2. September-November 2012.
Erin had watched him closely, that shadow of her boss, over the past sixteen months. They had all been stunned and disbelieving when he had returned to the Grid a day after the funeral where he had stood, silent and immovable and ravaged by grief, Malcolm standing sentinel next to him on one side and another, younger man (also tall but dark haired, blue eyed and grim, with the fire of justice burning deep in his soul) on the other and the silence being the only thing that had stopped him from collapsing as completely as everyone had expected. At first, after his return, it had appeared that he was back to normal but she, along with the other two survivors of that hideous day, had quickly realised that he was anything but: it was all an act designed to hold himself together for fear of the total disintegration that was likely to happen if he didn't. Although completely on the ball professionally – if anything, frighteningly harder, sharper and more clinical than he had been for years - he was, personally, little more than a shell of who he had been, brittle, fragile, emotionless and preternaturally calm, and so the trio had watched, forming a protective barrier around him of which he wasn't even aware, and hoped that, one day, something of the original man would return.
Occasionally there were moments when she thought he might be coming back to them, flashes of light in eyes or voice, a brief spark of humour in his words, but then something would send him back behind his invisible wall, unapproachable. She had managed to talk to him, once or twice, about why he had returned but all he had said was that there was nothing else he could do when the alternative was to stay at home to wither and die, a pointless action of which Ruth would not have approved. He had also warned her to plan on getting out, before all that was left for her as well was the job, her identity and everything else consumed beyond recognition.
Watching him navigate his way through daily life so very carefully, wrapped in his self-imposed, overly calm isolation and so disengaged from anything personal it was almost, she thought, as though he was waiting for something to wake him up from his torpor although neither she nor Dimitri nor Calum could work out what that might be. They knew he was nowhere self-deluded enough to believe that, somehow, Ruth would miraculously return from the dead, he was too grounded in reality, but time and events such as the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics came and went – without incident and apparently, unusually for him, without stress – but still he seemed to be waiting for that which was unknown. Unless it was the ultimate oblivion but none of them believed that of him, either: he had never had a death wish and he had made it abundantly clear to Erin during one of their chats that his priority now was to continue to mend his relationships with his children and if it took him another 30 years to repair the damage then so be it. In the meantime, until whatever it was he was waiting for – redemption, forgiveness, peace? – arrived, there was work. Never-ending work.
On this day it was a particularly fine Autumn morning, even Harry could recognise that, with the sky an eggshell blue above a city glittering in clear, pale gold sunlight. He was feeling slightly more human today and could actually appreciate the view and the warmth of the sun on his face; that very rare weekend on the coast (Norfolk, not Suffolk – he would never be able to cope with Suffolk again) just gone, spent out-doors in the sea air and on the water, had presumably done him some good, as had the news last night that Catherine was finally marrying her partner and, unaccountably and unexpectedly, wanted him to do the traditional thing and walk her down the aisle. That thought made the shadow of a smile flit across his face. At least he had managed to patch things up with her, although Graham was proving to be more intractable but there had even been recent progress on that front as well. From both sides, to the surprise of one if not the other: the father had long recognised the ache of longing to reconnect but the son had refused to until recently and was still battling with the realisation but at least he hadn't rejected the impulse entirely, as he had so often done in the past. Harry had quietly and correctly decided that his son's changing attitude to him was at least as much down to the combination of Graham quietly knuckling down, quite successfully, to university studies and starting a stable relationship with a 'suitable' girl (one who didn't have a string of drug and other charges behind her) who was a post-doctoral researcher as it was to his own efforts but he didn't care, as long as it continued. There would be no more personal relationships for himself, he had decided that long since – he didn't want his uneasy calm shattered by emotions, he wasn't sure he would survive that variety of pain ever again – but if he could get things right with the kids, continue to be a stable reference point for Wes Carter and, maybe, become a half-way decent grand-father, if and when that happened, then that would be enough and he would be content.
The door to the deck opened and soft footsteps approached. He had long since stopped listening for a certain footfall, knowing he would never hear it again but occasionally, such as now, when he was thinking of other things, the setting would make him turn and half expect to see her. Instead, it was Erin, of course, as he knew it would be. She gave an apologetic smile.
"Sorry, Harry, but our visitor has arrived. She'll be on her way up by now so I thought I'd better come and get you."
