Chapter 11
Confession Box
"Lucas!" Ros had hastily bound and gagged Salko, attaching him to the railing as an extra precaution, although there was really no need, before descending on her fallen officer.
"Lucas?" she murmured, more softly now that she was crouched down beside him.
There was a large, shocking patch of scarlet blood soaking through his shirt at his shoulder. Taking a deep breath she took control of herself and the situation, her level headedness winning out over her unsteady heart as she decided that she couldn't do anything by having her heart listening to her head, never a good idea, as she had decided long ago.
Removing Lucas' shirt so she could get a better look at his wound she then began tearing it into strips, intending to use them as makeshift bandages. Their comms did not work and she could not get a message to Harry without leaving the building, something she refused to do while Lucas was like this. Sallko would keep for now and unless Lucas woke up, she was going to have fun getting the two of them out of the building on her own.
Now that she could see the wound in his shoulder she was glad to find a through-and-through, while this ultimately meant a bigger hole, it also meant that she did not have to worry about digging the bullet out and potentially doing more damage.
She carefully began to wind the strips of fabric around his shoulder to prevent him from losing anymore blood, as she put the final knots in her makeshift bandages, pulling the fabric as tightly as she could without ripping it, he groaned and tried to sit up.
"Easy." She said, warningly, having no intention of allowing him to undo the work she had just done and, frankly, still being pissed that he had been inconsiderate enough to get himself shot in the first place, she put a hand on his injured shoulder, forcing him to lie still as she finished up.
"What happened?" she managed to discern through a violent coughing fit.
She rolled her eyes and deadpanned, "What do you think? One of Santa Claus' reindeer gored you. "
"I see...And Santa?"
"On an enforced tea-break."
"Well he's a hard worker..." Lucas said, absently, before narrowing his eyes and adding, half-amused, half-exasperated, "What did Harry say about heroics?"
"I forget...Which is bloody lucky for you, you ungrateful-" she broke off at the satisfied smirk on his face and asked, "Can you make it back to the car?"
"Is that a question or a command."
"The latter." She said, flatly, "And you'll have to grit your teeth and help me with Salko."
"Wonderful."
They somehow managed to stagger back to the car where they then stuffed the unconscious Salko, unceremoniously back into the boot. By this point Lucas looked as though he had lost about a quarter of the blood in his body, judging by his complexion and slumped gratefully into the passenger seat.
Ros decided to task him with nothing more than staying conscious as she thrust a bottle of water she found in the driver's door at him, while she angrily ordered the phone to find a signal to allow her to call Harry.
Lucas found several sachets of sugar in the glove box, intended for long since cold cups of coffee and added them liberally to the water as Ros finally managed to get a hold of Harry.
"Ros! What happened are you both OK?"
"We'll live." She said grimly, smirking at Lucas who pulled a face to say maybe.
"Thank God. Salko?"
"We're providing him with first class transport back." She replied quaintly.
"Well done both of you."
"Listen, Harry, Lucas is injured, can you have back up meet us at the hospiteal to take custody of Salko? We'll-"
"Bring him in ourselves." Lucas cut in firmly.
"Lucas you-"
"I'm fine." He said, flatly.
"Lucas if Ros-" Harry began patiently, thinking that there must be something to it if she wanted to take him to a hospital first.
"It's just a scratch Harry I'll-"
"Scratch? It looks like the bloody Black Hole of Calcutta's opened up on your shoulder!" Ros snapped.
"As you said we'll live, and I believe that the Black Hole of Calcutta was a prison." He smirked.
"Don't play cute with me Lucas." Ros growled, tempted as she was to make him beg to be taken to a hospital to escape her, she would not let this go, "This isn't up for negotiation."
"Well it should be. If you think I'm going to jeopardise this entire operation just so you can hold my hand while a doctor kisses my shoulder better, then I'm not the one who should be hospitalised." He said forcefully, "Salko's too important to risk, we'll go to The Grid first, it'll hold til then."
