A/N: This is just a little oneshot inspired by a comment from the lovely and talented Sigma Creations. This story is set in the present day, where it has just been announced that Big Ben will be silent for the next four years while it undergoes repairs. In terms of canon, I've set this story in the months following the Gavrick affair; please forgive my utter disregard for the timeline of the series.
14 August 2017
The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and to Ruth, it often felt as if the entirety of her life's story was contained within the decade she'd spent working for the Security Services, as if everything that had come before was no more than a footnote, the oft-neglected prelude to a story that was sometimes dramatic, sometimes painfully dull, but nevertheless wholly hers. And Ruth herself was a creature of habit, relying upon routines and structures and neat orderly columns to navigate the murky waters of her professional life, though she had long ago learned that there were some areas which, despite her best efforts, defied all attempts at categorization and analysis. One such matter was that of morality; her many years as a spy had taught her that there was no black and white, when it came to differentiating between good evil, only shades of grey, sometimes indistinguishable one from the other. She was reflecting upon that uncertainty this gloomy evening, as the clouds gathered overhead and she made her way across the river, walking along with her eyes downcast, watching the endless marching of her own feet, oblivious to the sights and sounds of the city around her.
It had been her habit, long since established, to seek out the shelter of the Thames House rooftop when she was distressed, when she was contemplative, to celebrate the successful closing of an operation or to mourn the bitter disappointment of all her hopes. Though she had been working for the Home Secretary, safely ensconced inside the walls of Whitehall, for months now, she still felt herself called to the somber visage of that building that remained the closest thing to a home she had ever had in her entire adult life. Though it was late, and she really needed to be getting off home, still she trudged ever onward. The day had been a long and trying one, the powers that be nervous that recent events in the States might embolden their own homegrown white supremacists, that a riot like the one that had rocked Virginia might spill over into their own city streets. Ruth wasn't certain that such fears were entirely founded, but having spent the entire day slogging through vitriol and cataloging the status of many a group of disgruntled xenophobes, she found her faith in her fellow man at its lowest ebb. She wanted, very much, to find some sense of peace, some sense of rightness in this world, and in her heart she knew there was only one place she could find it.
When she arrived at Thames House the security guards did not bat an eyelid at her presence; they'd known her for years, and she still stopped in several times a week, meeting with various section heads, though she found her way down to Section D more often than not. For a moment she prevaricated by the stairs; she could travel down, discover whether Harry was still enthroned in his glass fishbowl on the Grid, if he were still in possession of some excellent scotch he might be willing to share; they could sit for a time, breathing the same air, the stillness around them crackling with the electricity of betrayals and heartache and desire, always that want, never fulfilled, always consuming. There was nothing as invigorating, nothing as deflating, as spending a few stolen minutes in his presence; they had not really found their footing, following the Gavrick affair. He was still cross with her, for going over his head, putting a stop to his attempts to capture Jim Coaver, leaving his side. For all the grief it had brought her, Ruth still believed she had done the right thing; Harry had been briefly suspended, and between them Jim Coaver and Erin Watts had successfully put an end to Elena Gavrick's machinations, and avoided any undue bloodshed. Though Harry had been reinstated without so much as a whisper of doubt regarding his abilities, he had never forgiven Ruth, she knew, for the lapse of her trust in him.
No, it would do to go down and see him, to torture them both with proximity and the weight of words never spoken. She made her way resolutely up the stairs, puffing a bit by the time she reached the top, but grateful nonetheless that she had followed through with her intended plan of action; it was cool, and the noise of the streets below faded into the background, gentle as a lullaby. The moment she stepped out into the night she felt as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders, as if she could breathe for the first time all day.
Her relief was short-lived, however; across from her in the darkness another visitor had usurped her place, leaning against the railing and staring out into the night. Even from behind he remained the most identifiable man she had ever known, every line and plane of him etched into her memory, the broadness of his shoulders, the softness of the blonde hair just beginning to curl above his collar, the stance of his powerful legs. She knew him, knew him better than her favorite song, the words that spelled the truth of him tattooed on her heart long ago when she was naive and he was brave and they were both of them so much younger, unburdened as yet by the grief they would face together, though never entirely without care.
For a moment she hesitated, uncertain as to whether or not she should approach. This had been their place once, a secret paradise he had shared with her; it was Harry who had brought her to the roof, that first time, and in the many years since it had been a battleground, a sanctuary, a confessional, a gallows. I'd love to have dinner...together and we couldn't be more together than we are right now; how stunningly different those two moments had been, hope and devastation, two sides of the same coin. She had given him her heart and snatched it away, standing on this rooftop, albeit many years apart. Ruth had often wondered how much her life might have changed, if she had given him a different answer the day of Ros's funeral, if she had been strong enough to take the hand he offered her, and run with him for the horizon. It didn't matter in the end, she tried to tell herself; right or wrong, she had made her choice, and they would both have to live with the consequences, however much they both disliked the current state of affairs between them. She could not decide if she dared go to him now, to stand beside him as she had so often done in the past, or if perhaps it might be better for her to leave him to his silent musings, untroubled by the distress her presence seemed to bring him.