Ah, the Cousin from the Antipodes, he had forgotten that she was arriving today. A diversion foisted on him by the DG that, initially, had annoyed him but now, he realised, would force him to focus on something else for a while... Although he had been working with the woman on and off for well over two decades, mostly at a vast distance, he only had the dimmest memories of what she looked like. Tall-ish with long, dark hair was about it, which probably wasn't bad considering they hadn't actually seen each other in the flesh since Bangkok in 1993. Her laconic sense of humour he was more familiar with: rememberance of her pointed responses to the emails he still occasionally sent, crowing when England had beaten Australia in some sporting event somewhere, made the ghost of a smile appear and disappear as they wound their way down from his roof-top eyrie. No matter what, she would still be under foot for weeks, a stranger on the floor when he still, really, wasn't up to having a stranger there. Or, correctly, another one – he had only in the last few months got used to the oddity of having the new senior analyst on board, over a year after they had been appointed. Sighing, and wondering just how painful the next few weeks were going to be with the alien presence around, he followed the young woman back onto the grid, musing momentarily on how she had grown into her role over the past year or so, although she still wasn't ready to take on his job permanently, lacking the moral flexibility, he liked to call it, required to make a success of the laser-like focus on the defence of the realm that she did have. His instinct to keep her on had been right on that front, at least, even if not on anything much else of recent years.
Dimitri, now his Senior Case Officer, and Waleed, the replacement senior analyst – he really must stop thinking of the man as a replacement, he chided himself absently, he was the analyst and a bloody good one – were talking to the new arrival when he and Erin returned. Dressed in a sober although exquisitely tailored linen suit the colour of sage and wearing low-heeled court shoes, she was not quite as tall as he remembered – although in the heels she was still looking him in the eye – but had clearly kept herself fitter than he had, which wasn't surprising, given the penchant she had always had for martial arts (a black belt in karate and something ridiculously high in ju-jitsu, he thought he remembered). The dark hair was collar-length now, not half-way down her back as it used to be, and liberally streaked with silver; what he thought he remembered as a hard, muscular body had softened around the edges with the passing of time and the plethora of crinkles around her eyes when she smiled reminded him that she wasn't much younger than he was, either. Striking, not beautiful, and with a well-modulated contralto, their paths had physically crossed only thrice before, around the time of the collapse of the old Soviet regime, when he had been on one of his periodic secondments to MI6 and she had been with ASIS and they had both been dealing with potential domino-effects from the failure of the communist monolith within their own spheres of influence, his in Western Europe and hers in South East Asia. She had a talent, then, of being able to disappear into the background, to the extent that even her own colleagues could make the mistake of underestimating her, although they only ever made that error once... Since then, they had both lived not dis-similar paths. He had permanently returned to MI5, for his own, personal, reasons; a decade later, she had done something similar, transferring to ASIO from ASIS, although he couldn't know it was on similar grounds, and they had remained intermittently in touch while she had been his equivalent over there, swapping information along with the barbed sporting emails. It wasn't any of that, however, which was the cause of the shock of recognition that hit him like the proverbial lightning bolt when they got close enough to be re-introduced and shake hands; it was when she turned her sea-green eyes to him and he saw the bottomless depths of the old, incurable sadness that they held, for all to see. That was a major change from the last time they had met and his immediate conclusion was that she had to have been where he was now, although he hoped not for the same reason. He wouldn't wish this on anyone.