Harry considered this for a moment as Ros seethed, "OK Lucas, Ros, bring them both back to The Grid, Salko is too important to risk losing."
"Fine, but if he drips blood all over your antique carpet don't be handing me the bill."
Harry hung up and Lucas looked sideways at Ros whose expression told him that his next words were probably not wise but he couldn't help himself, "You're going soft Ros Myers." He smirked, playfully.
"I'm not above putting another bullet in you delusional or not I assure you, and I'll make a better job of it than Sparky in the back." She hissed, feeling the corners of her mouth twitch involuntarily.
He decided he'd started now and that a little more couldn't hurt as he teased, "I'm not delusional at all, you're insisting we risk assets to have me checked over, and don't even get me started on what happened in that warehouse, I thought you were going to confess your undying love for me..."
A sharp, well-aimed slap to his injured shoulder warned him that he had gone too far, "I'll be confessing to something Lucas...A little more criminal than loving you." she muttered darkly, the effect ruined by the definite smile that was now playing around her lips.
The look on her face forced him to bite back the retort that was dancing on the tip of his tongue, sensing that he could probably push her too far and that she would find it altogether too easy to make whatever punishment she deemed suitable look like an accident and allowed them to slip into a comfortable silence as he sipped at the sugar water and carefully rearranged the bandages at his shoulder after noticing several spots of blood peeking through the dark material.
They had been quiet for a while, and the industrial plant was far behind them when she spoke again, "Lucas." She began, softly in a tone that announced that she was now being deadly serious, "What happened to you in that warehouse?"
Knowing full well what she meant but having no desire to discuss it he deflected the question lightly by saying, "I thought we had established that, I got shot."
"No." She said quietly, knowing his thoughts but pressing on all the same, "before that, after we split up, when you rejoined me in the house of mirrors room, I thought you'd just come back after spending another eight years in Russia."
He paused, struck by the irony of this before saying finally, knowing that she would not drop this without a fight, "It was nothing, flashbacks, I'm a little claustrophobic...I'm fine."
"Bullshit." She snapped, the only time she worried was when he insisted that he was 'fine' "You looked like you'd been confronted by the ghosts of prison's past. I know you Lucas, it takes more than flashbacks and nothing to set you off like that. What exactly do you mean by claustrophobia?"
"It means I'm not particularly fond of small spaces." He said with a flash of irritation, knowing that his wish of having her drop this was about as likely as canaries emerging from the bullet wound at his shoulder singing the Coronation Street theme.
"Don't you bloody patronize me Lucas!" she spat, flaring up as well, "I need to know I can trust you to keep your head in situations like that-"
"You can."
"Not if you lie to me." She said shortly before saying urgently, "Lucas what-"
"I need to know that I can trust you to understand that I can choose not to share every memory, every flashback, every minute detail of my past with you without having you question my loyalty." He said in an undertone, the softness that had returned seamlessly to his voice making the words more poignant that if he had screamed them at her through a megaphone.
Both of them were still, realising that they were too full of adrenaline and tense relief to have a conversation that they would not regret later. They had both overreacted and had been suitably chastised by the other.
"I'm sorry." He murmured, being the first to vocally acknowledge what they had both internally accepted.
"I'm sorry too, you're right, I don't have any right to presume that I can order you to allow me to intrude on your past."
"I would never say that you 'intrude' Ros." He said, quietly, "I just-"
"No, it's OK...I would feel the same in your position...It was Russia?"
"It's always Russia." He replied, bitterly, knowing exactly how limited his service experience was considering that, of what he had to draw on, three quarters of it had been spent in Russia.
They lapsed into silence for a long time before he said, impulsively, in a voice barely audible over the howling wind that had recently engulfed them, "They buried me alive..."
"They did what?" she whispered, hollowly, praying she had misheard.
