Varying Degrees of Clarity
Written for Yuletide '08. Based solely on the prompt: Ros Myers. 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.'
At first, they were flaky.
She used to play Scrabble with herself to take her mind off things. To drown out her mother screaming at her father, to drown out the crying and the door slamming and the cursing. But it was never quite enough, because she was alone. There was no one to beat, no one to defeat, getting that rush, that "winning" feeling. The overwhelming success of simply being better than someone else at something. And maybe it made her a bad person for being that way, but she was seven years old and her world was warped and nothing mattered other than focusing solely on what she was doing.
Because if she focused hard enough, everything would just disappear, and she would come out on top.
It was when she was fourteen she realised that it wasn't normal, her life. She realised, all of a sudden, that the way her dad was, that wasn't normally allowed. That all the pain and the secrecy and the darkness in her family weren't echoed in everyone else's, and that life didn't have to be this unfair.
It was then that she realised she didn't have to be passive, didn't have to be the victim, the observer, unable to do anything. She didn't have to bear her pain. She could do something, she could stand up and fight, and she could win.
The day she left home, the day she turned eighteen… well she couldn't say it was the happiest day of her life, but up 'til that point it was the most satisfying. She kissed her mother on the cheek, gave her a sorry shake of the head that seemed to say: I can't do this anymore and left without ever knowing what her father would have said had he been there.
And that feeling, that empty loneliness she experienced for the first time that day when realising she was not only alone in her head, but alone in the world too, that feeling didn't hurt as much as you might think. She thrived on it, and not too far into the future it would become the one thing she knew.
Things were sharpening, like the pixels of a blurred picture falling into focus.
She fell in love at university, for the first and only time. His name was Iuan, and he was dark haired and skinned and he rarely spoke. He voice was thick and accented and sometimes she thought she hardly knew a thing about him. They had a good relationship, but they would fight, and she would never back down. He would always be the one to come back, grovelling, begging for forgiveness from her, and she would bask in that feeling again – she was totally in control.
But she wasn't in control the day his car spun across the ice and into a ditch, flipping twice and leaving him with fatal damage to his frontal lobe.
That was the first time someone died.
Someone she knew.
Someone she cared about.
And she vowed she would never get that close to a human being again.
Of course, there were people that broke through the barriers over the years. She shed a silent tear when she stood at her mother's grave, and when her first partner in MI6 was shot on the job. But with each death it became easier, she felt less.
She knew what that meant: she was winning. She was fighting the monster she'd had born inside of her, the nameless monster that threatened to rise up and destroy her sanity every time she dared to feel an ounce of emotion.
So she stopped daring.
One day she stepped back and realised she belonged somewhere. Her heart thudded for a moment and she took a deep breath. Quite by accident she had found her way into a team that valued her, needed her, supported her. Adam had her back, Jo relied on her judgement, Harry trusted her implicitly.
Harry. Harry Pearce. Without even realising it, he'd given Ros Myers a chance to claw her way out of loneliness and ice and connect again, really feel. The team linked together, like a puzzle, but it was more complex than that. Everyone had a tie of some kind with everyone, and everyone knew things about the others that you just wouldn't know working in any office on any street in any place.
She promised herself that day that she would be the best officer Harry Pearce and Section D had ever had.
And all of a sudden, they meant something.
To begin with, she decided the most important thing was being cold. Calculated, driven… ice. She was a woman neck-deep in a man's world, and there was only one legitimate way she could see of dealing with that. She watched the women around her, Jo and Ruth, and saw only softness and weakness and failure within them.
That was what she loathed in Adam Carter. The weakness. The history that preyed on him. She so wanted to close her eyes and pretend that that man, that man that somehow transfixed her, was perfect.
But he wasn't, and that made everything harder.
She wasn't pretending she didn't enjoy it a little bit when she had to step in and take control, protect him, help him, save him.
It was like she'd won. A little slice of the bigger game.
And then they were drowning together…
She knew she wasn't invincible. She wasn't under any delusions like that. She just… she just didn't want this to be it. To die underwater, to die struggling, begging a God she didn't believe in for life, without even having a chance to make half the difference she wanted to make. And that wasn't her being deluded, either. She knew that anything she could do could only ever scratch the surface of the world she'd ended up in; it was a scratch better than nothing. A scratch she had to play for, a scratch she had to win.
