A/N – The next in the 4+1 series. I might start making a list of these on my profile, in case these are the only things that people come looking for…
i.
They are fighting again. If they think that Ros can't hear them, tucked up in her bed two floors up, then they are wrong. She can always hear them.
The clock on her bedside table says it is 9.36pm. Ros has just learned how to tell the time and Daddy got her this clock to celebrate. He even got one that doesn't tick, because he knows the noise would keep her awake. Daddy thinks of things like that. Mummy forgets them, most of the time.
Ros like Mummy though, most of the time. She even loves her, when she takes out one of her old books and pulls Ros onto her lap and begins to read. Ros does not know now that in thirty years time, Mummy's voice will be all she really remembers of her. Mummy's voice as Long John Silver, as Bilbo Baggins, as Wendy Darling, as Mrs Tiggywinkle, as The Little Prince. That is their favourite book. Mummy has read it to her so many times that Ros can recite it word for word.
They are still fighting. Some nights they stop. Some nights it goes on for a very long time, like tonight. Ros cannot sleep when there is a lot of noise. Daddy knows this and still he is shouting. Ros can forgive him though – Mummy probably started the fight. Ros loves Mummy but she loves Daddy more. She knows she shouldn't but she just does. Mummy forgets and Mummy shouts. It is more easy to love Daddy.
Ros cannot sleep. They are too loud. She takes her blanket and puts on her slippers, quiet as a mouse. At the top of the house is an attic, reached by a staircase behind a secret door. Daddy keeps the attic like an extra room, with a bed and a chair, a desk and lots of bookshelves. Ros only comes here with Mummy. Tonight though, she will sleep here. She can't hear them anymore.
She takes The Little Prince from the shelf and cuddles it to her, curling up on the bed under her own blanket and the heavier one that was already there.
She is asleep in minutes.
When Ros wakes, Mummy is standing in the door of the room. She is crying but she is smiling too.
"Here you are, my little darling," she says, crossing the room and kneeling by the bed, "When we couldn't find you we thought-"
She stops and pulls Ros into her arms, calling out, "Jocelyn! Jocelyn, I've found her!"
Ros hears Daddy running along the hallway below and pounding up the stairs, and she lets Mummy pick her up. She takes Fantastic Mr Fox with her but Daddy takes it away, throwing it onto the bed and taking her from Mummy. He holds her too tightly and Ros can feel his heartbeat but she doesn't say anything.
Two days later, Mummy will leave and she won't come back.
She will leave The Little Prince behind, laid carefully on Ros' pillow with a note saying, "Remember that I will always love you, my little darling."
Ros will throw the note away, crumpled up with the other rubbish.
ii.
"You must take part in an extra activity, Rosalind," her personal tutor told her, "Just one. Try and have some fun."
"I don't have to do anything," Ros had raged to herself, but she did as she was told and joined the Warwick University Conservative Party Association and she went to the meetings and she listened to the bullshit and then she met him, this waste of space who was currently sitting at her kitchen table and she let herself believe, just for a second, that maybe she could just have some fun.
Fat chance.
"Ros, please," Davis says, his Welsh accent more pronounced in his distress, "You can't tell me this is all you want from a relationship – a bit of intellectual porn and a quick fumble?"
"And what if it is?" she asks, fighting to keep her anger caged, "We're twenty one fucking years old, David. You can't tell me you're thinking about the big white wedding and the house full of kids already?"
He hesitates, just for a fraction of a second too long, and Ros can't contain her laughter. He must be joking, she thinks, he must be.
The hurt look on his face says he is doing anything but.
"So what if I am?" he says defensively, crossing his arms and blushing a deep shade of red, "My parents married at twenty three and they're happier than any other couple I've ever met. I'm not asking for that, Ros, just a sign that you're willing to commit a little to our future."
Ros fights the urge to collapse into a chair, wondering where along the line she misjudged David and his intentions so badly. Our future? He made it sound so final, like a death sentence.
"Why does it have to be more?" Ros asks carefully, "We have fun don't we? I thought that's wat you wanted."
He shrugs, brushing his hair back from his eyes for something to do. He is handsome, in a rough kind of way. Ros has always thought it. Now though, his looks just seem like another way to trap her.
"I'm not leaving here without an answer, Ros," he says sadly, "Either way, I'm not going."
"Then you'll have a long bloody wait," she snaps, furious that he should dare to come round here uninvited and try to put her under pressure. She makes a run for it, snatching her coat from the peg at the door and heading out into the night.