The decision was taken out of her hands, in the end; without turning, Harry spoke into the darkness.
"I can feel you lurking."
Despite herself Ruth smiled, and made her way over to him. Of course he had known she was there, had likely realized it the moment she stepped through the door; they were spies, after all, and very old friends. They had no need of words, did not rely upon the sound of a gentle footfall to herald the arrival of the other; they always knew, with some sense Ruth could not define, when the other was near. Despite her attempts to distance herself from him for the sake of their hearts and the sake of all they held dear, they were a pair, Harry and Ruth, two links in a chain, two ropes twisted and tied and knotted together beyond all hope of extrication. They simply were, their stories now so closely interwoven that one could not be told without the other. How different would her life have been, she wondered as she approached the railing, if she had never met this man?
"It's late. You should be at home," he told her softly as she approached. He did not move when she came to a stop beside him, did not turn his gaze to greet her, and she seized the opportunity to study his profile, the weariness etched in every line of his face. There were more of those lines, these days, more worries, more care than there had been when they first met, and for one mad moment her fingers itched to reach out to him, to smooth the furrow between his brows and promise him that all would be well. Ruth had promised herself long ago that she would not lie to him, however, and so she offered him no such comfort.
"So should you," she answered in a tone as gentle as his own had been.
He turned to her then, and her gaze skittered away from his face, embarrassed at having been caught out watching him so intently.
"I wanted to hear it, one last time," he explained.
"Hear what?" she asked, her heart pounding in her chest as her mind began to race, immediately jumping to all sorts of distasteful conclusions. The bustle of the city, he's leaving, you'll never see him again, he meant to go without telling you goodbye, damn him…
"Big Ben," he answered, gesturing off in the distance towards the clock tower, only barely visible between the rows of squat grey buildings.
Reflexively Ruth's eyebrows knit together, showing her confusion.
"What do you mean, one last time?" she asked, trying not to make it sound like a demand, though fear sharpened her words. Please don't do this, Harry, she thought despondently. Please don't leave me. Not just yet.
"Haven't you heard?" he sounded amused, surprised, not at all like a man on the cusp of abandoning his life's work for the bucolic splendor of the countryside. "They're repairing the bell. It won't chime again until 2121. Midnight tonight is the last time you'll be able to hear it for the next four years. I thought I ought to hear it, just in case I'm not around by the time it goes back on line."
Ruth was equal parts relieved and irritated with herself for having become so overcome by sorrow at the thought of his departure, but she did not miss the melancholic note in his voice. On impulse, the cover of darkness and the knowledge that he wasn't leaving her just yet making her bold, she reached out and gently squeezed his forearm where it rested against the railing.
"You've got a good many years left in you yet, Harry," she told him.
Harry stared down at her hand on his arm, his expression unreadable, and she snatched her hand away as if it had been burned.
"It's been called the prince of timekeepers," she said in a rush, desperate to deflect from the momentary revelation of her affection for him, to keep their conversation on neutral ground, to stop them tearing open the wounds they'd each delivered one to the other. "It's a technological marvel."
For all her attempts at obfuscation Harry was staring at her fondly, and her cheeks reddened under his gaze. He had this way of looking at her, when she went off on one of her tangents, as if she were quite the strangest, most fascinating creature he'd ever seen, some sort of wild bird of paradise engaged in a complicated dance that he did not understand, but adored all the more for its eccentricity. Often times she felt much the same about him; Harry was no bright-plumed bird, more a scarred, silver-maned lion, getting on in years but still as ferocious as ever, watching the movements of the lesser beasts around him and flicking his tail in wary vigilance. Despite herself she smiled, to think of him thus, thinking how very lucky she was that he could not read her mind.
"122 years, and it's still standing," she added, thinking of all that Harry had endured for the sake of his country, all that he had lost, thinking of the way he remained a beacon for his team, standing as still and steady as the clock tower despite the chaos that had so often rained down upon him, despite horror and calamity, always there to offer his guidance, offering reassurance just by the virtue of his presence. The very sight of him was enough to soothe her fraying nerves, to restore her sense of equilibrium, his face as symbolic of Thames House as Big Ben was of London.
"Survived the Blitz," she pointed out, turning away from him to peer off into the darkness towards the tower.
