The Rest of the School

Author: Brightbear

Disclaimer: Spooks/MI5 does not belong to me. It belongs to Kudos, the BBC and many other people who are not me. Unfortunately.

Rating: PG-13 for minor language Spoilers: Only for the first episode of the first season. Summary: Rachael, a former anti-abortion terrorist, encounters one of the men responsible for putting her in jail.
Author's notes: This is my first Spooks fic so I hope you like.

Rachael was walking in the park when she saw him. She was walking in the zoo, near the otter enclosure. Her sons were still in the nocturnal house so Rachael was standing alone when she saw him. He seemed even taller than she remembered him. He was still wearing a long, black coat that swept behind him and walking with a chilling confidence. His face was just as blank and cold as she remembered it from the hospital room.
Much of that month was a blurred memory of tears, law courts and the inevitable realisation that she was going to jail. But she remembered him. How he had stood there in front of her and told her that they knew everything. She had never quite worked out who they were - the police or somebody like them.
She remembered the panicked phone call to her husband Rob, her words spilling out like her tears. Jesus, Rob, they know. Rob had told her to calm down, that they were only trying to scare her into giving away information. If they already knew everything, we'd all have been arrested already. Rachael never found out how much they did know but a day later, Mary was arrested when she placed the next bomb. Then the police turned up on Rachael's doorstep.
The fact that Rachael had two young boys had convinced the judge to be lenient. The way Rachael had cried at the trial had probably also worked in her favour. Not that she'd cried on purpose. She'd tried to be strong for Rob, for her boys but she hadn't been able to do it. Not with the memory of the little girl that had been killed by their first bomb. A bomb that had been silenced by a cover-up. An unexploded World-War II mine was what was in the papers. Rachael had agreed to go along with it in return for even more leniency.
Rachael had spent two years in jail. Two years in which her sons grew older and lived with their grandparents. Two years in which she'd only spoken to Rob over the phone or seen him through a glass window. To be separated from her boys... She looked around in a panic. Had the man come to take her boys away from her again? But there were her sons, walking out of the nocturnal house and holding their grandmother's hands. They were happy. Rachael tried to smile at them as they saw her.
She looked back at the man who'd threatened her at the hospital. The same man who had watched, unblinking, as Rachael had sobbed. He wasn't looking at her, was walking straight past her. As if he didn't recognise her. Was it a trick? Maybe not. Maybe he didn't remember the faces of all the people he threatened. Then there was a young voice squealing in delight, "Tom! Tom!" A young girl, maybe ten, was running across the grass to the man. He smiled, his whole face lighting up with an answering delight. He crouched down to his knees, still towering over the girl, and swept her into a hug.
Rachael couldn't stop staring. She knew that any minute now, he would turn and look and see her. But she couldn't stop staring. He was smiling, all the fear and coldness was gone. Not even his dark coat was frightening now. He was just a man who adored a child.
And Rachael remembered the hospital and the reason they had lured her there. The hospital bed and the little girl that had been injured and later died. We don't have much time. Something little Sarah here knows all about, thanks to you. He had stood there and bluntly reminded Rachael what her beliefs were doing. He had looked cold and hard but there had been real anger in his voice.
Rachael had been too busy trembling under the force of that blunt, angry tone to wonder why he spoke as he did. Was he imagining his little girl lying on the hospital bed? Was he angry at Rachael because she'd scared him?
A woman slipped out of the crowd, smiling indulgently, and walked across the grass towards the man and child. "You came," called the woman. Even from a distance, Rachael could hear the happiness in the woman's voice. The man and woman embraced and then turned to listen to the little girl who was tugging at their hands.
One of Rachael's own sons was at her side, tugging on her hand. Rachael raised her other hand to her face and it came away wet. Her son's face was worried but he'd seen his mother cry so many times while his father was in jail that he'd stopped asking her what was wrong. Rachael allowed herself to be pulled away to buy an ice cream and endure the worried looks of her family as she continued to cry.
They walked away from the man and his small family. For the long years of Rachael's misery, he had been the enemy who had taken her husband and her children away from her. A cold, unfeeling man who understood nothing of family. Rachael could remember Mary's words clearly now.
If you saw a man with a gun, you'd be scared. But if you saw that man walk into a playground and point that gun at a child? How scared would you be then? If you saw him shoot that child and then another and another? Would you still be scared? Or would you stop thinking about yourself and try with everything you had to stop him before he killed the whole school?
Mary and Rachael had seen the abortion doctors as the ones holding the equivalent of guns. It had been slow to occur to her that the bombs they themselves were placing were just as murderous. The man at the zoo had known it. He had stood in front of Rachael, in the hospital room of a girl who died. He had been a man of cold, angry, calculating and manipulating hatred and he had saved the rest of the school.

THE END