Autumn 2006
Time went by. No one seemed to notice or care that Harry and Ruth arrived on the Grid together more often than not. Malcolm and Jo both tended to smile upon seeing them together. Ros preferred to purse her lips and roll her eyes. And Adam…well, Adam was rather distracted with his own personal dramas.
Harry had to exercise every ounce of restraint not to push Ruth too far, not to want her too much, not to ask for more than she was willing to give. For in their relationship as with nearly everything in her life, it seemed, she was timid and reticent. Oh there was no shyness between them now, not with the amount of time they spent naked and wrapped in each other's arms—which was nearly every spare moment they could manage, it seemed. No, Ruth was simply very deliberate about things. She did not leap before looking. Actually, she did not leap before looking, calculating distance, measuring windspeed, and any other little detail anyone could imagine. The nature of falling in love with an analyst, he supposed. It was her job but also very much her personality. And really, it was probably best that way. He had always been a bit cavalier and brash in his personal life. Ruth forced him to take things slow, to savor every step along the way. Even if he might get a bit grumpy about it.
One Saturday afternoon in late September, Harry found himself in Ruth's company and totally resenting it. She was lounging on the sofa in his house, wearing only one of his old Oxford jumpers and a fuzzy blanket she'd brought over from hers. She had a book in her lap—some sort of Brontë, he thought—and was lazily scratching Scarlett's ears. It should have been a picture perfect moment for Harry, having the woman he loved so comfortable and casual in his home. And yet he wanted nothing more right then than to kick her out so he could be on his own to shout and fester in his anger.
Because while Ruth was obliviously enjoying the day, Harry was pacing in the hall just out of earshot. He was on his mobile and doing his damnedest to keep from swearing up and down. "Juliet, you cannot be serious," he said for the dozenth time.
"Harry, I just can't. I can't keep doing this. The recovery is going practically nowhere. It's too difficult to keep track of things and be presentable and show up in the office."
"So work from home! The PM will allow it. I'll have Malcolm set up your equipment," Harry offered.
She sighed into the line. "No, Harry. I've made my decision. I'm stepping down as JIC Coordinator."
"I was just getting used to dealing with you," he grumbled.
"I know you too well to take that as a compliment. I'm sure you'll have better luck with my replacement."
"And who will your replacement be?"
"I'm not entirely sure," Juliet replied with cagily.
"You do know but you're not going to tell me," he translated.
"How's your girlfriend?"
Harry rolled his eyes. Leave it to Juliet bloody Shaw to change a subject with the deftness of whiplash. "She's very well, thank you."
"I heard it's official now. You did the paperwork. You know, you never did that for us," she pointed out with a fake pout.
"You and I were both married to other people," he reminded her.
She let out a small laugh. "I do seem to forget that. Seems strange that either of us was ever married, doesn't it?"
Harry just grunted in response. He was growing tired of the way she was toying with him.
"Are you going to marry Ruth, Harry?"
"Who's going to be named JIC Coordinator?"
"I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
"I will go over there and break both your arms to match your legs!" he growled in frustration.
"It's not terribly politically correct to threaten the crippled," she said acerbically. She took a deep breath and told him flat out. "Oliver Mace."
Harry swore loudly. So loudly that Scarlett gave a startled little bark in the other room. "You've got to be joking," he begged quietly, praying this was another one of those disgusting ways Juliet meant to taunt him.
"The PM likes him. Blake likes him. He recommended him, actually. Apparently the Home Secretary likes the idea of having someone in the job who's familiar with it," she explained.
With a heavy sigh, Harry accepted his fate. How the tides had turned. It was just over a year earlier that Mace's attempts to oust Harry from Section D had failed and the HS shoved Mace over as punishment, replacing him with Juliet Shaw. And now Mace was back in favor and it seemed Harry might be left out in the cold. He really was getting too old for this. "God save the Queen," he muttered. He hung up the call, cutting off Juliet's laughter. Sadistic witch.
Harry returned to the living room and flopped down on the far end of the sofa, careful not to fall on where Ruth's legs were stretched out in front of her.
"That didn't sound like a very nice call. What's wrong, love?" she asked with concern. She put her book down to focus her attention on him.
"Juliet Shaw is stepping down. The recovery from her injuries is too much for her to stay in the job anymore."
"Well that's good, isn't it? I mean, the two of you don't get along rather well. Personally, I won't be sorry to see her go," Ruth said darkly.
Harry couldn't resist teasing her a bit. "Jealous?" he asked with a smirk.
Ruth pursed her lips slightly and admitted, "No, not anymore."
"Why not anymore?"
"Because I used to be jealous that she got to have you and I didn't, but now I'm the one half-naked on your sofa and she's not, so I win," she proclaimed.
Harry chuckled happily and placed a fond hand on the lump of her feet beneath the blanket.
