and soon he'll have things back under control and it'll all go back to truce. Tom sees in his eyes that Adam has no truce with his demons. He has them suppressed so deep that it only flickers across his face because he wants Tom to see.
And why does he want him to see? It isn't solidarity, it isn't empathy or comfort or pity. There's aggression in his stance which they both know is part of the Hero From Across The River front that he's playing. Tom is bewildered that only he sees through it. And in glimpsing those demons he wants to shout out again, wants to cry a warning.
But who would listen to him? Who would believe him? They see only what they want to see and to them, Adam is the hero and Tom is broken. It would ruin them all to think otherwise.
He drops his head and stares at the bile stringing from his hands.
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