Hope Johnson also vaguely remembered crossing paths with the younger Harry Pearce, first in West Berlin and later back in London, before that final, very short, reunion in Thailand. In Berlin – his last time doing Six's dirty work, as it turned out – he had, with extreme efficiency, been mopping up the last of a joint operation with a tall, slim, dark-haired young CIA agent whose name she couldn't remember for the moment and was preparing to head home and had, she remembered, been rather glamorous, with a head full of riotous blond curls, that beautiful English skin she so envied, almost irridescent hazel-amber eyes and a voice to die for. Back in London a couple of years later the riotous curls had disappeared, tamed by a civil service cut, and the casual clothes had been replaced by sharp Savile Row suits but the rest was still there, albeit mitigated slightly by the fact he was hobbling around on a broken foot after another run-in with the IRA. In Bangkok, of course, they had both been running around under cover in civvies, he doing a very good impersonation of a sun-burned, bumbling, slightly ignorant English tourist while she was performing her own loud, drunken Australian version of the same thing. It was the current version of the London incarnation that now approached her with a young, rather decorative brunette trotting along behind him. She was about to crack a joke about him only hiring beautiful assistants (Dimitri was a bit of a dish and Waleed was absolutely gorgeous, an Ancient Egyptian pharoah come to life with bronze skin and huge, dark, almond eyes but sporting carefully maintained designer stubble in lieu of the traditional false beard) when she realised something was seriously amiss and the wise-crack died before it was born. Instead of the vital, powerful, charismatic person she was expecting, here was a man locked in deep mourning: slim to the point of being gaunt, which he had never been in the past (trim, yes, but solid and fearsomely fit with it back in the day, although she remembered him once commenting in an email a few years back that he was at risk of turning into a pudding, as they all were, between the twin evils of encroaching age and increasing desk-sitting), dressed in an immaculate black suit and a black and white tie, although he was giving her a welcoming smile as they went to shake hands she noted it got nowhere near to touching his eyes.
It was as much a shock to her as it had been to him when she met his eyes: they were brim full of a very raw and recent pain and hopelessness that was right up there with what her own had been just before the turn of the millenium. She had heard one or two whispers, once it was known that she was heading to London, of some things that had gone very astray a year or two back, including murmurings of an enquiry into his past and something extremely messy involving, first, the Chinese and then a group of Russian nationalist extremists (she had briefly wondered if the latter had anything to do with the whispers of another old stuff up in Berlin, also involving Russians, that she had heard of while there in the late eighties, then dismissed the idea; there was thirty years between the two events, after all, and the Soviet Union was long gone) but she wasn't expecting to see something approaching the scale of her own ancient suffering to be looking back at her. Whatever the cause, she would have to quietly find out some details from his staff to make sure she didn't inadvertently do or say anything that would make his torment worse. Poor bastard...
Masking her thoughts with a pleasantly neutral expression in eyes and tone she proferred her hand with a slightly casual,
"Hello, Harry, long time no see!"
He had forgotten the warmth of her smile, as well as the strength of her handshake but both memories were solidly revived as they shook.
"Hello, Hope, welcome back. About twenty years since we last met, I make it."
The realisation that it was a shade under two decades had only hit him as they had been returning from the roof-top terrace and it was sobering, almost depressing. Where on earth had the years gone? Last time they had met Catherine had been thirteen, Graham about to turn ten and Ruth would have still been a university student, none of them even remotely aware of the disasters the future would hold, although the same would have been said of he and Hope, despite them both being in their thirties and far more worldly... He noted the wry acknowledgement of the passage of so much time in her eyes and immediately felt guilty as her smile faded a little and she sighed.
"Ah yes. The era of perestroika and glasnost and we were all going to be out of a job. Then look at what happened."
Hope had worked out the dispiriting number of years that had passed since they had last met on the long flight over but hearing the numbers spoken made her feel as unenthusiastic as he obviously did. Gazing at him, she thought she saw a glint of another pain in the dark eyes as she spoke and immediately assumed she had already put her foot in it (the Russian connection again?) but, whatever it was, it was gone as soon as it appeared and he flashed her another hollow smile, accompanied by a slightly sardonic,
"Indeed. The world was going to be peaceful and we were all going to live happily ever after. For the dreamers, perhaps. The likes of you and I knew better than that." He gestured at the rest of the small group. "I see you've met Dimitri Levendis and Waleed Yassine already. This is Erin Watts, my Section Chief. Erin, this is Dr Hope Johnson, formerly China Section Head for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, later Head of counter-espionage for the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, now Deputy Head of the National Security Council and a senior policy advisor to the Australian government and here to pick our brains for the next three months in preparation for the new, multi-national counter-terrorism focus group that is being set up."
The brunette was Harry's Section Chief? Looking like that she'd hardly blend into the crowd... The disbelief died as Hope suddenly remembered her own successor, Ilian Grant, who was generally impeccably glamorous herself, capable of rivalling the average movie star but equally of looking like a washed-out suburban housewife depending on what was required. Ilian had always cheerfully maintained that glamour was an advantage in their game because everyone assumed she was a ditzy piece so no-one ever thought she would be a spy... The two women shook hands as the visitor suddenly grinned with a hint of devilry in her eyes as she responded to the introduction cheerfully,
"It's not just your brains I'll be picking, Harry, I'll be buzzing around like a blow-fly annoying the hell out of the JTAC, Six and GCHQ as well, if that's any help!"