But this was it, now. It was over, and suddenly she had no right to loathe Adam Carter any more. She stared at him and he cupped her face in his hands, bringing her closer to him, as the fighting stopped. She responded slowly, almost not recognising herself as she took his face in her fingers, feeling the afternoon shadow stubble through the icy water, feeling the muscles tense in his jaw. Her hair was wisping in front of her face, obscuring her vision every few seconds, but apart from that, there was nowhere to look but Adam's eyes. And that was when she knew. She had no right to loathe him for his weakness because his weakness made him stronger than her. The fact that he had faced his past, defied his fear; that made him more than she was.
Adam won that round, fair and square, and it seemed that at last she had an opponent, and a friend. Someone to play the little game she couldn't even remember when she had entered into with.
But it was fading… the world was darkening around the edges, and he was gone, she was drifting….
And arms bore her up, coaxed her to grasp that last strand of fight to reach the home stretch and soon she was rattling the grate with as much vigour as he was…
The air, when she finally reached it, burnt.
And Adam didn't let go of her until he hauled her out of the water, gasping and coughing himself.
And the colour started to return… and with it the realisation that she had lost a set…
But she wasn't losing when she stood on his doorstep the next evening and said nothing, just stepped into his arms and let herself forget for a while.
And suddenly they stood out in high resolution, clear as day.
Of course it wasn't going to be all sweetness and light. She could never have a perfect relationship with someone who had the capacity to beat her fair and square, it just wasn't possible. But for a few months it was easy to pretend they were on hiatus from the game, they were just fooling around on the sidelines. She was the queen of lying to herself, and he was the king of denial, so between them the reigned over a kingdom of lies and pretences. She would lay beside him at night, thinking that his only purpose was to keep her warm, when the rational side of her brain was telling her a blanket would do that and there was something else going on she couldn't quite put her finger on it.
"Adam?"
"Yes?" he whispered, his voice thick with sleep, sliding his arm under her bare shoulders and pulling her closer, "Ros?"
"What are we doing?"
He took a deep breath – she felt his chest rise and fall. "Sleeping." He whispered.
Had it not been dark, he would have seen the small smile touch her lips. "You know what I mean…" she whispered, turning her head so her face was on his chest, cheek flat against his bare skin.
"I don't know." He replied, raked his fingers through her newly cropped blonde hair and said nothing more.
When she was sure he was asleep, the slowing of his breathing and the halt of his fingers tracing her skin giving him away, she murmured: "I do."
Moments remain hazy, but now that's abnormal, interspersed moments of pain and wrong in a suddenly right world.
She hated Ana Bakshi from the start. Call it jealousy, call it pettiness, it didn't make any odds to her. It wasn't even about her and Adam, not really. Not in the way people would have thought. No.
It was the power this woman held over him, the power she could never hope to control, a power that meant Adam was playing his own game now, with Ana, and it was dangerous.
But not as dangerous as she could be, as Ana found out.
That night is a blur. A blind haze, a rage coursing through her veins, even now, when she thinks about it.
Because had Adam died that night, instead of that other day not so long after, it would have not been for the lives of tens, if not hundreds of people. It wouldn't have been in the line of duty, it would have been in shame, in confusion, without dignity. And that, more than anything else, enraged her. So she hadn't been in control of her actions, not as she fought the other woman, as she let everything loose, forgot everything she'd ever learnt, as she tore at her hair and just wanted to make her feel an ounce of the pain she was feeling…
That was a revelation. The pain she was feeling because Adam Carter had come this close to dying. That didn't bode well.
But she pulled him out from under the water, if nothing else, because he couldn't drown, not after everything. Drowning was not the way either of them was going to go. She thumped and pushed and fought the breath out of him again, because if he didn't she might have to face some terrible truths.