She walks for what seems like hours, kicking stones and glowering at people who happen to meet her eye. She can't believe, can't believe, that he would do this to her. She hates him and she hates the idea that she even needs to think about it. The answer should be obvious. She should send him packing. She doesn't do 'relationships'. She never has done. The only person she is willing to commit to is Daddy and that's because he's earned it, damn it. David has never shown himself as good for anything except a political debate and bed-bound debrief afterwards. He's fun and he's sexy and he makes her feel things.
It is only now, at this precise moment, that she realises the things he makes her feel mean nothing, not really.
She can find her fun some other way and that's all he is, some fun.
She doesn't need him, especially if he is going to act like this, turning up at her door and asking for more than she can give.
Well, that's that then, she thinks, bye bye David. Nice knowing you.
iii.
In hindsight, starting in Section D yesterday was a terrible idea. Today is Colin Wells' funeral and the Grid is almost empty, with the bare minimum of staff present to keep it running. They are all watching her furtively, every single one aware of the fact that her father is the reason the man is dead at all. It seems Colin was popular, for a techie.
Ros ignores their stares and settles down at her desk, playing catch up on the current operation. Adam is the one who wanted her to start yesterday and it made sense, to give her this morning to get up to speed, but there is definitely an atmosphere here that she does not appreciate. She carries on though, headphones glued to her ears so she doesn't have to listen to the whispering, like the twittering of little birds with nothing better to, and by lunchtime she is almost up to date and she has a few suggestions to make just as soon as they all come back.
Adam is first on the Grid, tugging his black tie from around his neck and shooting her a small smile in greeting. She is pathetically grateful for that grin when, a few moments later, Harry and Ruth follow him in. Harry nods and takes off for his office but Ruth won't meet her eye and Ros knows why. The guilt that she has been holding off all day starts to claw at her stomach and only gets worse when Jo and Malcolm come in through the pods. Neither of them even look at her and she can't blame them, but it doesn't make her feel any better. Malcolm is pale and drawn, the evidence of the morning's emotional impact plain on his face. He sits down at his computer and stares, unmoving, at the keyboard.
"Coffee?" Adam calls from the kitchen, addressing the room in general. Everyone consents.
"Not for me," Ros finds herself saying, "I'm going out for lunch."
She has already eaten, hunched up at her desk over an hour ago, but she needs to get out of the office and she needs to get out now.
She almost crashes into Zaf on the way out, who is tossing the car keys in his hand up in the air and catching them as he walks.
"Ros," he says, and his grin feels like he is mocking her, "Alright?"
She doesn't answer him, sweeping past and making for the front door as quickly as possible. She'll take a walk along the river and when she comes back, they all will have settled into their work and she won't have to watch them mourning. It's best for everyone; they don't want her with them today any more than she wants to be there.
It's a brisk day and she walks quickly, hands stuffed into her coat pockets because she didn't think to bring gloves. She is wearing black, a sign of her respect for their grief, and she is sure that other people walking along the river are watching her curiously. She is probably a very stark figure, all in black, hair buffered by the wind, murderous look on her face. Well, the more distance the better, as far as she was concerned.
After half an hour she gives in and buys a takeaway coffee, making her way back towards Thames House. She claims a bench nearby and sits down to drink her coffee before she goes back.
Someone sits next to her and she ignores them, until the person speaks to her.
"Are you alright?" Zaf asks. He is bundled up in a thick coat that she recognises as Adam's and he is holding his own coffee.
"Peachy," she answers drily, "What are you doing here?"
"Just needed to clear my head for a while. It's been an intense morning, you know?"
She doesn't answer, because an inane question does not deserve one.
"You didn't come out for lunch," Zaf says, "I saw the sandwich wrapper in your bin."
"Alright, Sherlock," she smirks, "I just needed to clear my head for a while."
He chuckles, his own words echoed back at him, and for a while they sit in silence. Ros sips her coffee and watches him do the same from the corner of her eye.
"You don't need to avoid any of them," he speaks again, gazing speculatively over the river as if he was discussing the birds swimming on it rather than this, "I know it seems like a good idea but none of them actually blame you. Not even Malcolm."
"I'm not avoiding anyone," she says icily, her fingers tightening on her cup. Damn him.
"OK," he smiles, and she has the urge to slap the smile from his face.
"I'm going in now," he stands up and looks at her properly for the first time since he announced his presence, "Come with me?"
"I'm good, thanks," she forces herself to meet his eye, "I'm entitled to a lunch hour aren't I?"
He nods and disappears, without another word, and Ros is left staring at the river. A lone duck floats past, a little separated from the group of its fellows it is following and Ros sighs.
She hates it when life imitates art.
vi.
She specifically did not tell Harry which hotel she was staying in, so the fact that he is here now at her door means that he went to the trouble of tracking her down.
He shouldn't have bothered.
