Summary/Author's Note: Finally settled in Cyprus, with a new job, a new home and a new future, Ruth's newly established world is shaken to the core when a face from the past appears out of the blue. When the past comes back to haunt her, she realises it could just be the opportunity she needs to clear her name and avenge herself against the man who almost destroyed her. Meanwhile, Lucas North has just returned to London after an eight year stint in a Russian prison cell. He struggles to piece together the wreckage of his former life, while learning to get along with a certain lady boss while sent a mission together.
AU. In my other fics, these couples (Ros/Lucas and Harry/Ruth) are already "an item". So, I want to go back in time and dream up a scenario where I can write them all being drawn gradually back together.
Chapter One: Uncovered
Nicosia, Northern Cyprus
The park had been built following the invasion of 1974. Battle scarred streets, derelict houses and the broken bodies of the fallen had given way to emerald lawns, irrigated by the city's waste water. Great tufts of Pampas Grass; lemon trees fattening with fruit and exotic plants Ruth couldn't name. It formed a living, pollinating, blossoming memorial to the places and the people Turkish tanks razed to the ground just over thirty years before. A place of peace and tranquillity, where the war machine once raged.
Ruth looked on, watching as City officials roped off the park. She, as well as any of the people standing around her at that moment, knew that you could cover up the past with whatever you wanted. But, you couldn't make it go away altogether. Once the ropes were up, large diggers, cumbersome as mechanical drunks, lumbered over the previously immaculate lawns she had been admiring just five minutes ago. The trees and Pampas Grass flattened, the turf torn from the earth. The exotic, nameless plants thrown aside like History's flotsam.
She looked about her, at the other people gathered in silence to watch as the excavation began, as though she expected them to protest. She hadn't expected this. The images in her head were of men in khaki shorts, with white handlebar moustaches, raking through the topsoil with a fine tooth comb. She thought that the past would be slowly revealed; first the dome of a skull, a perfect circle where the bullet extinguished life. Jutting, angular jawlines exposed, as the next layer of soil was delicately dusted away at the expert hands of the Archaeologists. Fingers probing the compacted earth, pushing through empty eye sockets, the windows to the soul smashed in for the final time. Then, the teeth. Teeth lovingly restored, gifting up their rich DNA cargo and, in time, the last piece of the jigsaw as faceless, nameless, human bones were restored to humanity, given back their identities. Telling their stories, after thirty long years buried beneath the façade of peace and prosperity.
Just six feet from the excavation site, Ruth reached down beside the bench she was sitting on to retrieve her handbag. Beside her, an elderly lady swathed in back shuddered as the digger's bucket gauged out another chunk of dirt dripping earth. The elderly woman's grip tightened on a dog-eared, black and white photograph held in her lap; Ruth hadn't noticed before, having been too immersed in the dig. The photograph showed a smiling girl of about nineteen, dark hair cascading down her shoulders, frozen in time; forever young. As Ruth looked, a teardrop splashed on the girl's face, magnifying her smile to the point of distortion.
Ruth tried to smile at the woman's bent head, but she did not stir. Her silent tears, still falling for her lost child even after all these years, so Ruth reached into her handbag. Inside, among the debris of lipsticks, ticket dockets and loose change, she dug out her pocket handkerchiefs and handed one to the elderly lady.
"It will be alright," Ruth told her. 'They'll find her,' she thinks silently, but cannot bring herself to actually say. All the people there, holding similar pictures, maybe practical, but they still had hope. Hope that, even after all this time, their loved ones were merely trapped on the wrong side of the UN buffer zone. Ruth wasn't about to be the one to snuff that out.
The woman looked up at her, oddly grateful for this small act of compassion, as she took the hankie and used it to dry her tears off the daughter's photograph face. Mothers: they always out their children first.
Their brief moment of bonding was brought to an end as George appeared through the small crowds, beckoning her over. She went to him, after giving the old girl in black another brief smile.
"Hey," she greeted George, accepting a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee from his outstretched hand. "Any joy?"
Unlike many of the others, George was not carrying a photograph of his lost loved ones; his father and uncle. He had simply slipped into the town hall, to scour the display boards where tiny mugshots of the missing were exhibited for the relatives. His expression clouded as he blew on his own hot coffee.