Another hollow smile preceeded his mildly facetious and only slightly conspiratorial response.
"Well, feel free to annoy them a little more than you need to, strictly on our behalf!" With that, he ushered her towards his office and they got down to business.
Hope fitted in surprisingly well, despite Harry's initial misgivings. Set up at a work station on the main floor she got to know everyone quickly and, as was her wont, melded into the background, spending more of her time working with those on the main floor than with Harry when she wasn't off looking at the other sections or, as promised, annoying the sister organisations. An early, quiet chat with Erin, Dimitri and Calum, the senior techie, had filled her in on the outlines of the horror couple of years Harry had had:
his previous section chief going bad in a spectacular manner (the Chinese connection – interestingly, she had been aware that Beijing had been overly excited about something a year or so back but then it had gone very quiet) leading to his suicide and the subsequent enquiry into Harry's apparent treason to protect his senior analyst (Ruth) from the section chief's machinations;
his tortured relationship with the analyst – not that any of them knew any details on that front – and how he had tried to shield her from the disaster that was unleashed, while the enquiry was still going on, by the Russians;
a bunch of former KGB operatives fronted by a woman who was an asset gone wrong of Harry's from the 1980s (Hope blinked at that – her gut feeling had been right, then) who had cost Section D the life of their young techie, whom they had murdered in cold blood and whom the team on the Grid had loved, as well as several others including two of their own country-men and a long-time friend of Harry's, a CIA agent turned Deputy Director with whom he had worked in the 1980s (oh, shit, now she remembered his name: Jim. Jim Coaver, that rather lovely, polite and utterly ruthless young man with the very dry sense of humour who had been working with Harry in Berlin in 1989 and with whom she had enjoyed the briefest of flirtations at the time);
and the finally desolate end on the coast with the Russian woman dead by her husband's hand and Ruth dying in Harry's arms after being stabbed while trying to stop the former asset's son from taking out Harry in some sort of twisted, senseless revenge.
Christ, talk about a Greek tragedy... whirling images of the group arriving to find the pieta-like tableau of an almost lifeless Ruth in Harry's arms as she bled out, irretrievably, internally, leaving no hope of resuscitation, followed by carloads of FSB operatives arriving to remove their colleagues at gun-point and finally, far too late, the arrival of the air ambulance when the woman was already cold spun in Hope's mind as the trio talked. That certainly explained the grief and the destruction of his soul and left her quietly gutted – she knew all too well how it felt to lose a loved one as a result of your own actions. The young ones clearly had an idea, but no real experience, of the depth of what he was going through but she most certainly did and would tread very carefully around those subjects, unless and until he brought them up himself. And she understood perfectly why, for the rest of her time with them, he never did emerge from full mourning, although occasionally and increasingly, on his better days, the ties were grey, not black.
For his part, over the days and weeks that followed, Harry found Hope to be oddly comforting. Quiet, efficient, still with the ability to melt into the surroundings and still with a brain like a steel trap, she nonetheless exuded peacefulness and tranquillity, and had a well-developed, if slightly anarchic, sense of humour despite the ancient anguish in her eyes which was so clearly now part of her soul. She didn't intrude, or ask those questions he dreaded, although he assumed that she had found out about the events of the past few years; strangely, he didn't find that prospect at all difficult to swallow. Instead, he appreciated her calming presence on both him, especially over the mid-morning coffees the pair took to sharing in his office, and the rest of the crew. Sometimes they would talk, other times it was mostly silence but even that didn't appear to faze her much: it would seem she knew the healing power of quiet and it was oil on the unpredictable, ever-changing and uncomfortable water of his heart.
Hope realised early on that she still genuinely liked the man, especially his ascerbic, very funny, observations on politicians and the public service, rare though those observations were, and his ill-concealed affection for his team. She observed him as closely, but probably with more comprehension, as his Section Chief did, quietly marvelling as he negotiated the dramas and boredom of day to day life in the Service with apparent equanimity, totally subsuming his own despair to the needs of the greater good and, she deduced shrewdly, actually deriving him some form of pleasure in a job well done, even if he didn't consciously recognise it himself. All of which meant that, despite everything he had been through and what she suspected he himself thought, locked away behind that emotionless barricade, he hadn't lost the ability to care. Which was a good sign.
