He shifts uneasily in the doorway, but Malcolm meets that hollow stare, holding Harry's eye with a bravery he would ordinarily never have been able to sustain. This is not about him, or even about them; this is about the man who is standing before him, covered in Ruth's blood, even as he holds her hand tenderly and strokes her hair with all the wonder of a lover in the first flush of discovery, smoothing the dark wing of her fringe back from her pale forehead with a rhythm of almost hypnotic intensity:

Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…

As long as I'm with her, holding her hand and saying her name, she's not really gone at all, Harry tells himself. She's just asleep, or perhaps in a coma… but she's still here. With me. She wouldn't leave me like that, all that life and brilliance and passion just poured out across the cold, wet grass…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…Ruth…

Harry looks away first, his gaze dropping back to Ruth's face dismissively, while his former colleague and old friend watches, heart cracking wide open with grief at the sight of such silent despair. After a time, he takes a tentative step into the room, and Harry rumbles instantly, "Get away from her," his voice so darkly menacing that anyone else would have turned and fled; instead Malcolm takes one more step, then another, his eyes always on the older man, until he is facing him across the gurney. "Don't touch her!" Harry growls, as Malcolm reaches out towards him. "Harry," he says, as his hand makes tenuous contact with Harry's, still desperately clutching Ruth's. "Harry, I'm so sorry," he continues, although his throat is thick with unshed tears, and for the first time, the other man stops stroking Ruth's hair. Ruth… Ruth… Ruth.

Harry's sudden stillness is a terrible thing to see, and Erin, observing from beyond the glass, realises that she is holding her breath in total concentration; this gentle man, with the thinning, reddish hair and the kindest eyes she has ever seen, is approaching her boss with all the caution of a bomb disposal expert faced with a particularly lethal IED. "I'm so sorry," he says again, even more softly, and with incalculable patience and humility, he begins to unentwine Harry's thick, strong fingers from Ruth's small, cold ones. He has the touch of an artist, and the soul of a saint, Erin thinks, watching in fascination as Malcolm carefully releases Ruth's hand from Harry's grasp. She is nearly, but not quite, unaware that her own hand is now wrapped in Dimitri's large, rather nice one. How did that happen? Erin wonders, before deciding that she will allow it. Just this once

When at last he has separated them, Malcolm reverently folds Ruth's hands over her breast, and lightly passes his palm over her eyelids, closing her dull, filmed-over eyes, no longer a piercing greenish-blue, but a flat, opaque non-colour, saying something in Welsh under his breath as he does so. Ruth's body looks like a medieval carving in ivory when his ministrations are complete, and Harry, standing beside him, hands hanging uselessly at his sides now, begins to howl like a wild creature, mortally wounded; it is a shocking noise, raw and like nothing that Erin has ever heard before, or ever wants to hear again for as long as she lives. Dimitri looks down at her questioningly, shuddering at the sound of Harry's naked pain, and she nods: Let's go.

There's nothing more we can do here, anyway, Erin reasons, as Malcolm delicately draws the sheet up over Ruth's face and then turns to attend to Harry. Her boss tilts towards him, still making that heartrending noise of absolute suffering, until his forehead is just touching the outer aspect of Malcolm's shoulder and his fists are clenched like a boxer's in the heavy knit of his old colleague's guernsey. She turns around as she reaches the double doors, just as Harry seems to stagger and lose his balance; Malcolm catches him as he crumples to the floor, and unlike Lot's wife, Erin knows that she mustn't look back any more; what is taking place in that tiny, glassed-in room is not for anyone to witness, and she leaves without another glance.

Much later, the two men leave the morgue, Malcolm leading Harry like a small child as he hails a black cab outside the hospital and gives an address in Westminster, just over the river. It is Malcolm who pays the driver, Malcolm who locates the keys in Harry's stiff, dirty clothing, Malcolm who lets them into Harry's little mews apartment. He moves around the unfamiliar space, turning up the thermostat, drawing the curtains, finding light switches and little pieces of Ruth as he goes. Here on the mantelpiece is a well-thumbed edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, just as she left it, and there are her shoes, lined up in the hallway; on the kitchen bench is an opened packet of the HobNobs that she so loves – loved, he reminds himself, feeling ill at the thought of food – to enjoy with a cup of tea in her chipped old mug from Corpus Christi; the mug itself still sits in the sink, to be washed up when its owner returned this evening…Malcolm finds that he can't bear the sight of something left undone, and he rinses the mug out before setting it on the draining board.