"Nothing," he replied, taking a delicate sip and wincing against the burn all the same. "As you would say: a needle in a haystack."
She met George just under a year ago, at the Hospital where she worked in Clerical and he was a Doctor. They went for lunch, then dinner, then the theatre. They swapped numbers, because they made each other happy. When they continued to make each other happy, they started staying around at each other's houses. Together, they wandered the streets of Nicosia, taking in the buildings and the views. Away from the dig site, the aroma of the orange blossom and lemon trees was heavy in the air. At times like these, Ruth felt like she lived in a foreign country. Reminding her of the distance she had travelled and the stark contrasts between Cyprus, and the country she had left behind barely two years before.
Once, George had asked her why they couldn't go back for a holiday. He wanted to meet her family, to see where she played as a child and where the mystery of her past life flourished in the open. What could she tell him? That she was legally dead? That she had exposed deadly corruption at the heart of the nation's security services? 'There is nothing and no one,' she answered bluntly, and left it that. Even as she had spoken the words 'no one', the memory of Harry Pearce flashed across her mind, unbidden and automatic. Silently, Harry slipped back out of her mind, leaving in his wake a sorrow she could never quite expunge.
Together, they slipped down a sheltered alleyway between two limestone buildings and perched themselves on a low wall near the coach station. Tourists thronged the streets, disembarking from buses, having been on a tour of the UN buffer zone that provided a no-man's land between the Turkish north and the Greek south. Their own coach back to Polis wasn't due for another twenty minutes, so Ruth listened out for English accents among the tourists swelling around the luggage compartment of the coaches. She never could break the habit of looking for little signs of home, even after two years of trying to convince herself that Cyprus was her home.
She picks up snatches of conversation.
"… well, Rita, we saw that nice café down the road. None of that foreign stuff in there…"
"… must be somewhere that sells proper tea…"
She laughed into her coffee. George turned to her, a frown furrowing his brow.
"What's funny?" he asked.
Ruth just smiled. "The English," she replied, affectionately.
He wouldn't understand the quirks of her people. Their dogged adherence to the familiar, their fight to the death to stay the same. Their endless, fruitless search for an England in the sun. George had asked her once, was it really that bad. She told him the truth; that the English sun was a tabloid newspaper. He had given her a most peculiar look; but his enquiries about possible holidays down memory lane grew less frequent.
She picked up another English voice.
"I'm on my way down there now," the man says, his accent clipped and proper and his voice low. "The dig began an hour ago, or so I'm told. But wait until I'm down there and I'll call you back. Don't make any decisions until I know what's happening."
She knew that voice, it was enough to make her heart beat faster. But the source of the voice was hidden among the throng of sight-seers. George noticed her trembling as she set her cup down on the wall.
"Ruth," he said her name, reaching out to steady her hand. "Is something the matter?"
She looked at him, as if surprised to see him still there.
"Just, wait here for five minutes," she replied. "There's something I need to check. I won't be long."
The crowds of tourists had begun to disperse, headed out towards the hotels and restaurants along the main streets. Ruth slipped in with them, her gaze darting about as she got the talking man back in her line of vision. Immediately, her old instincts kicked back in and let herself fall behind again. For the few seconds she saw him, she noted his height, his slim build. She frowned, kept her sharp eyes on the spot where the man had stood. She felt that she knew him, while at the same time, she knew she couldn't possibly be right. She gave herself a shake, turned around and returned to George.
"Ruth, where did you go?" he asked, as soon as she reappeared.
She smiled and failed to answer the question. "Come on," she said. "The coach home is here."
Lucas paused outside the supermarket to grapple with a shopping trolley. They're all chained up. What's the point of having them there if they're all chained up? He glanced over his shoulder at the young woman balancing a baby on her hip, clicking her tongue impatiently at him. She glowered a 'hurry up' at him just as her baby hit her in the face with his toy.
"Here love, do you need a pound coin?" she asked him, giving him a maddeningly sympathetic look over the child's head.