She spent a week with GCHQ in Cheltenham late in October and the crew, along with their leader, realised they missed her. Harry could feel his mood descending again, starting the weekend before she was away, the faint cheer remaining to him gone completely by Monday afternon, while Erin and the rest of that inner circle could actually see it and when Waleed commented quietly on the return to despondency while waiting for Harry to arrive for the morning briefing they all recognised just how different the atmosphere had become over the previous few weeks. As a result, when Hope returned the following Monday, profoundly glad to be away from the weird world of the mathematical geeks, she was gratified by their warm welcome, acknowledging silently that walking back on to the Grid was almost like coming home. Reinforcing that feeling, the staff had used the excuse to lay on morning tea then, to her great surprise, Harry took her out for an impromptu lunch. Although they had been known to share a table in the staff cafeteria sometimes, more often than not it was in the company of one or another of the others so he was as surprised as she was when the idea popped into his head during the tea break but, if he was being honest with himself, he had missed their coffee interludes and the conversations (or non-conversations) that went with them and he just wanted a chance to catch up with her on their own, away from the noise of the Grid.
The result was a fairly quiet but companionable meal which extended into a walk that was almost as quiet. Both found the experience comforting – he, because (suspecting there was something buried in her past that made her so empathic without pitying him) she was about the only person apart from his daughter or Malcolm that he could stand to be around for any length of time and she because he, apart from having gone through a nightmare similar to her own (despite him not knowing it, although she suspected he suspected something of the sort), seemed to be one of the few people she had met who was content to let her be herself, complete with the powerful need for silence that was so much a part of her. The peace they found during this lunch was so soothing that they repeated the meal a few days later and it then became a bit of a habit, at least twice a week, during her remaining time with them, albeit with the self-imposed rule that, if they were going to talk at all, they could do so about anything except work. These were their moments to forget who they were, what they did and the price they had paid and continued to pay and they were quite content to abide by their agreement.
The peace and quiet after that first meal didn't last long. Towards the end of that week they found themselves in the middle of a crisis involving Uigher Islamists intent on taking out the government during the visit of a high-ranking Chinese delegation to a sitting at Westminster in an attempt to bring global attention to their plight; thirty six very long hours later they had been foiled and the team at Thames House could catch up on some sleep. Until a day later when a bomb threat by a previously unidentified Scottish Nationalist splinter group had them all back on high alert. By early Tuesday morning that had been dealt with as well so Harry sent them home again while he retired to his office to deal with the paperwork.
Hope joined him a few minutes later, once the others had started to leave, and flopped down on the sofa. She had been with them through the lot, assisting where she could, particularly with the Uighers (she spoke enough of the language and had a far better grasp of their issues and likely behaviours than anyone else they could easily or quickly get at and had ended up at the forefront of the final hostage negotiations as a result), and had stayed through the bomb threat at Harry's request – he found having her around as a sounding board useful. Now, she was every bit as weary as they were but instead of going home when they did she was a little concerned about Harry so decided to stay a while longer. He had been fine during the earlier crisis but the second one, although smaller, following so closely on the first had been met with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm on his part, for all that he had remained completely professional throughout. It was, she thought, as though it had been the second-last straw on that particular camel's back and the struggle to not break was getting impossible for him to maintain...
He was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, when she quietly knocked and walked in. Observing him silently for a moment, she realised he looked haggard, with noticeable darkness under his eyes, stubble shadowing his jaw, tie askew and his shirt crumpled, but he managed a tired smile when he heard her sit down, opening his eyes to reveal dark wells of exhaustion and still the endless pain. Some words from a song that had climbed the charts back home just before she had left to come over here echoed in her mind as she contemplated him: the lyrics had resonated with her on many levels; now, she realised just how well the main hook also fitted her old sparring partner...
These battle scars don't look like they're fading
Don't look like they're ever going away
They ain't never gonna change
These battle...
