5

Reckoning Ch 1

The characters (well, almost all of them!) are owned by BBC and Kudos.

Your comments on Returns were so helpful, and I enjoyed writing that story so much, that I decided to write another one…not sure where this going. We'll see. It is set immediately after the end of series 8. What prompted it is that although many of us see harry as a bit of a softy, I actually thing that he is quite hard, quite ruthless at times (remember the episode where he kills some assassin who was following him, by using his tie, in a subway public toilet? Or something like that…) Also, in series 8, Ruth has changed too. She stands up to Harry, she is no longer gauche and awkard, she has gained in confidence and experience. In this fic I will try to explore those features of their character, and how they affect their relationships. At the same time, I want them to remain in character broadly speaking, so tell me if I go off track (some of my plans for future chapters really might not work at all…)

OK, enough of this, and on to the story.

1.

He phones her on a regular basis, from the hospital, to give her updates on Lucas (both legs broken, fractured ribs and a concussion), Ros (in coma), and Andrew Lawrence (crushed pelvis, critical condition.) He hasn't come back to the Grid, or gone home, since the explosion two days before. Nor has she. She is itching to go to the hospital, not least to be with him, but he has made it very clear that she is to stay where she is – processing, analysing information on Nightingale as some of the conspirators throughout the world are being rounded up and interrogated.

In the spare moments she has, in between emails and phone calls, she casts her mind back to the few moments she and Harry shared as the plot unfolded – when he took her to the intelligence briefing, when she challenged him – rightly, it seemed – on his prejudices against the home secretary, that moment on the roof, when he brushed off her attempt at comforting him, his direct, quite hard stare when she tried to convince him not to go to the hotel…he is blowing hot and cold on her, and she no longer knows where she stands with him. What she does know is that once the adrenaline generated by those hectic few days levels off, she will be left with the same answered questions as before….how long, she thinks bleakly, how long before we can finally talk, and find a way to each other…

She sighs.

'Ruth?'

She looks up: Tariq, who really got his baptism of fire today, and came through superbly, is calling out to her, looking rather worried.

'Yes?'

'There's something odd. About Nicholas Stone.'

'The former Home Secretary? What's that?'

'He's disappeared.'

'What do you mean, disappeared?'

'Well, Harry had asked me to put a trace on him. It's gone.'

'Have you…?'

'Yes. He's not answering his phone and his email account has been deactivated.'

She thinks for a few seconds, then picks up the phone and orders a car. 'I'm going to go to his house now. If Harry rings here put him through to my mobile.'

At Stone's house, no answer. The blinds are shut. There's no sign of anyone there. She pulls out her mental file on Stone: a widower, no known lover, no children….on the way back to the Grid, she places a few queries with the police and local hospitals. No one has filed a mssing person report, no one has seen him. He's properly and truly gone, she frowns as she makes her way to her workstation.

'Tariq told me. So?' Harry intercepts her, impatient, urgent, fatigued etched on his face.

'Nothing, Harry. No one has any idea where he is. How are….??'

'Still stable, both of them', he cuts in.

'And Lawrence?'

'Still critical. You were right about him, Ruth.'

'Mmm…which leaves us with his predecessor.'

Harry rubs his face, tiredly. 'I don't know what to think anymore. I was so convinced he was one of the good guys.'

'He might still be. We need more information, Harry.'

'The voice of reason', he says…'As usual.' He means it well, but she does not take it that's how he sees me, she thinks. Good old dependable reliable Ruth…she grits her teeth. Come on, get a grip, she tells herself, you're exhausted, so he is……

So she smiles, a thin, tight smile, and takes her place at her desk station, the blue light of her screens tracing abstract figures on her face, oblivious to Harry;'s intense, concerned and at once hungry gaze on her.

2.

Four weeks after the explosion, Lucas is out of the hospital but stuck in a wheelchair; Lawrence is recuperating in a high dependency unit – he is still the Home Secretary though, in a symbolic gesture of the PM, determined that 'terrorists will not endanger the functioning of democratic institutions'. 'He's got no else to replace him with' – was Harry's hard, cynical gloss to Ruth.