She was lying to herself. It wasn't Ana that had made her quite so angry, in retrospect. It was Adam, for letting himself be put in that position, for letting that weakness get the better of him, for almost dropping out of the entire tournament. She felt a familiar twinge of that old loathing again as she watched him laid on the floor, struggling to breath, helpless as a baby. Because the one thing – the one thing she could not bear, was failure.
"If one of them was thanks, I meant it." He'd said afterwards, when referring to what he'd said the night before, clearly not remembering hardly any of it. She'd just shaken her head, because the night before had resulted in her lying awake all night.
He'd looked her in the eye and asked her why she'd done it, and she couldn't seem to lie.
He'd pushed her away when she'd tried to calm him down, roughly, and with a force he'd never used with her before. And she'd had to swallow some thoughts she'd rather had never come into being.
He'd looked her in the eyes and told her he hated her.
One of them wasn't thanks, he'd still been half-high and there was a hint of the old, weakened, crumbling Adam under it all.
But she wouldn't stoop so low as to fight with him. It was unconducive to the working environment and frankly, she gained nothing from it.
They were neck and neck.
We were back to the Ice Queen again, and it almost hurt to look.
That confrontation was a full out match between them. In the safe house, the moment after Ana Bakshi left forever.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he stared ahead, unable to look at her. She regretted nothing. She would fight him, God help her, she would defy him, and she would win.
"We didn't think we could trust you." Ros: 1, Adam: 0.
"You? Trust me?" Come on, you can do better than that, she thought. And suddenly she realised there was nothing she wanted more than for him to shout at her, fight with her, give as good as he could get, but she wasn't sure that was happening, not now…
"You were in love with her, you were-"
"I was not in love with her!" he raised himself out of the chair.
That was more like it, more confrontational. She needed to win this one.
"Don't bullshit me."
"She killed someone because of me, I was responsible."
"And didn't you take those responsibilities seriously?" Ros: 2, Adam: 0. She could practically hear the acid dripping from her tongue, and hated herself for a brief moment, hated him for making her like this, leaning against the wall, almost smiling, watching the fire rise behind his eyes.
And it pained her that the only way she could make him fight was to fight him.
"Whose idea was it to send her away?"
It was too easy just to lie to him. Too easy to lie to everyone. "I have no idea. Harry arranged it with the Canadians-"
"Oh come on Ros, I know you too well. You arranged the whole thing – why?"
A dawning realisation, in that moment. Those words, I know you too well. When had that happened? That wasn't supposed to have happened. The fear that spread through her veins, probably even reaching her eyes as she realised she couldn't lie to him anymore, not easily. Ros: 2, Adam: 1.
Yalta. She still held that in the vault inside her, one he would never open.
"Ok…" breathe, Ros, "I saw an opportunity to get Bakshi on side, and deal with a residual problem…"
"Is that was she was, a residual problem?"
"Yes, that's exactly what she was." Ros: 3, Adam: 1.
She saw the detestation in his eyes, and almost laughed a little, bitterly, ironically.
"Gosh… she really had you wrapped around her little finger, didn't she, with her big beautiful brown eyes like a bloody deer…"
"When are you going to get it into your skull that I was not in love with her, I didn't leave you for her?"
That did it, really did it. She had not bee left; Ros Myers did not fall second to some asset with a wedding ring on her finger and false notions of espionage in her head. "You didn't leave me at all; this is not about us…"
She hardly had time to think before she said it, but the word us was definite, defining. And that… that terrified her.
"Isn't it?" Ros: 3, Adam: 2, just for making her heart do something strange in her chest.
She didn't feel like this. Not now, not ever again.
"Look, what happened between you and I was a stupid mistake…"
She should have remembered he could tell when she was lying, because she might as well have just thrown in her hand. She sounded pathetic, clichéd, alone…
"Then why every time I spoke to you about her did it feel like I was betraying you?"
It felt like I was being betrayed, she thought, but instead said: "I did not encourage that!" because she was too far in to break a lifetime habit of lies.
"Yeah? Look closer, you're a spy, you can deceive yourself just like you deceive everyone else…"
Suddenly, his eyes were boring into her. Suddenly, she felt like she could conceal nothing. Suddenly, all she wanted was to make him feel the same thumping of hearts, the same racing of pulse, the same self-loathing she was feeling right then.
