A/N: Some of you know that I have had this story sitting, completed, for almost three years. After some recent tweaking, here it finally is. Originally written when Post Finem was on hiatus after the end of s10 there may be the occasional superficial similarity to aspects of that story. My thanks to Batteredpen for allowing me to use her interpretation of events immediately post-Estuary and bend it to suit.

1. Late May 2012.

It was always the same. Every time he visited, the walk through the grounds felt unreal until he rounded the final corner and was confronted, yet again, with that irrefutable, terrible truth. She was dead. And, as always, it hurt. God, Christ, it hurt. This day was no different. It had been months since he had last visited and the grief that day had been so overwhelming it seen him end up on a wooden seat high above the sea in the fading dusk contemplating the futility of it all, including why he persisted in visiting when he knew there was nothing there of her. The physical remains, yes, but they were out of sight, defined only by the polished sombreness of the Larvikite he had chosen to commemorate her existence. There was, however, no hint of the essence of the person that she had been, in all her complexity. That was gone, consigned to history, a fading memory and he didn't think he could stand it. There were so many of those shadows in his mind, dating back almost forty years to his mother, that ethereally beautiful blonde woman who had tried so hard to steer him back on to the straight and narrow during his turbulent teens and first year at university, only to die without warning while he was still acting the young fool, and now Ruth had joined them, right when the future should have been so different. So very, very many, gone far too soon.

As he approached the foot of the grave he allowed it all to wash over him yet again, recognising that the intensity was at least as much due to the date as it was to the reality. He really shouldn't be surprised that it was hurting every bit as much today as it had on that terrible day exactly twelve months ago, to the minute, when his personal Harpy had come home to roost from events back in what felt like the mists of pre-history. Events that had started with one lie and continued with another, a chimaera cobbled together with manipulative skill by a psychopathic adversary who had proven to be more deadly than even he had ever been. God knows he had been no angel which must have made Elena Platonovna the hand-maid of Satan. He had once tried to explain that to the woman in front of him now, that he was drenched in the blood of the innocent as well as the guilty and that he was irretrievably damaged as a result, better off out and away before he could hurt anyone else but she wouldn't have it and so, against all his better instincts, for and because of her, he had stayed. Then, apparently inevitably, she had pointlessly paid the ultimate price for his stupidity and her own wilfulness. Even worse, she had paid after all they had managed to achieve were a few precious, happy and oh so fleeting moments, when a tendril of a possible future, together, had first lifted its fragile head only to be immediately and permanently crushed. And that he knew he couldn't stand.

His vision blurred and his throat constricted as he slowly, carefully, sat on the edge of the elegant, understated stone monument that bore her name, suddenly consumed by the grief, almost as raw and bleeding as it had originally been for all that he now recognised that it was more for the loss of her future, what she might have become, as it was for the loss of his, with her. The surprise at its force on this day was mostly because lately he had thought the darkest depths of despair were behind him, that he was through all the traditional stages and into the last and hardest one, that of acceptance, for all that, now and then out of the blue, something (usually small: a hint of perfume, a cat who looked like Fidget sitting on a window sill, once the appearance in a late night TV show that he wasn't even watching of a young actor who bore more than a passing resemblance to Sasha Gavrik) would send him back into the slough of despond where it was uniformly dark, cold and featureless. Today the trigger may well have been an old folk song on the radio just as he was arriving here in the town where she was buried: it was the sound of the hammered dulcimer that had first got his attention, before the words had grabbed him and twisted his heart:

...There is a ship and it sails the seas and it's loaded deep, as deep could be

But not so deep as the love I'm in and I know not how, if I sink or swim.

The water is wide, I cannot cross over. Neither have I the wings to fly.

Give me a boat that can carry two and both shall row, my love and I...

Neither sinking nor swimming, instead he had been adrift for the last year, carried hither and yon by the tides of grief and anger that had followed the loss of so many – Lucas, old Max, Tariq, Jim, Ruth, even Sasha, in a way – in such a short space of time. The water between him and them was indeed uncrossable by all means but one and that was a boat he was not willing to catch before nature or the Fates decided it was his time. He had considered it, in the darkest hours of those first days but, as he had on the previous occasion that he had contemplated the option, after the terrible destruction of the little family of Archie, Amanda and little Lucy, lost at least partially as a result of Graham's obstinacy, he had dismissed it as neither appropriate nor of any use, to anybody.

He had generally been able to hold himself together at work through a combination of decades of practice and because he could feel her presence there and it was somehow comforting – he could almost pretend that she would come sweeping in at any time, without warning, as she had always done – but perhaps he was kidding himself about which stage of grief he was really at. After all, the blinds of his office were still permanently drawn to block the view of her desk and the fact that she no longer occupied it. That wasn't acceptance.

Outside of work it was harder, irrespective of whether he was here at her side or miles away, slogging through the midnight dark as he attempted to walk out his demons. Harder to remember, harder to accept, harder to even think about. He had sought – well, been sent to, after a couple of minor but very uncharacteristic melt-downs in the office – some assistance on coping with the grief; occasionally the strategies worked but more often they didn't. The past was almost overwhelming and he couldn't stand it. Sitting there, on the edge of her monument, beautiful but as cold as she herself now was, staring at and yet through the chiselled lines of her name while his fingertip absently stroked one of the large, luminous feldspars in the highly polished black surface, he deliberately let his mind wander back over the previous year as some sort of warped challenge to the never-ending anguish...

