Author's Note: This is slightly AU as it is set in a world where Ruth survives being stabbed. The Seal Lullaby is a beautiful tune written by the composer Eric Whitacre for a Dreamworks film that never happened, set to a poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. It is on youtube and I would highly recommend going to listen to it.
They stood on the bridge at Vauxhall, a cold, dull day of damp air drifting in from the Essex marshes.
It was the best they could do for a neutral venue given their respective schedules. Ruth's move the Home Office and her time recovering from Sasha Gavrik's stabbing put paid to their plan to leave. Harry had resolved that there were too many dangers. Ruth that no matter what, their past and their history would still be there and could still harm them. So in spite of best intentions they both went back to work and also, in spite of best intentions, they never moved forwards with their relationship.
Ruth had asked for some time, time as she recovered. Two whole hours of Harry's suffocating nurse routine had finally resulted in an angry outburst that had him quietly but resolutely walking out her door.
That had been three months ago.
In spite of his best hopes. Ruth's time apart seemed to have cemented her old doubts rather than putting paid to them as Harry would have wished and the cold, sharp, bitter words that met him cut to the quick just as they were meant to do. Eight years in love had taught them how to hurt each other, and little else. He listened to her words, he flinched at them, he stared off into the distance at the water beneath.
"Sometimes," Harry returned quietly, "I wish I could stop loving you."
Ruth listened to the words, drowned by the noise of the traffic. "Well maybe you should, Harry. Maybe you should stop loving me. Get over me. People do it, relationships break down and they move on, why should we be any different."
"You were singing a different tune three months ago, Ruth."
"Three months ago, Harry, you were prepared to leave the service."
"Three months is a long time, Ruth. There's a lot of water under that bridge," Harry said.
"And you wonder why I thought that working together was as close as we could ever come! You are your job, Harry. You always have been. Head of Section D. You live to work. God! Why did I ever think for a moment you would happily retire to some quaint English village?"
Harry wondered, not for the first time, about the convoluted connections that made up Ruth's mind. From what he had been able to establish working at the Grid reminded her of her life before exile, which caused her pain because of the reverse culture shock of coming back and finding nothing would ever be the same, that the idyllic early days of her time on the Grid, if the Grid could ever be called idyllic, were gone forever. Her guilt over marrying George without loving him as much as a wife should, her guilt over Nico being orphaned, her unreproachable anger at Harry for Baghdad, Albany and the Russian fiasco. An ex-friend at uni had once told Ruth after a prank that had gone down like a lead balloon that Ruth needed to learn to let things go. Ruth knew that she had always felt too much, that she took on the pain of both herself and others but it was who she was. She carried the pain with her and in that moment she looked up at him and regarded his profile and wondered, how many deaths...how many broken relationships...how much pain did he bear in his heart everywhere that he went. Berlin. France. Northern Ireland. Section D. How many orphans.
"The problem, Ruth," Harry whispered into the wind, "Is that you expect it to stop, the pain. The truth is that it doesn't stop and it doesn't ease. It becomes part of you, its seared onto your soul. You either learn to accept that the pain of everything you've endured is part of the whole, part of the person you are now, or you spend your life wishing for something that can never be. Do you think for a moment that I don't carry them with me, everywhere I go. Will, Nico, Wes, and all the others? And if you accept the pain as part of you, then when you love someone, you love them with that pain. It hurts, to love."
Slowly, carefully, Ruth took a step closer. Close enough that their shoulders touched. Down on the river a stray seal popped up. Its large head and dark eyes gazing curiously up and down the busy river. It was much quite far upstream for a seal but everyone knew they swam upriver from time to time.
"Its not that I don't love you, Harry. It never was."
"I know," Harry acknowledged, "It just hurts too much."
They stood that way a while, the wind in their hair, the cold biting at their noses as the watched the seal play in the waves, ducking under, popping up again, inspecting the boats nearby with great curiosity.
"And black are the waters that sparkled so green,'" Harry murmured.
"Hmm?" Ruth looked up sharply. "What?"
"Oh, I was just thinking the pollutions going to do for the poor thing if it hangs around much longer."
"No, the poem. That's..."
"Kipling," Harry supplied.
"Yes, that's right." Ruth took in a deep breath. "Harry..."
"Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled so green." Harry stopped. "The Seal Lullaby. I forget the rest."
A seagull squawked overhead. A series of buses rumbled over the bridge behind them. A taxi tooted at the tradesman's white van that had just cut it up on the outside lane and softly, Ruth Evershed began to sing.
"Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o'er the combers,
looks downward to find us
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas."
When Ruth stopped she felt a rush of embarrassment at her impromptu burst of creative expression. It wasn't like her to break out in song except in the shower, but she missed choir and she missed singing and it had seemed a good idea at the time. Cautiously, cheeks burning an awkward shade of crimson, Ruth glanced up at Harry and found him looking slightly dumbfounded and nestling her hand in his own.