"Only just," Harry responded, and she turned back to him, eager to hear what he had to say. They had always been rather good at this, she mused as she listened to him speak. They were both of them passionate, fascinated by the world around them, fond of learning, and they played off one another, shared bits of knowledge and clever witticisms, sparring and conversing and drawing ever nearer to one another. "Westminster was bombed, in 1941. Broke all the glass on the tower's south face, but the interior remained undamaged, and the clock carried on."
Rather like Harry, Ruth supposed. He had seen his fair share of calamity, had come so very close to devastation, but though he had been battered, still he endured. It was a comforting thought.
"Midnight, you said?" Ruth asked, reaching into her pocket to retrieve her mobile to check the time. Harry beat her to it, glancing down at his watch with a flick of his wrist.
"Five minutes," he said. Ruth abandoned her search for her mobile, and leaned against the railing.
For a time silence stretched between them, each of them thinking their own thoughts, Ruth drawing more comfort than she cared to admit from the warmth of Harry beside her. And for an instant she lost herself in wondering what it might be like, to stand here with him, hear the great bell tolling one final time, before taking his hand and making their way home, together. Would it be so terrible, she asked herself, if she gave into the longing she felt for him, if they carved out some bit of quiet for themselves amidst the terrible noise of their lives? He was her boss no longer, and she had nothing to fear from whispered words. After everything, after Mani, after Albany, after Elena, they were still here, still standing, together; surely that meant something.
"How are you getting on, at the Home Office?" Harry asked her quietly, and though she knew he meant well, she couldn't help but bristle at the question, hearing the unspoken rebuke he had never delivered, the admonition she had never received for abandoning him. She wished he would shout at her, damn her for a betrayer, name her a coward for abdicating her post when she had berated him into remaining firmly in place on the wall. No such recrimination was forthcoming, however; he offered her only this courtesy, and though guilt made her waspish, she fought back her instinct to snap, choosing instead to offer him the truth.
"Well enough," she answered. "It's not quite as exciting as being in the thick of things, but I get home at a decent hour, and the pay is good."
Harry chuckled a bit at that. "I did try, you know, to get them to pay you more. You were worth so much more. I'm glad Towers can see that."
She hummed, trusting that the darkness would hide the blush that stained her cheeks. It was still hard, to accept a compliment from this man, harder, even, in the face of all that hurt she had bestowed upon him over the years. She never doubted that he valued her, as an employee and a confidante, but it was another thing altogether to hear him say it outright.
"One minute," Harry murmured, his eyes on his watch.
"And you? How are you getting on?" she asked. Christ but this was strange, the normalcy of the conversation so very foreign to her; she had become so used to urgently discussing the impending apocalypse of the hour with this man that the idea of the pair of them engaging in small talk seemed utterly bizarre to her now.
"Muddling through," he answered, his honey brown eyes lifting from his watch and focusing on her face, seeming to pierce her very soul with the intensity of their gaze. "My team is young, and inexperienced, and I find I miss...I miss the old days."
The confession was startling in its honesty; Harry had never spoken such a thought aloud, and it troubled her, to think that he was so disheartened that he did not balk at revealing his vulnerability to her this way. It was in her mind to ask him which days; they had endured so much upheaval, it was difficult to pinpoint a single moment of the past that could be described thus, difficult to isolate a year they spent in blissful consistency.
"I miss Tom's sense of purpose," he answered slowly, hearing her question despite her hesitance to voice it aloud. "And Zoe and Danny, always dancing around each other. And Colin and Malcolm, doing God only knew what in the technical suite, and Sam flouncing around and you...and you." Her breath caught in her throat as he whispered those final words. And you. Ruth missed that girl as well, bright-eyed and hopeful, with her ridiculous outfits and her bursting desire to do good. Above all, though, she missed Harry as he had been, missed his certainty, his ferocity, his dry wit and those braces and waistcoats he used to wear. Those words, I miss you, were on the tip of her tongue, her lips parting to speak, when the sound of the bells tolling in the distance shattered the moment like a glass vase upon a marble floor.
They stood together, neither of them breathing, each of them counting the tolling of the bell, the very air around them frozen in an instant of limitless possibility.
"That's it, then," Harry said when it was done, taking a step back from the railing, retreating into shadows. She couldn't help but feel as if he weren't talking about the clock at all, but instead drawing a line underneath their conversation, putting to rest all thoughts of the past, all fond remembrances of what had been, what should have been, preparing once more to step into their proscribed roles, pretending that their hearts weren't cracked and bleeding and cursing the distance between them.
Like hell it is, Ruth thought. She would be damned if they left things like this between them, still unspoken. Though she could not say from whence this bravery came, whether it was the lingering taste of fear at the thought of his departure, or the cool stillness of the night, or the frantic clamoring of her own battered heart that urged her on, it didn't matter. This was her moment, her one chance to right the wrongs she had done, to set her feet upon a different path, and she would not let it pass her by. Not this time.
"Harry," she spoke his name slowly, deliberately, watched him turn to face her in the darkness.