In the cupboard over the cooker, he finds what he is looking for, and carries the squat, dimpled bottle and two tumblers back into the sitting room, where Harry stares into the gas fire and holds something against his cheek; a ladies' cardigan or wrap of some kind, Malcolm decides, as he pours several fingers into each glass, and sets the bottle on the low table between them. He hates whisky, but tonight he would drink from the waters of the Styx itself, if only Harry would say something. When he finally does, he sounds like the Harry he knows of old, just for a moment.

"So, where the bloody hell have you been for the last year?" he begins belligerently, somewhere halfway through his second drink. "And why are you here now? Who leaked?" Malcolm grimaces, as much at Harry's hoarse, harsh tone as at the whisky now burning its way into his stomach, and wonders how much to tell him. "I went off the grid, after Albany. Mother and I had to clear out of Hampstead in a hurry, you know, and it frightened her very badly. So I paid a little visit to Tom Quinn, got some advice, and dropped out of sight. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder; the idea of it terrified me." Harry grunts in disdain, fixing Malcolm with the interrogatory stare he knows so well of old. "And?" he prompts; Malcolm sighs, peering into the depths of his whisky, glinting a warm golden-brown in the crystal tumbler.

"Did you know that Ruth had updated your Next of Kin form recently?" At the mention of her name, Harry's eyes blaze bright hazel. "Of course I did. I asked her to do it at the same time as she changed her own." Malcolm exhales slowly; he had thought as much, of course, but it was still surprisingly difficult for him to hear. "Well, she listed my number right at the bottom – as a last resort, I suppose. She must have gotten it from Tom. Why didn't you ask her to list Catherine, or even Graham, instead?"

Harry looks straight at him, then, pupils black and bottomless as an ocean crevasse, and twice as bleak. "Because I expressly told her not to. I didn't want them dragged into our world unnecessarily; she and I were going to be everything to each other, you see. I didn't think I'd need anyone else; so much for that little dream of Utopia, then." His words are hard, but his voice starts to tremble towards the end. The whisky's beginning to erode Harry's reserve, Malcolm notes, and chooses his next words carefully. "I think she knew that something like this might happen one day, and if it did, she didn't want you to be alone, or amongst people who didn't know you like we…like I…do. Whatever lies in the past, Harry, I'm here now, for as long as you need me." Harry drains his glass and in the same movement raises his arm to smash the vessel on the hearth, and before Malcolm can intervene, the crystal shivers into a hundred tiny shards.

"Damn it, Malcolm, I've missed you," Harry whispers at length, and the man sitting opposite him nods slowly. "I know. I've missed you too." Harry's face creases, then, and burying his face in his arms, his body shakes with the effort of suppressing his sobs. Malcolm quietly gets up and goes upstairs, partly to look for the bathroom, and partly from his wish to give Harry a modicum of privacy: and there it is, hanging faintly on the air as he passes the master bedroom, ready to ambush him in an instant. Ruth's favourite perfume, a scent that has always reminded him of an English flower garden after rain.

It is as if he has run into an invisible force field; his legs stop working, as memory after memory cascades through his consciousness, and his own feelings threaten to overwhelm him altogether, until he hears the muffled sound of Harry's heartbreak, and is reminded of his purpose here tonight. He finds the bathroom, and perches on the edge of the bath, chest heaving, fighting for control. Blushing, he spots a pair of Ruth's stockings, wrung out this morning and left to dry on the radiator, her purple toothbrush next to Harry's white one in the glass on the vanity, her towel hanging on the back of the door. The whole room is redolent of her, and unbearably personal. If he needed any further proof that Harry and Ruth had been together in the very fullest sense of the word, here it is, laid out before his eyes: her Dewberry body wash in the shower, her hairbrush on the window ledge, her fluffy pink slippers in the corner.

Malcolm forces himself to take it all in, and when he can absorb no more, he draws a long breath, bows his head, and prays, before going back down the stairs, to keep vigil over his friend. For her.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love…

A/N: Malcolm's words are from the Prayer of St Francis. For those who are wondering, as background to this fic, Malcolm has long carried a torch for Ruth, of which storyline there is (much, much) more in my major work in progress, Hook, Line, and Sinker. This fic is a standalone, but I have spent so much time in the world of H,L&S that inevitably some bits of head canon will get carried over into other stories!