She doesn't tell him that though, not when he is standing there with the oddest look on his face that she has ever seen from him. He looks like it wouldn't take him very much at all to either start smashing things or to break down and cry, and she doesn't want to watch him do either of those.
So she follows him to the bar and she lets him buy her a glass of red wine, because if anyone understands what she is feeling right now, it is Harry. Adam was his closest friend, save perhaps Malcolm, and there's nothing she can say to him that will make it better, any more than there is anything he can say to her. So they sit and for a little while, they just drink. They drink until the glasses are empty and he goes back for more. Ros already knows that a second glass is a bad idea but she takes it anyway. Right now, bad ideas seem just as valid as good ones.
She wonders if Harry has slept at all. It doesn't look like it, but then why would he? He is the one who had to tell Wes that his father wasn't coming home. He is the one who held the boy whilst he cried. Ros had just waited, pretending to watch the rugby game but really just avoiding looking at them, wrapped in their grief together. She had no part in that grief, any more than Harry has any part in hers now.
And yet here they are.
Then Harry starts to talk, about revenge and going to Dolby and taking down Kachimov, and Ros just listens, because this isn't Harry. Not really. Harry doesn't talk about revenge as an abstract concept, like some brooding hero in a gothic novel. Harry has plans and back up plans and, most of all, a cold and calculating approach to the whole thing. This Harry is eaten up by his passion, his rage, his pain.
This is the closest he has ever come to pouring his heart out to her, and she is angry, because she doesn't want this. For a wild moment, she wishes Ruth was here, because then Harry might have gone to her instead. It is selfish and she can't bring herself to even care. She just can't be here, right now, listening to him. She can't offer him anything that will soothe him and she knows, just knows, that if he carries on like this he is going to break down on her and she can't.
He trusts her, when trust is so hard for him, and she is selfish and she just can't.
"Go to bed, Harry," she finds herself saying, as coldly as she can bear to be towards him, "We're not doing each other any good."
And she is gone, before he can even answer her, and he could drink himself into a coma right now and she feels terrible because, right here and now, she doesn't care.
+ i.
Lucas disappeared almost as soon as he was allowed to, muttering about going home to sleep. He would be best left alone, right now. He'd been seething with a rage that she had never seen from him before.
Ros stays to finish some paperwork, to have something to do other than to think about the fact that Connie has turned out to be a prize-winning bitch. Ros had actually rather liked her, despite the fact they clashed too often, and she is annoyed that she just didn't see it coming. She is the section chief, the most detached of the senior staff from Connie and she should have been the one to spot the signs.
If she had seen it coming, maybe Ben would still be alive.
It is already late in the evening when Harry and Malcolm remove themselves from the Grid. They will be going to the pub, to drink whiskey and console each other that their good friend turned out to be who she was. Ros is not invited to this party and she wouldn't go even if she was. The pair of them need each other right now more than they need anyone else.
Jo is still at her desk when Ros decides to make a move and she stops, perching on the edge and waiting until Jo finally lifts her eyes to look at her.
"You should go home, get some rest."
"I can't stop thinking about Ben," Jo says, and Ros admires her for her ability to just say what she is thinking, "I just picture him lying there and –"
She stops, tears welling in her eyes. She is fighting them, for Ros' benefit. She knows how Ros feels about tears.
"And? What?"
Jo looks curiously at her and Ros can't blame her. She knows she is not known for her skills as a counsellor.
"When Adam and Zaf – I wished that there had been bodies, there had been something I could see, you know? But now, now that I've seen Ben like that…I don't wish for that anymore. Maybe it's better not to know."
Her lips are trembling and she looks down at her hands, still battling for composure. Jo is so young. Ros forgets it sometimes, but she is so, so young. She has lost Ruth, her confidante, and Adam, her mentor, and Zaf, her best friend, and now she has lost Ben, who Ros knows she was still harbouring some complicated feelings for. She has no one she can turn to tonight, to talk to about any of it.
She has literally no one.
Well, almost no one.
"Come on," Ros says, "Come back to mine. I'll make some dinner. We can get pissed and you can sleep on the sofa. I'll even make sure you don't choke on your tongue."
Jo's eyes are wary and Ros wants to laugh. Her performance as Ice Queen has clearly been effective, so that even an offer like this could potentially be hiding something barbarous.
"You don't need to be alone tonight," she coaxes, making her voice as gentle as she possibly can, "Come on. I don't bite. I even cook pretty well, if you don't mind pasta in two hundred varieties."
Jo smiles, a small, watery thing, and Ros knows she has won.
For now, this is who she is.
Counsellor. Confidante. Mentor.
Friend.
'Of course I'll hurt you. Of course you'll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence means accepting the risk of absence.'
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.