"Er," he replied, looking back at the trolley and noticing the slot for the coin for the first time. 'You have to pay to use a shopping trolley these days?' he thinks to himself. "I'm sorry," he said, looking back at the woman and noticing the queue for the trolleys getting longer. "I've … been away … everything is different."
He felt the need to justify himself as he fished for the coin in his pocket. He felt the need to justify himself to everyone. Harry and that dreadful woman who seemed to follow him everywhere, these days. Even Malcolm. And now, the woman at the Supermarket, too. However, his acute embarrassment ended as the coin slotted into place and the trolley was finally released from captivity. He never thought he'd feel affinity with a shopping trolley.
He pushes the damn thing, struggling to keep it straight as the wheels all tried to roll independently of one another, and headed down the first aisle directly in front of him. Eight years of inflation, how much is that? Eight years of price hikes, but Malcolm has seen him right, courtesy of the service. They may be about to spit him out as damaged goods, but at least they'll see him right.
He shuts off thoughts of work, turned to the task at hand and lost himself in a fog of bewildering choice. That's the thing with being in prison: everyone made the choices for you. They told you what to eat, when to eat and how often. They told you when to sleep and when to wake up; when to go out in the exercise yard and when to fry your bollocks on the live wires. Everything was pre-ordained; everything was regimented and all you had to do was lie there and take it. He had believed that the only thing they couldn't control was his mind. He could lie awake at nights and torture himself with thoughts of all the things he would or could be doing, if he were a free man. But over the course of those eight long years, you slowly forgot how to make those choices, how to handle 'freedom'. You didn't know you were 'institutionalised' until you were released, and faced with all those stark choices.
Stark choices, like what breakfast cereal to buy. The options of overwhelming to him and, before long, he's methodically going through a process of elimination. Cornflakes, they don't taste of anything. He crossed them off the list, moved along and weighed up the pros and cons of each brand. His job was different. MI5: it was second nature and not even eight years inside could stamp that out of him. But for Harry… his heart sank again as the conversation ran through his mind. 'You're not ready!' Harry was adamant and it's no good trying to change his mind when he's in that sort of a mood. Being a spy: it's the only thing he can still do. Because, God knows, he couldn't even pick a brand of breakfast cereal anymore.
"Oh for God's sake, just get the bloody Cornflakes."
The woman's voice jolted him violently out of his own, one man self-pity party. An arm reached around him and grabbed the box and dumped it unceremoniously in his trolley. He whirled around and bit down on his tongue. 'But, oh shit, it's her; it's that awful woman with frost for knickers and a barbed razor for a tongue,' he thought to himself, inwardly recoiling from her hard little eyes.
She stood back, arms folded and regarded him coolly. Calm and self-possessed; or still waters running deep?
"Harry wants to talk to you," she said.
The command to drop everything. He still recognised it when he saw it.
"Thank you … er…."
"Ros," she curtly reminded him.
"Thanks, Ros."
He watched her turn sharply around, to all intents and purposes lost in the special offers on display opposite the breakfast cereals. One neat nail trailing over the packets. She stops occasionally, pulls something off the shelf and tosses it into the trolley. "You'll be needing that," she muttered to herself as she did so. "Oh, and this and some of that, too. Ah yes, this is nice."
Lucas watched her aghast; too taken aback to actually stop her from doing his shopping for him. She seems to taken the task in hand herself. But, she hated him. She had made that clear from the moment they first met. She regarded him like something she'd accidentally trailed onto The Grid on the sole of her shoe. She stopped then, looked back at him and sighed impatiently.
"Chop, chop!" she beckoned, "Harry's waiting and you're clearly going to take your sweet arsed time, if left to your own devices."
He couldn't argue with that, so simply followed and let Ros make all the key decisions with regards to his week's groceries. Not that there was much to consider; it was only him, now. Elizaveta had gone, married someone else on the presumption of his death. But that didn't make it hurt any less. It didn't make the fact that he had been all but forgotten any more palatable. It didn't make unexpected shopping trips with the Ice Maiden any easier.
"Look Ros," he spoke up, still following her like a bored toddler down the aisles. "I don't know what the state of affairs was between you and Adam Carter-"
The reaction was understated, but undeniable. Her body stiffened and she whirled round brandishing a packet of lasagne sheets like a shield.