"I take it Juliet stepping down is not good news. That must mean you know who's replacing her," she deduced.
"Oliver Mace."
Ruth swore just as Harry had earlier. "Oh that's what that was about, wasn't it?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
"Well, we'll just have to deal with him as he comes. We've avoided his scheming before. We can do it again," she said optimistically.
Harry couldn't help but smile with the way she said that. We would deal with it. We. Though perhaps she meant the whole team. But Harry liked to believe she was speaking about just the two of them. That they had become a collective unit. He certainly liked to think of them that way.
After a brief pause, Ruth spoke again. "Harry?"
"Yes, darling?"
"Do you think you might be able to take a short holiday sometime soon?"
He turned to look at her, a bit taken aback by her answer. "I don't know. Why do you ask? Have you something in mind?"
She smiled softly. "Not exactly. But your birthday is coming up soon, and I thought it might be nice to go away together. If you want."
Harry had to admit she made an attractive offer. After all, the last time they were in a hotel together had been Havensworth, and that had ended up rather wonderfully. Though perhaps any more such happy experiences might overtake his good senses and he'd do something really stupid like propose marriage. "I'll see what I can do. I think it would be really lovely. I usually work on my birthday."
"I'm sure you do. But it's on a Saturday this year, so we could just take Friday off and stay two nights in a B&B somewhere in the country, perhaps."
"We could go to Paris," he suggested quite suddenly.
Ruth's smile widened, as though she, too, could hear Harry's voice in her head softly asking, Where's your sense of romance? "That's an even better idea. Let's go to Paris for your birthday. It's no Grand Tour, obviously, but we could celebrate your birthday properly."
For Harry, just getting to spend the night with Ruth would feel like a proper celebration for his birthday. "That would be wonderful, Ruth," he said softly. "I'll make the arrangements next week."
"No, let me," she requested enthusiastically. "It's your birthday. I want to surprise you. Just make sure we can get the time off, barring an emergency, of course. I'll do all the rest."
"Alright," he agreed.
Ruth sat up and leaned over to kiss him, her face beaming with excitement.
On Sunday, Ruth returned to her house to prepare for the week and to spend some time with her cats. Despite being madly in love, as she assured him nearly every day that she was, Ruth still needed some time on her own. It was what she needed, and Harry didn't fault her for it in the least. He did, however, grow to be a bit of a restless sleeper when she was not in bed beside him. But it just made the nights they did spend together all the more special.
First thing Monday morning, Oliver Mace was named JIC Coordinator. Harry and Ruth were already aware of the news, of course. The rest of the team was grumbling something fierce about it. In a strange way, it made Harry feel better. At least they could all be miserable about dealing with Mace together. As a team.
Ruth had tried to avoid the complaining over Mace as much as she could. She'd already told Harry her thoughts, that it wasn't an idea situation, but they'd be on the ready. And until he did something loathsome, as he certainly would, there was no use wasting valuable time and energy over him. So while Adam and Ros were griping, Ruth made herself useful down in the registry.
About lunchtime, Harry heard the no-knock entrance into his office. He smiled to see Ruth come in with a file in her hand. Only she wasn't smiling.
"Something wrong, Ruth?"
She was chewing on her lips and letting her eyes dart all over the place. A certain sign that something was indeed wrong. "I made this mistake before, and I don't care to repeat it."
"What mistake?"
"Finding something about you and not telling you until it was too late."
Harry had a feeling she was talking about the Contingent Events Committee and the disaster that arose from the discovery of Harry's name on the documents by Angela Wells. "What have you found, Ruth?"
She handed him the file in her hand and explained, "I was in the registry pulling some old records. And this one was misfiled. I noticed the numbering was off, so I pulled it out. And…well…"
"This is my signature on a stack of orders authorizing enhanced interrogation on suspects captured by Five and held overseas," he said, flipping through the pages and seeing his own name, his own tidy scrawl, on every single one, ordering the torture of people captured by his own Section. He looked up at Ruth who was watching him, petrified. "You want to ask me if they're real," he knew.
"I…"
He felt a pang of affection for her. She was warring between her instincts as an analyst, needing to take everything objectively, and her love for him, believing he could never be capable of such a thing. "Well they're not," he told her, seeing her exhale. "They can't be. I didn't sign these pages. The signatures are fake. They must be."
Ruth's whole demeanor relaxed for a moment and then tensed up again. "Then where did they come from?"
Harry had no answer for that.
But Ruth was already prepared with a plan. "I'll pull the CCTV footage to see if I can find who misfiled it. And I'll give the pages to Malcolm to test. He can prove that the signatures are fake."
He gave a curt nod. "Do it. But for now, this goes no further."
Ruth just nodded in return.
When she left his office, Harry scrubbed his face with his hands. This was the beginning of something. Harry could feel it in his bones. Of what, he wasn't sure. But something was coming. And he knew they'd have to all brace themselves.