"It was during the Sugar Horse interrogations. I'd been tortured for days already. They, dragged me outside, I was barely conscious to begin with but they knocked me out anyway." He had no idea why he was telling her this but now he found that he had began speaking, he could not stop, "When I woke up I was sealed in a glass coffin with nothing but a torch and a tape recorder..." he paused again there, but she sensed his uncertainty and the impulsiveness with which he was speaking and knew better than to interrupt him, "The tape." He stumbled again before taking a deep breath and forcing himself to continue, "The tape said that they would release me once I had given them information on Sugar Horse, they said that the torch would last for eight hours and then things would become unpleasant...I was in there for two days straight, after the eight hours, as promised..." he broke off, staring ruefully at his hands as he suppressed whatever flashbacks had plagued him in the warehouse, "After eight hours, they began to fill the box with water, I'd already gone through the water-boarding, 'unpleasant' wasn't the word I would have chosen..."
"God Lucas, I'm sorry." She breathed, marvelling at how well he managed to control himself, thinking of the small interrogation rooms favoured by MI-5, unpleasant for their visitors, unbearable for him. She also found memories of the time spent in the disused tunnels beneath London that they had been forced into during the Sugar Horse operation, making thier unwelcome way to the forefront of her mind and wondered how the Hell he had managed to keep his head.
"Needless to say, I've not been too fussed with small spaces since." He said, feeling the need to fill the gaping silence that had been left in the wake of his anecdote.
"How do you deal with it?" she asked, also speaking out of the need to say something.
He laughed bitterly at that, "You just do...I was interrogated about Sugar Horse within the first few months of my imprisonment, I had another seven and a half years to learn how to cope...Everything moves at warp speed in prison, despite the fact that a day feels like a year, you have to learn to adapt, quickly, you can't do that, you won't belong, you don't belong and you won't last long."
"Dum spiro, spero." She said quietly, quoting the tattoo on his back as she nodded, though she knew that she could never understand. She was sorry she had asked now, wishing that she had kept her curiosity to herself and let him alone when it first became apparent that he did not want to discuss it. He seemed to know what she was thinking, an ability that often unsettled her more than she would admit , as he murmured softly,
"Thank you."
"For what?" she said laughing humourlessly.
"For being the world's worst counsellor." She snorted in spite of herself and he smiled as he said, "I could never talk to shrinks anyway, they could never understand."
"And you think I can?"
"No, " he said, choosing his words carefully now, "I know you can't...But you know that too, you can't understand what I've been through, but the same can be said for anyone, but you do understand me...You listen to help, not so you can scribble something deep and meaningless in Latin and collect a payslip at the end of it."
She smiled quietly at that, having a similar opinion of psychologists and thinking that he had summed up her feelings on the matter very well and said, "You're very welcome."
The remainder of their drive back to The Grid was spent in companionable silence as they were both suddenly hit by exhaustion like a freight train as the remnants of the adrenaline that had fuelled them evaporated.
The sugar water had worked wonders on Lucas, but despite his assurances to the contrary, his shoulder was in agony and he almost wished he'd allowed Ros to take him indulge her moment of matronly madness, allowing her to drop him off at a hospital; although he knew it would probably have come undone and she would have seen sense before they had arrived there his shoulder was protesting, loudly, against his decision. He was, therefore, intensely relieved to find officers waiting at Thames House to relieve them of Salko, meaning that all he had to do was remain upright.
Something he soon realised that was easier said than done as he found himself walking a little closer to Ros than she deemed necessary as he hobbled up the stairs.
A/N: Thanks for reading, hopefully Ros didn't come across as completely out of character here, she does tend to have a bit of a 'mama bear' streak in her if her team is threatened so I'm hoping that explains it :) I don't know, maybe it's just the onset of writer's block but I felt that this chapter was dragging, hopefully not but if it did let me know, if you enjoyed/didn't enjoy, I would love to know why, please leave a review if you have a moment.