"Do you remember," she asked him, trembling as she took a step towards him. "That day, by the docks?" She wrapped her arms around her waist, comforting herself, trying to be strong enough to say the words she'd never had the confidence to speak aloud. She had addressed that moment, the desperate, doomed, unspoken love they harbored one for the other before, that day in the warehouse with Mani; if you have any feelings at all, if you have any feelings for me, she had cried. And again, in the wake of Albany; it was unfair of you to love me. That he loved her was a foregone conclusion, but Ruth had never spoken of her own heart so plainly. He deserved more than that, she knew, deserved to know that his feelings were not a burden, were not unrequited. Sometimes she worried that was all they were now, a memory, but she could not stop now, could not retreat now that she had drawn so close to him. "Do you remember...something wonderful…" her voice cracked, as she spoke the words, fear and hope swirling round and round inside her.
"That was never said," Harry finished for her, sorrow radiating out from him in waves. "I remember, Ruth. I don't think I'll ever forget it. But you were right, to stop me."
"I wasn't, Harry," she whispered. "I was wrong, I should have let you-"
"And what would we have gained, Ruth, if I had said it?" he asked, stepping towards her, invading her personal space, the scent of him and the intensity of his gaze making her dizzy.
"Maybe nothing, maybe everything, but at least you would have known…" It was hard, so much harder than she ever thought it would be, to be honest with him, to face her own desires despite the guilt she still carried, despite the fears that had stayed her tongue so often in the past. She felt herself untethered, floating high above her own life, all of the many excuses she'd used to keep herself apart from this man fading one by one.
"Known what, Ruth?" he pushed her, pursuing her even as she retreated, forcing her with the rich timbre of his voice to face the truth her heart was bursting to tell.
"That I love you, Harry," she confessed. "I loved you then, and I love you still."
For a long moment he simply stared at her, disbelief and hunger shining in his eyes, remaining silent just long enough for her to wonder if perhaps it was too late, if perhaps his feelings for her had been replaced by hurt and distrust, never to return to the splendor of the early days of their would-be love affair, when everything was bright and bursting with hope. He did not make her linger indefinitely, however; he reached out, clasping her arms, pulling her closer.
"Took you bloody long enough," he murmured gruffly, but before she could muster up some snappy retort his lips descended on hers, and any protest she might have offered was drowned beneath the waves of her desire for him.
She whimpered, just a little, and collapsed against his chest, her arms wrapping round his middle while his hands traveled the length of her spine, and with the soft insistence of his lips and tongue he drove out every doubt, every fear, until all she could feel was him. The taste of him, the heat of him, comforted her, inflamed her, left her ravenous for more, and for perhaps the first time in her life, Ruth was determined not to question it. He made her happy, and she decided right then that a moment of happiness with him was worth more than a lifetime of loneliness without him.
"Let me take you home," he whispered after a time, his arms slung low around her waist, his forehead resting gently against her own as they both struggled to regulate her breathing.
And for once, she did not fight him.
"All right," she answered softly, catching his lapels in her hand, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle. "Only if you promise to feed me," she added playfully.
"Only if you promise to stay," Harry murmured in response, his shoulders tense with uncertainty. It galled her, to think that she could make him so nervous, could bring this titan of a man to his knees; all she wanted, all she ever wanted, was to stand beside him, to see him shining in his power and his grace and know that he was hers, as she was his, that were both of them strong and well and whole.
"As long as you'll have me," she responded.
This earned her another kiss, longer, deeper, more soulful than the last, as they traded all their years of misery for a future that suddenly seemed so much brighter than it had only a few moments before. His hand wandered down to her bum, giving her a gentle squeeze, and she sighed against his mouth, giving into temptation and pressing her body that much closer to him, a prelude to everything that could be, would be, if only they continued to trust in one another.
Harry tore his lips from hers as if he'd only just remembered where they were, casting a wary glance around them before smiling at her sheepishly, reaching down to clasp her hand in his own.
"Take me home, Harry," she told him softly.
He just nodded, looking bemused and elated, the expression of a man who had just been given everything he ever wanted, a man who was determined to take it, now, before cruel fate once more snatched away the dearest longing of his heart. He led her down the stairs and to the carpark, their fingers intertwined all the while, and as he did, Ruth thought about Big Ben. The tower had survived bombings and political upheaval and the cruel march of time, just as Harry had done. And now the bells would rest, while those few souls who oversaw the inner workings of the clock tower, those few who knew it best, tended to it, mended the broken pieces and helped restore it to its full potential. We all need a bit of care, every now and then, Ruth though, giving Harry's hand a gentle squeeze. He smiled down at her, and on impulse she reached up, and brushed her lips across his cheek. Perhaps it was time, she told herself, that she and Harry looked after one another.