This final chapter is dedicated to Mamzalini who got the pairing right. Thanks to everyone for RandRing. I tried to make these conversations as simple and as real as possible. Hopefully this one finishes off the fic series well.

Harry: Who are you?

Lucas: I am nothing.

-Spooks 9.8

There was no one out looking for him. Not even Harry. That was because Harry had asked Ruth.

"He'll open up and talk to you in a way he never would have done with me."

"I think you're wrong about that."

"He doesn't trust me."

She'd laughed. "Lucas never trusted anyone." Except Ros.

She put a tired hand on Lucas' shoulder. He was standing by the Thames, not all that far away from Thames House itself. He never seemed to spend much time at home.

He didn't look up. "The colleagues will be alright, Ruth. Don't worry about me."

"But I do. We all do. We know how much Ros meant to you."

He turned and his blue eyes seemed unnerving, piercing. "Did you?"

Ruth cleared her throat, told herself to be brave and said it anyway. "You loved her."

To her surprise Lucas began to laugh; all hideous chortling and with a slightly hysterical edge. "It wasn't that kind of love Ruth. Just because you're in love with Harry, he with you, and you both dance around each other like you're still unsure about what feelings mean, doesn't mean the rest of us are the same."

She bit down hard on her tongue to stop an angry, hurt reply. "How did you know?"

"Oh come on Ruth. Everyone knows."

She tried to regain some of the lost pride, tilting her chin up slightly, trying to look like she didn't care. "Oh. But I thought..."

"That I hadn't noticed?" Lucas' face fell. He put an arm awkwardly around her. "I didn't till Ros told me. And I didn't mean for it to come out like that."

"What did you mean then?"

"I'm upset, Ruth. We say things we don't mean when we're hurting, cruel, unkind things. I'm sorry."

"It was the truth though wasn't it?"

He didn't answer for a bit. "Everyone has truths Ruth. Sometimes more than one. The truth is complex and confusing and messy. What is your truth? What is my truth? Are they the same?"

"That's not answering the question."

"Because you already know the answer." He took her arm and pulled her off the river edge. "I'm restless. Let's walk."

They strolled along the embankment. "So Ros was just a friend?"

He looked at her quizzically. "Just a friend? No. She was much, much more than that. But it wasn't the kind of love you were talking about Ruth. She knew me as I knew her. I'll miss her." His eyes crinkled at the edges. He swallowed and breathed in and out once; slowly, steadily.

"We had difficult times, we were two very different women, but I respected Ros, she respected me. She saw past the usual armoury and defences. She cut you to the quick but you always knew where you stood with her."

Lucas stopped, looked at Ruth like he was really seeing her for the first time. He was speaking so softly she didn't know if he was still talking to her at all. "You always were the deepest one, the one who saw the furthest."

She tried to laugh. It came out all wrong. "So are you Lucas. Deep, I mean. Will anyone ever really know what you are thinking anymore?" She shivered a little. It sounded like an accusation.

He was still staring at her, like she was a little mad, like he was afraid of her.

"Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you..."

She raised an eyebrow, a little surprised. It was her who usually made the literary links. "Lord of the Rings? Eowyn? I suppose you could see it that way."

He still had a look of fear about him. "What we do Ruth, what all of us do every day, none of us can ever really know what it costs the other."

She shook her head, defiant. "No. But we can try. We can empathise, we can sympathise, we can guess."

"That's what worries me," he said cryptically. But then he smiled. "I'll be O.K Ruth, really. I've lost colleagues before and I've persevered and I've kept doing my job. I'll be fine."

"So you keep saying."

"It's what I have to keep saying."

Ruth could understand that. She left him standing straight and tall against the backdrop of The Thames. He was still staring after her with a puzzled expression on his face, like she had worked something important out, something the others hadn't.

She filed the feeling away for later. Maybe it was important, maybe it wasn't. She didn't have time for it now.

There was never enough time...

The next Spooks fic on the horizon is a Lucas/Ruth/Tom fic that incorporates capture in 9.8 with memories of s2 Tom and 3.7 with Forrestal. I've always wanted to write a fic about 3.7 and I think it will fit in well here. However, don't expect this oneshot any time too soon as I have exams next week. Alas. Fic writing is more fun.