Then again, Harry has become hard and cynical. Or perhaps he always was, and she had managed to overlook his inherent toughness? She tries to tell herself that he is desperately worried about Ros, who is only slowly emerging from her coma; she reasons that he is operating under enormous, crushing pressure – with Lucas and Ros out of commission for now, they are severely under strength. He has asked MI6 for field agents, but the process of vetting, and trying them out, is frustratingly slow. So far, MI 6 have only managed to release one – John Derby, in his late thirties though already veteran of Middle Eas field work, with unparalleled knowledge of the region's many dialects and politics. He is with them only part time, for a short spell, and she can tell, already, that Harry doesn't take too him. Still, she wishes he were less abrupt with Derby, less impatient generally with all of them, especially Tariq, the youngest of all, who is trying as best as he can to be as good as Malcolm was with only a fraction of the older man's experience, but who falls short somewhat – and how else could it be, when they have no time to process the avalance of information they are getting, when more still is coming, and when his many requests for more sophisticated equipment go unanswered by the high tech department?

She wishes that she could get through to Harry. But gone are the private moments of shared understanding which made her days at the Grid bearable. Gone are the briefed, snatched conversations on the roof, which made her feel that they were, slowly but steadily, groping their way to – to what, exactly, she asks herself in her bleakest moments? To a blurry friendship? A platonic never-going-anywhere romantic attachment? She casts her mind back to that time, on the roof, when he was crying over the fate of thousands of strangers who might die because of Nightingale; she remembers the feel of his arm under her fingers, as she tried to comfort him – and the way he pulled away, quickly, closing down on her, unwilling to acknowledge both his feelings and her touch….

He never used to smile much, at work. In the last few weeks, she has not seen him smile, let alone laugh, once. At first, she could understand his tension. Now, she is beginning to feel angry. Rather furiously angry, in fact.

3.

He doesn't remember feeling as powerless as he is now. His best field agents unavailable, the democratic credential of the wounded but stil very much present Home Secretary still in doubt, the complete lack of information about Nicholas Stone's whereabouts…and this new man, John Derby, on loan from Six as a huge favour whose smoothness and obvious rapport with Ruth irk him…He is floundering. He has a deep, unshakeable hunch, that Nightingale is not dead, and that all they got was a reprieve. Pakistan and India pulled away from the brink this time. Officially the CIA director was not part of it; nor the US president. He can just about believe that. What he cannot believe is that an operation as sophisticated, and as financially well endowed as Nightingale, was a one-shot so the question is where the next shot will be coming from, who will fire it, and when, and they don't have a clue.

Nothing Tariq manages to pull out from his twice daily trawl through relevant mobile, email and internet traffic yields anything much – however creatively Ruth manages to analyse the snippets they get.

Ruth…he so much wish he could get closer to her. A few weeks ago, it felt as if she would welcome that. Her fingers on his, when he took the difficult decision to keep a young teenager in the field as an informat…her hand stroking his arm, the day of the explosion…her offer they go for a drink, which he accepted but never took up….She's taken all the steps since their bench conversation after Jo's death, and he hasn't felt able to even meet her half way.

When he can, when he is not rushing between meetings and sitting at hair-raising briefings, he tries to understand himself. It's not that I don't want her, he tells himself. God knows…it's because I simply can't give her what she had in Cyprus. I can't give her a simple and elegant life. As for companionship…how could I, when I have to work 18 hours a day…

Deep down, he knows that these are flimsy rationalisations. That the reason why he is stuck is because he is terrified of losing her again, of having to watch her leave with someone else or die. The fear is hard enough in their state of non-relationship; if they were with her, properly together, as he is not even sure these days she wants to be, the fear would be terror, unmanageable, paralysing.

So he clams up, erects barriers around himself and keeps her at arms length – even more so these days as he really barely has the time to eat or sleep. He knows that he is not leading his skeleton-staff as effiicently as he could. He knows that he is too demanding, not genial enough, too sparse with praise. He can tell, too, that Ruth is becoming more and more distant with him. But he does not know how else to be.