Much though he wished otherwise, the first half-hour of the rest of his life was one that he could, and would always, remember with perfect clarity and a searing pain that was almost too much to take. The blood – too much blood – with its metallic tang, everywhere he looked; the catching breath as lungs were compressed inside a rapidly filling chest cavity; then a few final, resigned words as the creeping cold completed its journey leaving the beautiful eyes dimmed and the musical voice stilled forever. There had been no immediate denial or desperate bargaining – he was too pragmatic, too experienced in death for that – but the finality had ripped through him and, this time, the grief would be neither constrained nor consoled. There was a period – whether seconds or minutes he did not know – when the world froze in his shock and disbelief and he thought his own heart might stop, followed by tears and a pain as great as any other he had known, along with devastating helplessness as he had farewelled her and their future with a gentle kiss, the only gesture that seemed appropriate. Calum had said something and the trio had retreated to give him space and time, an offer he had used to gather Ruth into his arms, her body already cooling...so fast, the end is so fast...

When he had returned to the present, after another immeasurable time, he had become aware that the others were still there, quietly guarding him but equally quietly, furiously, discussing what was to be done with the mess inside the bunker.

"Erin, we've got about eight minutes before the helicopter gets here. We're going to have to do something with Elena Gavrik," Calum said as Dimitri returned from checking on Sasha who was quiet now, fiercely clutching the wound on his leg and retreating to the place in is mind where he would stay for a very, very long time. The woman glanced at him in surprise.

"No, we don't, not after what she did. Ilya only did what we all wanted to and put her out of her misery and he's got enough money to get a good barrister to get him off the hook—"

"Calum's right," Dimitri interrupted, earning a disapproving look. "We can't let this get out or it will destroy everything. We can call this—" he gestured to the pair in front of them, Harry cradling Ruth and apparently oblivious "—for what it is – Sasha having a nervous breakdown after the truth came out about Elena and out seeking a vengeance that went wrong – but we have to cover up Ilya's actions."

He had a point, she supposed, so she answered begrudgingly, grey-blue eyes never leaving the couple,

"What did you have in mind?"

The two men glanced at each other, knowing that there was really only one option and remembering all too well the last occasion they had acted together to do the same thing for the same reason.

"We're going to have to do what we did to John Grogan. Make it look like a suicide."

Dimitri's words sent a chill down the woman's spine as a primal fear of interfering with the dead flooded from her amygdala and coupled with her distaste for bending the rules, a distaste she was having to grapple with and subsume more and more every day in this job.

"I don't know, Dimitri—"

The words had filtered, slightly muffled, through the dome of silence and he had clung to them as some form of sanity, a liferaft in a whirlpool of madness, something to focus on so he would not have to focus on the other, just for a moment. His mind clutching at the perverted stability offered by regnum defende, he remembered lifting his eyes to them and grinding out his response.

"Do it." The trio had turned to see him gazing at them with eyes of onyx from a face ravaged by grief, guilt and despair. "They're right. If news of this leaks then the Partnership will be destroyed, Ruth and the others will have died for nothing and she will have won." There was no doubt to whom that pronoun, delivered with deadly venom, belonged. They remained, speechless for a moment and he could see in their eyes that they couldn't quite believe he was both listening and still giving orders under the current circumstances – no doubt it would add to the entirely erroneous belief that his veins flowed with ice water – but he didn't expect them to be able to see the truth, that he was screaming inside, howling like a banshee at a pitch far above that of human hearing, as his soul ripped and he tried to cling to normality, or their version of it, with the utter desperation of a man trying desperately to fight the enormous gravitational pull of his universe collapsing into a black hole. With no immediate response he had finally ordered, "Go. You don't have much time," before returning his attention to the dead woman, tenderly brushing a lock of dark hair from her face with his bloodied right hand. Then there had been nothing, just a return to that silent stillness, until the thumping of the air ambulance rotors and the wind whipped up by their down-draft bought reality crashing back into his world.

Wiping his hands over his face he looked up, focussing on the steeple of the ancient church at the far end of the graveyard while he returned to the present and considered why his memory was almost non-existent for the couple of days afterwards. Maybe because none of it really mattered, compared to the moment of loss; maybe because everything had just stopped registering, his mind unable to record any more. He really didn't know, or even care much. About all he could remember was that Erin and the immediate team had seemed to be there all the time, one way or another, at least at first...

She had taken him home many hours later when he was finally ready to leave Ruth and refused to leave him alone until she had extracted Malcolm's name from him as about the only other person he might want to see at this time. Finally persuading him to go and remove the blood from his hands and body, she had called the other man and briefly explained, registering the distress in his voice as he confirmed he would be over as soon as he could get there. When Harry had returned, quietly, he had found Erin curled up in tears in the sitting room and realising she was hurting as well had lifted her to her feet and they had held each other, crying helplessly; they were in the same position 10 minutes later when the doorbell rang.

