Disclaimer: Spooks belongs to Kudos and the BBC.
A/N: Set somewhere in 9.2. Spoilers for all series. This idea just wouldn't let go of me, so here it is.
The reflected lights of the city shift and blur as the dark waters of the Thames flow back towards the estuary but Ruth barely notices. She's not here to admire the view; she's here to think, and to remember.
Footsteps approach; a familiar footfall she could identify in a crowd of a thousand people. The left side of her body feels less cold as a figure comes to a stop beside her, blocking the chilly evening breeze.
"I thought you'd decided late night tête-à-têtes weren't appropriate."
"This is a public place, and my being here at the same time as you, purely coincidental," Harry replies, mildly.
She laughs, softly, but says nothing.
"I think I'm meant to say 'nice night out?' at this point," he offers, encouraged by the fact she's not walked away. Not yet. He risks a quick glance at her as he waits for her to reply.
A ghost of a smile briefly lights up her face but then it's gone. "I'm not sure this is much of a night out."
"It's peaceful. And cheap."
She turns slightly so she can look at him. "Is that the Harry Pearce definition of a good night out?"
He shrugs. "There are worse places to spend the evening. The Thames is the soul of the city, after all."
It's an almost poetical response, and an echo of her own thoughts.
"All the history this river has seen. The lives that have passed along it, over it, through it. All those stories. It's quite something, don't you think, Ruth?"
"Yes, it is."
He remembers both times she'd called him a bastard, remembers how it felt. The first time had surprised him; the second time nearly killed him.
She remembers her first day on the Grid. The fear, the excitement and the need to impress, which had quickly turned into a need to impress him.
"It's eight years, Harry. To the day. Since I started my secondment," she speaks quietly, the words almost lost to the night air.
And eight years since they'd first met.
Harry is silent; partly from fear of saying the wrong thing, partly out of guilt that he hadn't realised. Not that he'd forgotten her first day; he never would.
She'd arrived in a flurry of files and nervousness, gauche and a little naïve, but undeniably intelligent. And what had been missing from his life, what he'd been looking for, had arrived with her, within her.
Ruth sighs, heavily. "Eight years. Feels more like eighty."
"A lot of things have happened in those eight years."
"I thought you were going to say that a lot of water had passed under the bridge," she remarks, wryly.
"Am I that predictable?"
She thinks of dancing bread rolls and a shy dinner invitation, and shakes her head. "No, Harry."
He thinks of Paris, and New York, and a lively debate on the merits of both. "Maybe I am predictable, sometimes."
She remembers an army Major being shot dead; remembers Harry giving the order.
He remembers Tom on the blink, and Ruth standing by him.
She's right; it feels a lot longer than eight years; it feels like a lifetime. Several lifetimes. "You're first day…"
"Oh God," she half laughs, half gasps. "It's indelibly etched on my memory. By lunchtime I was convinced you all thought I was a lunatic and I wouldn't last the week."
"By lunchtime I was convinced I…we couldn't manage without you."
She remembers her short life as a double agent; remembers the fear (and the relief) at being found out.
He remembers the sound of a gunshot and Ruth crying for Danny.
She studies her hands for a few moments. "I really didn't think I'd made myself indispensible."
"You did. You are."
She thinks about Zaf and his smile, and the promise he made on a freezing cold morning.
He thinks about a train bomb in Tehran and a plague on London's streets.
"If you'd known," he begins, carefully, "how things would turn out. If you'd had any kind of premonition of the horrors you'd face…"
"Oh, Harry," she pleads. "I can't answer that. Can you? Would you have chosen the same path?"
He remembers his mother's smile and the agony of her funeral. He remembers identifying Bill's body and the nightmares that followed. He remembers his goddaughter, forever frozen in time as a toddler.
"I don't know," he answers, quietly, truthfully. "I really don't know."
She remembers holding her father's hand. She remembers being sent away to school after he died. She remembers a drunken week in Blackpool with her stepbrother.
"We've made our choices, Harry." She looks at him again. "We can't turn the clock back."
"Is every decision irrevocable?" he asks, knowing how loaded the question is.
She thinks about that dockside and kissing him goodbye. She thinks about the irony of having what she wanted, for one brief moment, as her world crumbled.
"Perhaps not every decision."
He thinks about Zaf, that intelligent, personable young man lost to torture and the highest bidder. He thinks about the photographs of his injuries and the post mortem report.
"I once asked Ros if she had any regrets."
"That was brave of you," Ruth replies, shifting her feet slightly to get the blood circulating again. "What did she say?"
"She said they were too few to mention."
Ruth laughs. "How very Ros."
She remembers a man who loved her but she lived a lie with; and a boy she couldn't have loved more if he'd been her own son.
He remembers how he took revenge for Adam, and choking a man to death in a subway.
"You were right, Ruth," he announces, out of nowhere. "The things we've seen together."
"And the things we've done."
She thinks about them arranging the assassination of a despot to prevent a genocide. She thinks about how she pushed Harry to give Zaf a kill order.
He thinks about a file of intelligence, given to him at a funeral. He thinks about how difficult it was to watch a man die.
She knows she's complicit in a murder.
He knows she'll never ask, and he'll never tell.
"We've managed to avert a few catastrophes along the way, Harry."
He wonders when she became the strong one; perhaps she always was.
"There have been some unpalatable trade-offs, though, Ruth."
She wonders how he's kept going all these years.
"Nature of the beast," she says, turning towards him.
He nods, slowly. "Yes, it is."
She smiles at him and then shivers. "Well, it might be a peaceful and cheap night out but it's also bloody cold. Let's go and get a drink; The Founders Arms is closest."
"Doesn't that count as a tête-à-tête?" he questions.
"There's a reason it's called a 'public house', Harry." She pushes her hands into her coat pockets. "Come on," she says, starting to walk.
He moves quickly, falling into step beside her.
We couldn't be more together than we are right now.
She was right about that, too.
Thanks for reading.