She didn't realise she looked almost as tired as he did, her shirt and linen skirt equally as crumpled and her own eyes sunk half-way into her skull under a top-knot that had long-since half come apart, leaving whisps of dark or silver hair starting to curl around her face and down the nape of her neck; they gazed at each other, silent, for a minute or so, while they processed the events of the previous few days. Eventually she gave him a quiet smile in return and said,
"That's a few days we can live without repeating."
He nodded and closed his eyes for a few seconds, his words an uncanny echo of the song.
"We wish. No chance of it happening, though. It never ends, this war of ours." His voice was as hollow as his eyes and creaked with tiredness.
"You're not going home?"
He sighed at her question, wishing the answer could be something different.
"No, not yet. I'd better get a summary to the powers-that-be first."
There was something in his tone that continued to give her pause and she suddenly wondered if he had seen someone about dealing with the very natural depression that would have reared its head after his personal annus horribilis; she assumed so, he wasn't stupid, but... It was his disconnectedness over the past day that was worrying her, evident in a flatness in his voice this afternoon; although the floor of the Grid wasn't entirely deserted, the immediate area around his fishbowl office was so she thought she might stay around for a trifle longer to see if she could stop his retreat even a little.
"I can stay and help, if you want," she offered casually. "Even if it's just doing the typing while you loll back in your seat and dictate. I haven't got anywhere in particular that I have to race off to."
At least he didn't tell her to go. He nodded assent and closed his eyes again, bone-weary and fed up. Early retirement was looking more attractive with every passing day but what the hell would he do with his time? Like her, he also didn't have anywhere , anyone or anything that would demand his attention and he didn't want to risk facing the emptiness alone. Not yet.
The fact that he didn't come back with one of his normal ripostes gently stirring her about her after-hours dedication to the gym or her attraction to martial arts training studios also worried her. He really didn't seem to be interested in anything today. Letting the silence continue for a couple of heart-beats she finally asked, carefully,
"Is everything alright, Harry?"
Hope's soft contralto was a welcome break to the direction his thoughts were taking (he should have been retired already. To that cottage in Suffolk. With Ruth.). He forced his eyes open again to return to the present – he was finding himself living more and more either in the past or in a future which would never happen now and it was a habit he was battling to stop – and shook his head, suddenly deciding to tell the truth for once. He had worked out enough of this woman by now to know that she wouldn't be shocked, wouldn't judge and wouldn't tell.
"No, not really. At times like this I keep asking myself why we keep fighting. Sometimes it would be easier to just give up, wouldn't it? Let the world descend into anarchy."
Oh, that wasn't good. She wasn't shocked by his words but was a little surprised that he had so freely admitted to it, although perhaps that was a good sign. Or perhaps not. His dark gaze was very direct and slightly challenging but she replied calmly, green eyes equally direct, although accepting, not combative.
"You know that's not true, otherwise you would have been out of here years ago, as would I. We keep fighting because the other option – not fighting – would be so much worse and totally unacceptable to our own personal beliefs." As she spoke the challenge in his eyes died as quickly as it had flared, replaced by a rueful recognition of the truth he was hearing. Regnum-bloody-defende. That one and only rule that he – they – had lived by for so long and that still held him to ransom. Subliminally picking up on his thought she sighed and admitted, "Maybe some of us have been fighting for too long, though." She had said her bit; it was time to change the subject a little to something a little happier. "That's a good team you've got there, by the way. Very impressive, you should be proud of them."
He could tell she meant it and the ghost of a smile flickered across his face.
"I know. And I am."
Relaxing a little – she hadn't even realised she had been tense until now – Hope went on with a casual observation that sent everything to hell in the space of a few words.
"They love you to death, you know, and would do absolutely anything for you. Which is very special."
Intense anguish suddenly flashed across his face and his eyes filled. Appalled and not knowing what she had said, she was out of her seat and crouching by his chair in an instant, hand on his arm and looking up with her own eyes filled with compassion while her voice reflected her desperate incomprehension.
"Shit, Harry, I'm sorry. Whatever I said, I'm sorry."