"We sang it in choir," Ruth muttered, feeling a bit stupid now.
Harry said nothing, he simply waited what seemed like an appropriate length of time before leaning in and kissing her gently on the lips. His heart clenched in joy and anticapted rejection as Ruth softly moved her lips under his and then tilted her head so their forehead rested together.
"My mother read it to me once. She always had a soft spot for seals. I was the weary wee flipperling," Harry announced making them both laugh.
Out on the river the seal appeared to be watching them, not that either cared to notice. In that moment nothing and no one existed but the two of them and their ghosts, the souls they carried with them through their lives and the melancholia that hung so closely around them slipped back in as quickly as the laughter dissipated..
"I can't not love you Ruth. God knows I've tried, but I can't. I wake up in the morning and think of you, I go to sleep and I think of you. You haunt me, you hurt me. But if its going to hurt so much why can't we hurt together?"
"Oh Harry..." Ruth's hands came to his chest, resting on the warm lapels of his warm coat. Her head inches from his, he could see her wavering.
"Let yourself love me, Ruth," Harry pleaded.
"How can I? How can I let myself?"
"By accepting that the pain is part of us now. It always will be. The pain and all of the ghosts that lie between us."
"So much for monogamy..." Ruth's cutting dark humour muttered.
It was that, more than anything, that gave Harry the first flicker of hope but he waited, still he waited, as she stood there with her hands on his chest making her deliberation. Eventually she nuzzled his cheek and pulled back and leaned once more over the water. With bated breath he waited, feeling the burn of the hand that had trailed from his chest down his arm to the cold stone of the bridge.
The seagulls squawked, the traffic rumbled. Below a river taxi hooted a fog horn.
"Two," She announced, a hint of a blush tinting her cheeks.
Harry floundered. "Two...?"
"Children."
Harry racked his brains to try and figure out which children she was talking about. "Nico and Wes?" Harry himself had more than two orphans to account for. Will Holloway had only been the first of those and the interest that the lad himself was now displaying in joining the service was something Harry feared might set an example for other service orphans interested in following in his footsteps.
"I meant with you," Ruth admitted quietly. "I always imagined us having two children. I was at my university reunion last week and I bumped into an old friend. She's just lost her husband, brain tumor, and she thought going along might cheer her up. Somehow all we ended up doing was exchanging sob stories over a bottle of chardonnay and somehow I got to talking about you."
Harry's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"I mean I didn't mention you by name, Harry, but I found myself talking about us and how we'd never quite gotten around to the relationship bit and after I'd explained she disagreed. She said, 'Sounds to me like you've been in a relationship with him for the last eight years, you just don't want to admit it.' I've just spent so long telling myself we can't be together, spent so long being angry and self-conscious and hating myself."
On the side of the bridge Ruth's hands began to wring together, an old tell for her anxiety that she had never quite been able to shake. Beside her, Harry reached over and stilled her hands with his own. His thumb ran over the back of her hand. "I'm sorry I went back to D."
"No you're not," Ruth chastised him. "That seal down there might as well apologise for being in the river. Where should Sir Harry Pearce be but in the heart of his natural habitat? It was a stupid idea."
"It wasn't stupid, Ruth. I'm just not sure I'm cut out for gardening leave. I do still want to marry you though."
Ruth tore her gaze away to stare. Down on the water the seal made an odd sort of keening noise before porpoising into the water. "Harry..."
"I am not having children with you without getting married, Ruth," Harry insisted.
"I can't handle a big wedding. All those people, the cost, the organisation the security threats. Half of five and six there, GCHQ muscling in, Towers parading about, the PM trying to seal some shady deal in the corner while the Russian Ambassador puts in a formal complaint that he wasn't invited..."
"Then we'll have a small wedding, unannounced, in the registry office," Harry brought her hand to his lips, cold lips that were chilled by the wind whipping down the Thames but it was the look of pleading in his eyes that caught Ruth and she realised she had a man here who would do almost anything for her. Who would cherish her and love her and bend to her will. The problem was that after everything that had happened she didn't believe she deserved it, that sort of happiness. "Just the two of us," Harry finished hopefully.
"And you think we deserve it, that happiness, after all that we've done? We don't deserve it, Harry," Ruth said resolutely, her eyes fixed not on Harry but on the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral, further downriver.
"We are all of us sinners, isn't that how it goes? There but for the grace of God, Ruth. I haven't been to church in a long time but I remember that bit."
"You don't believe in God."
"But you do, Ruth, or you did once, and from what I recall God's grace isn't something we get to choose. If we are bestowed a chance of, if not happiness, then at least sharing the burden and sharing the pain and occasionally, hopefully, sharing our love then who am I to argue?"
Ruth mulled this thought over, playing with Harry's hands, massaging his ring finger. "Okay," She agreed quietly.
"Ok?" Harry repeated, needing the confirmation of Ruth's decision after so many knock-backs.
"Ok."