...then Malcolm had appeared as though conjured up from nowhere.

Malcolm had joined them in their despair when he had arrived, the three of them forming a tryptich of intense sorrow until Harry had come to himself enough to realise how late it was – nearly 3am - and gently sent Erin home to her daughter and mother, after which he and Malcolm had spent the rest of the night drinking (a lot) and talking (a little, but enough). Erin had returned with Calum less than six hours later to find that Malcolm had, quite literally, just closed the door to the sitting room where Harry had finally succumbed to an unquiet sleep. For the next thirty six hours either Malcolm, Erin, Calum or Dimitri had taken turns to be there, unobtrusive but ensuring he wasn't left alone until he was ready for it. Malcolm had even insisted, despite his own sorrow and exhaustion, on accompanying him and William Towers on that dreadful visit to Ruth's mother, a day after her daughter's death.

True to form, he had tried drowning the grief in alcohol every night but soon realised that wasn't working, just making things worse. Early on, a couple of nights after the others had first risked leaving him alone and a couple of hours after he had been informed by Calum, gently and showing the tact and sensitivity appropriate to his age that wasn't normally visible, that Jim's body had been repatriated home to Langley so he had missed the chance to bid his old friend a final farewell, he had ended up on his daughter's doorstep in the middle of the night, gaunt, mute, inconsolable; she had finally got him to talk, a very little, at dawn and her continuing presence helped. From then on, he walked, endlessly and no matter what the weather, preferring to be outside rather than at home but that hadn't helped much either. During that terrible period, and still, on some days, another song he had come across somewhere (he could not remember where, or when) became something of an anthem, its wild anguish and drenched, bitter melancholy finding a permanent place in his heart...

These streets all know me. The shadows whisper.

The night keeps looking back at me with neon eyes.

And if they've seen you, they're not talking.

You'd think by now maybe they'd sympathise...

The sky is crying, the wind's against me.

Blows like some fugitive with nowhere left to hide.

I'm down to nothing but just this heartache

That I keep carrying around inside...

I take no comfort in my companion.

The rain is coming down now wild and uncontrolled.

Don't try to stop me, you best take shelter.

Tonight the sky will not be consoled...

Out in the rain I keep on walking.

Out in the rain like the broken-hearted do.

I could be wrong but that's where you'll find me.

Out in the rain just looking for you.

After nearly being run down by a bus that he hadn't seen coming on the rainy night after her funeral (how the hell hadn't you seen a bright red, double-decker bus lit up like a bloody Christmas tree?) he realised that he wasn't helping himself or honouring her memory – he could just about hear the lecture she would have read him – so he did the only thing he could. As he had first done so many decades before, when Bill had been tortured and murdered, and on more occasions than he cared to admit since, he switched off, erected another impenetrable wall and went back to work, sometimes eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and waited, internally numb, for some semblance of life to return. Twelve months later, it still hadn't, not completely. And he wasn't sure he wanted to stand it for much longer.

Of course, within the first few weeks organising the funeral and his vengeance had given his days some focus and had, incidentally, resulted in the odd sort of on-going, intermittent friendship he now had with Ilya Gavrik (they caught up every time Ilya passed through London on business, which was several times a year, two old Cold War adversaries who now had no-one else to talk to about those days; not that they did, but the knowledge that they could, if they so desired, was strangely comforting) but since then the only thing that was keeping him going was that, according to his eldest, his children apparently still needed him. Then, of course, there was Wes Carter. The golden-haired boy – teenager now – with his mother's cheekbones and dark eyes and his father's mannerisms and laid-back attitude was still a constant in his life, a responsibility that wasn't his to dismiss even if he had wanted to, which he most certainly did not. There was no way on this planet that he was going to inflict any more pain of any sort on any of them, intent instead on repairing the relationships with his own children as well as maintaining the other, attempting to get something, somewhere, right. Which was why he would go on standing it.

If he had been hoping for some kind of revelation, ghostly apparition or visitation on this anniversary day he was disappointed, as he knew he would be. Indifferent to human suffering nature went on with its unchanging course: the sun shone, the sky was blue and the breeze, cold though it was, rustled the leaves of the trees in the cemetery quite gently. He could even hear a bird singing somewhere above the distant rumble of traffic. Eventually the bitter, helpless tears dried, replaced by a desolation as harsh and empty as the desert. Leaning forward, he lit the candle lantern in the middle of the flower arrangement he had placed as a crown above her head then, struggling to his feet with joints stiff from sitting in the chill for so long, removed a small vial from his pocket and poured the libation of her favourite wine while speaking a few, appropriate, words of farewell in Latin. He knew she would understand, if there was anything in the idea of an afterlife from where she would be observing him. Not that he thought there was. A few more quiet moments and a final, murmured,

"Ave atque vale, anima mea*,"

and he turned and walked away, feeling as bleak and empty as the only future he could now foresee.

Can't go on.

*Hail and farewell, O my soul

'The Water Is Wide'. Traditional, performed by Rory Block.

'Out In the Rain'. Written and performed by Julie Miller.