I promised myself, and my readers, that I was going AWOL until I'd taken these pre-Christmas exams at uni. Then I had twenty minutes to kill in the library before my bus, and I started throwing this together. Now I'm going AWOL.
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me. Though it's not very character heavy at all, and all the ramblings belong to me.
Spoilers: Anything that aired, and the movie.
No one's called him Harry Pearce in a very long time, but there's not been a moment in which the life he was once a part of has not been at the forefront of his mind.
It's coming to a close now, that life, he feels it slightly more every day. He'd not ever expected or wanted to end up here, in a nursing home, unable to get out of his chair, with young, infuriatingly patronising staff wiping his mouth after he takes a sip of water.
The only enemy that's going to end his life now is old age, and that doesn't seem fair. And after 93 years, it's not even a particularly vicious attack.
Who or what had ever decided that he didn't deserve the dignity to go as all the others had?
When and why had he become the only one left, the only one remembering?
How had he lasted so much longer than the nameless agents he'd driven into the ground?
They were always the same, really, the nameless agents.
They'd somehow stumbled onto this path, somewhere along the line, and seemingly without any further planning they'd found themselves behind the pods, in Section D. However long it had taken, the team had become something of a misshapen, half broken family, and the losses always cut deep, some more than others. Like a real family, there were more distant relations side by side with people that meant close to everything, or were as important as they'd allow themselves to admit.
Perhaps it said something for how they belonged without realising, how they bounced back, even when forced to disappear in quite their own way. They would somehow always turn back up between the doors of Thames House, despite the odds, or they would show their faces somewhere completely different, still doing something to the same ends… they were never really out of it, no matter how hard the world tried.
They balanced themselves against each other, as a family, they'd slot in easier with some than others. They had their own strengths, and their own weaknesses, because despite the job they were human; that was independent of however much they chose to deny it. It was what made them great, however, their determination to be inhuman, their determination to undermine their weaknesses until they were hardly there, hardly noticeable. It said something for the type of person they were, though, that they'd forever dance on the knife edge of their most damning weakness, until it broke them, if they didn't sacrifice themselves first.
Because that's what they were, in the end, a sacrificial lamb. Too ready to be a martyr for the sake of the security of their country, as if, and truly, more often than not, that was the only thing left for them to believe in.
Maybe, for a time, they'd had more than that. A family, something to get their heart racing, even a child, a dependant, someone to keep them fighting. When everything in their life seemed to slip away, that was often the last thread. And a last thread left hanging, a family, a child, left in the lurch, never truly knowing everything given up. In the end of a sorry story, everything vanished, in a sense. There was never any history, there was never anything left behind. Everything was conveniently dissolved in an instant, like they'd never existed.
Forgotten.
He was the last one standing, remembering all his forgotten agents. When he was gone, there wouldn't be anyone anymore.
And he'd become nameless, too, he'd been nameless for a long time; ever since Will Holloway, Adam Qasim and Geraldine Maltby, and everything that had happened, he'd become Frank Drewe. He'd almost already disappeared.
It was time to join all the others no one remembered; what they stood for, what they fought for, what they gave their lives for. He was about to become another forgotten memory.
That's a wrap! Let me know what you think, in as few words as you'd like!