Blinking the tears away he shook his head and rested his own hand on hers for a moment, every bit as surprised by the reaction – an agony as sharp as a sword plunged into his gut – as she was. He had thought, or at least hoped, that his grief was ossifying into something more managable but yet again it seemed he was wrong... Swallowing as he fought to retain his composure and aware of her confused distress, he enunciated carefully, unable to keep all of the bitter self-loathing out of his voice,
"It's not you, it's me. If there's one thing I don't expect or deserve, it's their love or their loyalty." He stood up and pulled her to her feet. "Come on. I want to show you something." They left his office and headed through the labyrinth of corridors and stairs, ending up, she thought, somewhere towards the centre and near the basement. He let them through the door and ushered her forward, to the glass wall, running with slow droplets of water like an endless flow of tears and etched with names, too many names. "You know what this is?"
"Yes," she whispered, her heart contracting and suddently unable to breath properly. "We've got one of our own." Her eyes tracked over all the names of those who had died on operations, going back decades, and realised that, like her at the memorial at home, he would have known far too many of them. And presumably, like her, had sent more than enough of them, directly or indirectly, to their deaths. They stood, silent, locked together in despair, considering the toll that the job demanded of them while on the wall, in the soft, almost natural light, the tears ran and ran and ran. Unsurprisingly, she noticed that his attention had fixated on one name, the one that looked the newest.
"Is that Ruth?" Hearing that name spoken aloud by someone, after months of not hearing it at all, was almost shocking and caused him to look sideways at her, although he said nothing. She elaborated, "Erin and Dimitri filled me in, to an extent. After I asked them to, the day after I arrived and realised you and I had become two sides of the one coin."
Finally, after watching her steadily for a few moments while he dealt with the shock of the name he came to the conclusion that she was being nothing more than empathetic – there seemed to be no hidden agenda – so he nodded slowly, not immediately taking in the implications of her words.
"Yes." His voice was hardly even a whisper as he returned his attention to the terrible beauty of the wall. "Still the last on a list that contains too many names I'm responsible for putting there. All I can do now is try to keep any more of them from joining her. And what is it all for, eventually? I really do have a hard time seeing the point any more, especially after days like the last few." His gaze started to roam over the names again, stopping when it came to W. Crombie. Brilliant, theatrical, life-loving Bill, his friend since their childhood in the school yard who had been like a surrogate brother back in the day when they had both been young, ridiculously keen recruits and who had also been the first of his fellow officers he had lost, in such a way that it had scarred the rest of his life. The name reminded him of something the man used to cheerfully quote when they were confronted by one tangled mess or another, something that he had come to realise was more and more apt to the world in which they were living. "There is a law in physics that more or less states that every system tends towards disorder or chaos." Although it had explained the never-ending battles at the time, after the past decade Harry was at the point of realising it had another implication and this time he voiced it. "We're fighting an immutable law of the universe here so what chance have we got?"
Hope begged to disagree with him on his taking up of the burden of complete responsibility for the deaths – despite her own similar experience she still believed in the existence of free will, after all, and all of the people on these memorials had chosen to take up their particular battle and sometimes actively gone to their deaths, whether with conscious deliberation or not – but now wasn't the time for a philosophical discussion and in any case she most certainly felt a strong kinship in the owning of the appropriate portion of the guilt relating to such losses. And she had more than a passing acquaintance with that particular law. Sighing, she too glanced up and back through the history of death displayed in front of them before she replied.
"The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which also says that inside a closed system everything runs out of energy, eventually, for what that's worth. Presumably that also applies to terrorist organisations." They thought about it for a moment before she continued quietly, returning to their earlier conversation in the office. "What's the other option, anyway? Do you really believe we should give up and let the other bastard win? That's not me and it's definitely not you. Not when it comes to the type of 'other bastard' that we deal with." Sighing, she touched him on the arm and added, knowing it probably wouldn't help much because he had undoubtedly been clinging to the thought since that day on the Estuary and probably long before, "If that's not enough, at least try to think of the lives that have been saved, by you and all of them—" she waved a hand at the wall "—compared to what might have been, on days like we've just had."
They continued to stand in mournful silence for a little longer, overwhelmed by the enormity of what the weeping wall represented. On a whim, when he showed signs of remaining quietly lost and alone in his grief, she mused tonelessly, thinking it might help if he finally knew just how very well she understood where he was,
"Just so that you know, my husband's name is on the wall at home, only somewhat higher up the list. He's been there for a long time now."
'Battle Scars'. Written and performed by Guy Sebastian and Lupe Fiasco.