"And these," she cuts him off, raising her voice to a pitch just short of something only dogs could hear.
She blamed him. Lucas took her reaction as confirmation of that fear which had played on his mind since it happened. If she blamed him, did everyone else? Was that the real reason Harry was cutting him out of the action? He rushed to catch up with her as she strode towards the checkout.
"Look, Ros, listen," he pushed on, keen to get across his version of events. "I couldn't stop him getting in that car. There was nothing I could-"
"Get that till over there," she cut over him again, wresting the trolley from him and making a dash for the till before anyone else could get there.
Lucas watched her storm off in dismay. However, Harry had called and he must endure.
Harry adjusted the knot of his tie, loosening it before it choked him to death as he hastened towards the pods. He had hoped to find Ros and Lucas waiting for him, but clearly they were delayed. Only Jo, Ben and Connie were there, and none of them paid much in the way of attention to him. Just a friendly nod as he passed, or a small wave from Jo. But, at least, they were all safe for once.
He let himself into his office, poured a measure of whiskey and flopped down in his chair. The purpose of his little outing had been about getting information to hook Arkady Kachimov. But, what he got instead, was something so much better. He smiled as he opened his briefcase, removed the file his contacts in six had handed him and lovingly laid it out on the desk. He smoothed it over and flipped the cover over, revealing a black and white photograph of Oliver Mace. He's about to read on, but Ros knocked at his door, prematurely ending his enjoyment of the illicit activities of the disgraced former head of JIC. Behind Ros, he was relieved to see, came Lucas. Pensive and reluctant, but there all the same. He beamed at them both.
"Come in," he said, even though they already were. "Have a seat."
They settled themselves in front of his desk, both looking politely interested but saying nothing.
"Take a look at this file," he said, pushing it instinctively towards Ros. "Oliver Mace left the country three days ago, with the head of Turkish Intelligence. I want you both to work together to find out exactly what's going on and what he's up to."
Ros understood, all too well, what was going on as far as Harry was concerned. But Lucas frowned, clearly still in the dark as to exactly how much had changed.
"Oliver Mace?" he asked, looking from Harry to Ros. "But he's the head of –"
"Not any more, he isn't!" Ros retorted, cutting him off but with her face still buried in the file. She was grinning broadly when she looked up again. "Am I bringing him?" she jerked her head towards Lucas.
"Yes," he replied, silently adding 'look after him'.
The news didn't dampen her enthusiasm. She merely stood up, file still in hand. "I'll get right on it," she assured him.
Lucas, however, stayed behind as Ros left. Only an hour ago, he had regarded himself as spent. Chewed up and spat out of the service. Now, he looked across the desk at Harry, firing unspoken questions at him.
"I've been thinking," said Harry, leaning forwards in his seat. "About what you said this morning. About wanting to come back."
"And?" asked Lucas, suddenly alert and hopeful.
"And although it flies in the face of my overwhelming common sense," he states. "I'm willing to let you come back now, on these conditions."
"Name them," Lucas cut in.
"No heroics. If you want to stop, then just say so. There's no shame in asking for help, Lucas. If it gets too much, come straight back to me and I'll fix it for you. If I, or Ros, think things are getting too much, then we have the right to pull you out. Is that understood?"
Lucas was practically bouncing, now. He leaned forwards to shake Harry's hand. "Yes!" he replied. "Yes, understood. Completely."
Against his better judgement it may be, but the other man's boyish enthusiasm was undeniably infectious. Besides, if he was going to finally stick the knife into Oliver Mace, he'd need all hands on deck. He dismissed Lucas with the instruction to work alongside Ros and obey every one of her commands, no matter how capricious, or face a spell in the psych tank. The dire warning did little to dent his new found optimism, though.
Harry was happy. Spreading good news and cheer to his newly returned Case Officer, and wreaking havoc on an old enemy. And it wasn't even four o clock yet. He remembered the whiskey he had allowed himself just five minutes before, still undrunk. It felt like finding a twenty pound note down the back of the sofa.