"Yeah? And who are you deceiving?"
He stared at her for a moment and she knew she had won that little battle. Adam was speechless, but somehow so was she, and there was a look in his eyes that both terrified and enthralled her…
"Ros…" he breathed her name and it had never sounded quite like that before. He took a small step towards her, but she was paralysed for a moment, unable to even breathe, let alone make any connection and create a coherent thought, "Ana was work, it's not safe. If we step over the line, there's nothing to protect us…"
That, she understood.
"I know."
She watched him struggle to voice anything.
"We know too much about each other, it's not safe…"
She blinked, "I know."
She could hardly hear herself, and she could hardly recognise this person, standing in front of Adam Carter, stripped of all the loathing and replaced with a feeling she would not, could not name.
Everything he said was true - this was never and would never be a good idea. But there was something about Adam Carter that apparently dissolved any rational thought. She could feel her eyes stinging a little with the emotion in the room, and for that she resented herself a little. She watched his mouth curve into a smile, and then their lips met gently...
For a moment it was a case of just taking in what was happening. All that, over the past weeks, trying to swallow and pretend that her jealousy wasn't there, and she was the one Adam wanted. She was the one he was fighting to stay away from. A deep breath and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself tighter to him. There was no one else quite like him in her world. The pair of them staggered backwards, hitting the wall suddenly, her head snapping back against it, breaking their kiss.
She winced a little and he mirrored it, cupping her cheek with his palm. "You sure?"
"Sure." she breathed, pushing his face into hers again, grinning stupidly.
They staggered up the stairs, hardly making it to the bedroom. This – she'd never had this, felt this hungry for someone all at once…
She could feel him popping the buttons on her shirt, sliding it down over her shoulders, pressing his face to her neck in a way that had her screaming out for him…
For a short while, it wasn't a case of winning or losing.
What followed hurts to recall, but somehow, it's sharp and clear, as if it were yesterday.
First, everything was white. In a room, somewhere, laid beside him.
giggling. That was the first warning sign that normalcy, and sanity, were out of the window. But his lips on hers, and his legs around hers, were so comforting, so… alive. She felt invigorated, trusted, maybe even a little loved. Yalta could disappear, wherever Zaf was could disappear, the past could disappear… everything was so much simpler that morning.
Until Magritte phoned.
Things escalated at a rate Ros could hardly follow. Sitting in that public bathroom, head in her hands, shaking uncontrollably… she knew then, that it was all over. All of it. Everything she'd ever loved, worked for, achieved. She'd lost it all, the moment she lost the game.
She could still enrage both of them, and that was the last thing she hung onto. She still affected them. Which meant that to Harry Pearce and Adam Carter, she still meant something. Which she held onto.
Nothing, no bullet, no knife, no bomb, she knew in an instant nothing could ever hurt her, harm her, as much as that needle Adam held could. Pressed against her neck, no more pain that the prick of a pin, yet she thought she might collapse under the agony. She knew there was no point making excuses. She'd loathed Adam's weaknesses, on more than one occasion resented him for them. But she knew one thing. Adam would never, ever, be bought out. He didn't have a price, and not one as shamefully low as hers. He was loyal, faithful, strong.
And suddenly she could see how easily she had become the loser.
Sometimes we have to give each other up, sometimes we just have to.
She didn't believe it when she was saying it, so there was no reason to believe it now. She had a million and one other choices, but she made the wrong ones. She betrayed the people she worked with, the people that had become some sort of surrogate dysfunctional family when her own finally crumbled.
She'd never felt as alone however, as when Adam said, right in her ear, through gritted teeth: "I can't believe I actually trusted you."
When the needle was finally gone, she could hardly breathe. She hated herself, in that moment, for being quite so vulnerable, and wondered when it had happened. But in that moment, she had to fix all her extensive mistakes.
Of course I trust you.
The honesty in his voice, the way he stared her right in the eye, that burnt her. She could hardly breathe, laid there in the cornfield, unable to think straight as she watched him grasp for words, when she told him the only way she could redeem herself – throw herself right back into the firing line.
