DISCLAIMER: None of you recognise belongs to me - I wish it did but sadly it doesn't. Silent Witness, and all characters and storylines that you recognise from the show, all belong to the BBC. I can only take credit for storylines and characters which you do not recognise from the show.
You've been on auto-pilot ever since the coffin was lowered into the ground and the guests began to filter away, leaving you stood alone - both right there in the moment, and in the little family that you had built around yourself ever since you joined Harry and Leo at the Lyell centre nine years ago. You'd been successful in holding yourself together up until now, but once you were alone, you let the myriad of emotions that have been building up inside you over that last year escape, and you feel free. You finally feel free.
The ground is hard beneath you as you sink to your knees, no longer having the strength to hold yourself up. You don't know how have you managed it for so long. The tears that are welled up in your eyes threaten to fall and this time you make no attempt to stop them, you let them do as they wish. You cry for the loss of the only man that has ever been a father to you, not biologically, but in every way that matters. You cry for the absence of the one other person, besides yourself, that should be here today but isn't. Either because he was unable to get the time off work, or because he didn't know. There is a third option, the chance that he doesn't care, but you refuse to believe that. Of course he cares, because Leo was as much his surrogate father as he was yours.
A sob escapes your lips and you wish more than anything that Harry was there to wrap his arms around you, there to tell a joke and put a smile on your face. You can almost hear his voice in your head, your mind trying to do just that. But nothing you can come up with in this moment is anywhere near as good as what you know he can come up with when put on the spot.
You had tried to move on after his departure. To fall in love again. Only you ended up leaving half way through the dates after you had compared them to Harry, and realised that they didn't come anywhere close to him. After you realised that none of them were him. In the end you gave up trying to find someone, you didn't see the point of putting in the effort when you knew it would never last, not with anyone whose name wasn't Harry Cunningham. There was no one that could ever compare to the man who had stolen your heart and not given it back when he left. For a short time you had changed his name in the contacts on your phone to 'Heart Thief'. You changed it back a week later when you realised how childish it was.
You don't know how long you sit at the side of Leo's grave, but in the time that you've been there, night has fallen around you and there is a slight chill in the air, prompting you to pull your blazer tighter around yourself in an attempt to ward of the cold wind. You wipe your face clean and make yourself look as presentable as you can after you've been sat in a graveyard and let loose a year's worth of built up emotions. Rising to your feet you press a kiss to your fingertips and then brush the top of the headstone. "I'll see you tomorrow."
"Nikki, you shouldn't be here." Jack is out of his chair and has flown across the lab to stop you from entering before you even have time to blink. "Go home, take a few days off. The coroner has all bodies going to other labs, and I can handle things around here for now."
"Nor should you." You dodge past him and make it to your desk, hanging your coat over the back of your chair and stuffing your handbag into the bottom drawer of your desk. Harry's voice floats into your mind, chastising you again for doing so. He's saying something about how bending it like you do to fit it into such a small space is ruining the leather, deforming it. He makes some joke about how one day when you pull it out at the end of the day to go home, it'll look like a prune. It's no where near funny but you laugh anyway. Not at his failed attempt a joke, but at the memory of the last time you joked about prunes together.
"Are you going to turn around and look at me? Or do I have to stare at the back of your head for the rest of my life?" It takes you a moment to realise that the words don't have an Irish lilt - that Jack's not even in the room any more. It takes you a moment to realise that the words have come from a person who should have been here yesterday, but didn't show up. From a person who you never thought you'd see again.
You keep your back to him - or the ghost that's taken his form and his voice, you haven't quite decided yet. "Are you really there? Or are you going to disappear as soon as I turn to face you?"
He lets out a breathy sort of laugh, one that you've not let yourself admit to missing as much as you have. "It's really me, Nikki." You hear the click of his fancy shoes against the linoleum that covers the floor as he steps closer and closer.
He takes one last step and he's suddenly right behind you. The heat from his body is all you can feel, all that you want to feel. Until he reaches out and grasps your shoulder. For the second time in as many days, you allow yourself to break down. You tell yourself that it's okay this time because he's here, and he wasn't last time. He wasn't there to wrap you in his arms and hold you close. To let you breathe in everything that's him and tell you that everything will be okay. That even though Leo is gone, you're going to take a few days, a week even, to grieve and be sad and then everything will go back to normal.
And he does just that. He gives you everything that you need and you don't even need to say a word. Like he always has. You can almost make yourself believe that he hasn't been gone for the last year, that he's been by your side every moment of every day for the last nine years, and will remain by your side every moment of every day still to come. But he hasn't, and you don't know if he will. You thought he would, once upon a time. He turned down the same offer years before, why would he accept it at a later date, especially if he has something more to stay for later down the road. You thought you knew him, but you were wrong. You know him even less after a year apart.
It's then that you do turn around and face him for the first time in over a year. You let him comfort you like he should have done yesterday.
"I'm sorry about yesterday." He whispers, and you only just hear his voice from where it's buried in your hair at the crook of your neck. For a second you wonder if he can read your mind. "I tried to be here. I guess I didn't try hard enough." He takes a breath. "I should have be there. I should ha-"
"I'm sure you did everything you could." You reach your hand out and bring it to his cheek. He does the same and brings your foreheads together.
The moment is broken and you pull apart when you hear the click of another man's shoes crossing the lab. "Nikki, are you still here? I told you to…" Jack stops in his tracks when he spots two bodies rather than just the one he was expecting.
"To go home? Yeah, just telling her doesn't work," Harry gives you a pointed look before he continues. "You have to physically force her out of the building." You bring your hand back up and swat his bicep.
"Ignore him." You shove Harry out of the way and sit down in the chair at your desk, intent on getting some work done. "I'm fine." You fix a look at both the men in the room. Jack relents and goes back to doing whatever he was before he interrupted you.
You take a file from your in tray and pull it in front of you. A hand slaps down on top of it as you go to open it. You think about stabbing him in the back of his hand with your pen, but he takes that off of you before you can. He gives you a look that he's given you a thousand times and you know there's no way he's going to back down.
You sigh and throw yourself back in your chair. "Fine." You reach down and grab your bag from where it's stuffed in the bottom drawer. "Not a word." You stand and point a finger at Harry in warning, mischief sparkling in your eyes. He brings his hand up and mimes zipping his lips closed, locking them up and tight, and throwing away the key. His eyes mirror the mischief in your own.
He's grabbed your coat and scarf off the back of your chair and is holding it out for you to slip back into. Much like he did a year ago, only this time once the coat sits on your shoulders, and the scarf is hanging around your neck, he doesn't bring his hands up and tap your cheeks. "Are driving or am I?"
"Well, I took a taxi, so…" You open your bag and pull out your car keys, but before you can put them in your pocket until you get to your car, Harry has pulled them out of your hand and shoved them in his own pocket. You frown at him and he laughs, which just causes you to frown harder. "What? I said I took a taxi, not that I wasn't driving."