"I can't let that happen, I can't let you go…"
She had to swallow then, because she knew what he was doing. Clinging to her like she was Fiona, like she was Jenny, like she was Ana. But she wasn't, and never would be. She wasn't that woman, the woman Adam Carter could keep. And no matter how much her stomach seemed to tie itself in knots as she said it, she couldn't lie anymore: "Me and you, it's broken; it has been since day one…"
He was pleading, and that hurt. "We could try…"
She wore him down though, and she saw the resignation in his eyes at that last moment, as he realised she had never been and never would be the person he ought to love. She thought that was it, but a spark of something flew and her leant over to put his lips on hers one final time, tugging at her bottom lips gently with his teeth, closing his eyes for a millisecond, saying goodbye.
And then he was gone.
"You are my outstanding officer!"
She was going to die. She was going to die, and it was ok, it was ok…
And all of a sudden it wasn't ok anymore, she had books to read and she hated her kitchen, and she wanted to talk to Adam, to talk more to Harry, to apologise to the whole of the team, to find that place in the world Juliet talked about so carelessly, but it was over, and she was screaming, and even in that last losing moment she resented her own weakness, it wasn't how it should have been and this was worse than drowning because she was totally alone…
Then nothing. Not blackness, not even oblivion, nothing.
A face, a welcome face, Adam's face.
For a moment there was no hope of coherent thought and she could only cling, and cry, and he was murmuring things to her and his face was pressed against hers and her heart was thumping fast, moderately, back to it's usually dull slow thud…
Everything was over. For real this time. She hadn't even lost. She was being forced to drop out of the game, to quit. And that was worse than to lose.
Nothing seemed to fall into place. When Adam was talking about not having time she didn't care, she just held his hand, wanted him with her… and when he mentioned coming with her, she realised she wanted nothing more. She was falling apart, this wasn't Ros Myers, everything was crumbling.
And then, with sudden clarity, she saw it all. She was Harry's outstanding officer, no one, no amount of Bob Hogans and Juliet Shaws could take that from her. She swallowed, and let go of Adam Carter… forever.
A haze of foreign tongues, bizarre comm. conversations and missions she had no idea of the goal.
The moment she touched down on British soil was the moment her heart started thudding with the thought of it, again. She could get herself back into that sordid game she'd been playing six months ago. She was like an addict, after months of being clean ready to throw herself straight back in and mainline.
Eyes meeting across a road, short, spoken words.
There was never enough time. His words, not hers, but they proved to be so true. Because when Lucas North turned to her and spoke those words, "Adam Carter is dead," she realised that she couldn't just skip happily back into the game. She had to take someone's place. Someone else had to lose.
Nausea rose in her throat and she could hardly speak, and she vowed on the spot that revenge would be hers.
Like coming round from an anaesthetic, everything took a long time to focus.
Give me Section D.
It was the only thing that made sense now. The only thing that would stop her from thinking about Adam, and about why her heart literally felt like it was breaking in two. She needed control, control of the team. She needed to fight for them, make sure nothing happened to any of them. Now she was back on the playing board, in Adam's place, she had to win the game. It was the only way.
She thought she was holding it together ok. But throwing things around the room, that hadn't been holding it together. But she was even beyond the stage where she detested her weakness. The pain, the loss, the emptiness, the loneliness, they were all so raw. She could hardly breathe every time she thought about it, but when she didn't think about it, it burnt.
Ros will assume the position of Section Chief.
Back in the game. Bring on the Ice Queen.
Denial, she realised, was easier back then.
Lucas North proved a valuable asset to the team, colder and more calculating than Adam had ever been, yet compassionate and good at making moral decisions. She saw him with the eye of a spymaster, nothing else, though whispers started. At that time, the thought of being anything more than colleagues with Lucas North almost made her sick. It wasn't a thought she was even considering entertaining.
At night, when there was no one around, Adam was there.
Meynell – that was the hardest case of her career. And she'd done honeypots before, plenty of them; it was just an issue of compartmentalising. She could fight off the nausea and the self-loathing long enough to get the job done, and that was all that mattered. But this time was different. She hadn't exactly had leisure time in Russia; he was the first man since Adam.
And he physically disgusted her, with his ideals and his lack of compassion, and his horrible hands and mouth and….
She hated herself afterwards, when she looked in the mirror, but she knew she had to clean up her act. She was section chief, and she was playing the game. And this time round she was taking no prisoners. This time round she was playing to win.
Connie James got her just end. When Ben Kaplan died, she vowed someone would pay.
Members of her team couldn't die on her watch. For the first time in weeks, she felt tears pricking at her eyes.
People didn't get to die on her orders.
And Ben. Ben who'd stumbled upon this world, this world that killed him.
It was killing her too, just in a different way. Sucking every ounce of humanity out of her soul until one day she just wouldn't be anymore.
That didn't matter, because with every death like this, it hurt to be.
So she leant her head against the wall, and let herself have a moment of weakness.
That, aside from everything, showed how much she'd grown.
The haze cleared, to make way for normality again.
She liked working alongside Lucas. They were one and the same, the two of them. Cold, clever, ruthless, manipulating. Between them they held together a team that got Harry Pearce back without so much as a scratch, before he even touched down on Russian soil. They held together a team that got through everything, that uncovered every sleeper agent in the Service, in the British government. They held together when team members were killed in action, when team members resigned because their mental health just wouldn't hold out any longer.
He came round to console her the night after Malcolm was killed, and one thing led to another… it was the start of something.
It would never be anything like her and Adam. She'd put walls up the day he died that she would never let down. But Lucas was a release from work at least, a way to forget, even only for a few hours.
And she liked Lucas, which she couldn't say about many people. And for a while, things were ok.
But, like they always did, he asked for too much from her. He wanted more from her than she would ever give. So she ended things on a friendly note, and eighteen months later stood in the pews at his wedding.
And before she knew it, the finish line was in sight. Crystal clear.
She was appointed Head of the Counter Terrorism Department of MI5 the day Harry Pearce retired, and, at the age of 46, taking up residence in that office was the beginning of the home strait. She was almost there, almost the winner, and it was the only thing she thought of any more. Winning consumed her; it was the single most important thing in her whole life. She became one of the best Heads of Section D the Service had ever seen, cracking open Al-Quaeda operations, breaking the Israeli-Palestinian terrorist cycle in London, and had the FSB mole systems completely undone. She watched as Harry Pearce blended into the woodwork, and she smiled a little when she received a Christmas card signed: best wishes, Harry and Ruth.
She recruited like crazy, expanding the team with only the best, devoting everything she had to her country, to her Section, to her officers. And when she found herself a perfect new junior case officer in Wes Carter, she thought nothing of it. It didn't even cross her mind that Adam wouldn't have wanted Wes to die the way he and Fiona did. She trained him up to be her Section Chief before he was thirty.
She took out Yalta, and took the pleasure of shooting Juliet Shaw herself. That was the week before Lucas North was killed, leaving behind him a son and a daughter, and a sobbing widow.
For some reason, and not because of her past closeness to Lucas, that was the final straw. For the first time in her career, Ros Myers went MIA for a day, whilst she gathered her head and thought things over.
Everyone in her life she cared about was gone.
She was alone.
Maybe winning wasn't such a good thing anymore, if the only way she could win was to be the only one left in the game.
She'd spent the last years being cold, treating life as if it didn't matter. She told herself her past experiences made her that way, but the truth was she never drew on her past experience. Not now, not ever. She shut them out, especially the first few years of her time in Section D. And she was so tired these days, tired of hiding everything away, so maybe, just maybe, if she tried to remember…from the very beginning…
It all came flooding back then, memories, in varying degrees of clarity.
At first, they were flaky…
When her phone rang, it startled her. She'd been really remembering, like she hadn't in years.
"Myers."
"Ros, it's Wes."
"What is it?"
"We have a situation. An asset has confirmed that the Iranians are launching an attack on London this afternoon."
"I'll be in in ten minutes."
Remembering was a release, maybe. But she had to put it on hold for now. London, Britain, maybe the world – they all needed her help.
She thought they'd all relied on her to win – but maybe; just maybe, it was time to accept a draw.
Bring on Yuletide '09!
xx