Title: Uncertainty

FIC: The Science of Good-Byes

Rating: T

Fandom: Spooks/MI-5

Characters: Ruth Evershed, Harry Pearce

Description: Set post-3x02, "The Sleeper"; major spoilers through 3x02.

Written for: the Spookscreative ficathon; PhoenixElena wanted "tipsy Ruth" and Harry, plus a few other elements that I tried to work in.

Disclaimer: Ruth and Harry are owned by people who aren't me; Americanisms and canon-mistakes are mine. Thanks to CallmeSandy for extremely helpful feedback.

I have studied the science of good-byes,
The bareheaded laments of nightHow poor is the language of happiness!
Everything has happened before and will happen again
But still the moment of each meeting is sweet.
-Osip Mandelshtam, "Tristia"

Donald O'Connor was dancing his way up a wall when the doorbell sounded.

Ruth fumbled for the remote control and stabbed her own hand with a knitting needle. She cried out, got to her feet, and had to shoot out a hand to keep the bottle of wine from splashing a red stain on her carpet. This she accomplished, but sent the yarn flying, tangling it up with the cat, which hissed and darted into the back room.

The bell rang again, followed by a polite but insistent knock. Ruth left the film playing, and stumbled over an unlaced shoe as she went to the door. In the moment of opening, she thought that she had drunk more of the wine earlier in the evening than she intended, wondered if there could be a dangerous man at her door, knew that was a silly notion because dangerous men either did not ring bells or did not allow chained doors to stop them, and then she pulled it full open to face Harry Pearce.

"Harry." Ruth looked down to see him holding her day planner.

"You left this in my office. After –"

"Harry, you shouldn't --"

"I'm sorry." He looked down, and it struck her how different he seemed outside of his own domain. How much less sure of himself. Although, that could have had to do with the day that they had finally, seemingly against the odds, survived. "I ought to have rung you first."

"I could have got it tomorrow, Harry." Ruth put her hand on the doorframe and leaned backwards, feeling the wine rise to her head. "Or you could have sent it with Malcolm. He lives just a few streets away."

"You were on my way," he explained.

"Harry –" Ruth said gently. "This drafty old house is on the way to absolutely nowhere. As you well know."

"I thought I'd go for a drive. This seemed as good a direction as any." He held out the planner and raised one hand to brush down a tuft of hair blown by the wind. "I ought to have rung you," he repeated.

"I suppose this is your revenge," Ruth said gravely. "For my constantly barging into your office uninvited." She was repeating an accusation he had made on more than one occasion, but when he looked genuinely rattled, she broke into a smile. "Harry, I'm glad to see you. For heaven's sake, now, come in out of the cold." He seemed to hesitate over entering, and she quickly added, "Only if you like."

He froze for a moment longer, then entered. "Thank you."

"I'd offer you a drink," she said, as she followed her through the foyer. "But I'm afraid all I have is some very bad Chilean wine. I ought to give you –" She turned and frowned, looking at him. "A well-aged single malt. Whatever you and Oliver Mace would order up in your club."

"Ruth," Harry said gravely. "I cannot begin to express how happy I am, at this moment, not to be at the club with Oliver Mace." At Ruth's gesture, he sank wearily into an armchair. She was about to seat herself on the sofa across from him, when Harry eyed the bottle. "That South American plonk. It must be absolutely vile."

"The worst," she replied. "I decided to try it because they were two for one at Sainsburys, and now I have two bottles of the undrinkable stuff. Although –" she admitted, nodding at the half-empty container on the table, "It seems it was drinkable after all."

And now Harry almost smiled. "I might just want a glass, then. After all."

Ruth had to go to the kitchen and rummage around for a second glass.

"What in God's name are we watching?" Harry asked, when she returned.

"Just a video." Ruth lifted the remote and said, "I can –"

Harry squinted. "Singing in the Rain?"

"I was meant to be reading," she admitted, lowering the volume. "Something very serious. It seemed only right – after today. But then there was this –" She pointed at the wine, "And then I just wanted something happy. Only, once I started, it seemed a bit sad." She shook her head and raised a hand to her eye. "I know it's silly but –" And it was absurd, really. As though somehow the three laughing young people on the screen could stand for Tom and Danny and Zoe in less complicated times. There had never been less complicated times. There never would be, for them.

"Everyone has a right to be silly from time to time," Harry said gravely. "Even you. Sometimes I think we all ought to take the chance to be sillier." His words were so out of place with his solemn tone, so disconnected from the whole idea of Harry, that she had to hide a smile by taking another drink. Harry reached out to pour the last of the bottle for himself, and stopped to lift the paperback book Ruth had left dog-eared on her table. "You read Russian?" he asked.

"Not well," she admitted. "The book is bilingual – I had it from." She swallowed. "Well, from Tom."

"A gift?" Harry mused softly, turning it over to look at the back..

"No, I – I'm not sure," Ruth admitted. "It wasn't for an occasion. I just mentioned one day I hadn't read many twentieth-century Russians -- aside from Doctor Zhivago. He teased me about only liking a book if it was ancient or made a good film. Then – you know Tom when he was in the grip of an enthusiasm. At the time it happened to be Mandelshtam. He dropped this on my desk one day, said he found it in a used bookshop." She swallowed. "I was never certain if it was meant to be a loan or –" She looked at Harry. "I suppose I could post it to him?" He didn't answer at once, but flipped through the book. "Can you read it?" she asked.

"Of course," he said, then with false heartiness. "Know thine enemy. All that rot. Odd, though. As much as we go on about al-Qaeda, that it's still a challenge to find enough agents with good Arabic. Even moreso a decade ago." Ruth knew Harry's conversation well enough to hear him subtly shifting gears toward a subject he had wanted to raise from the start. "That's why Adam Carter was such a catch, straight out of university in 1991. I suppose he was planning to work for an oil company in Saudi before Six got to him."

"No," said Ruth. "It was T.E. Lawrence. Adam read the Seven Pillars when he was thirteen. Saw Lawrence of Arabia ten times at the cinema in one week. Of course, the real Lawrence spoke Arabic very poorly and didn't look a goddamn thing like Peter O'Toole." She found herself unconsciously imitating Adam's indignant expression as he had told her the story. "But by the time he found that out, it was too late. The services had him for life."

Harry looked closely at her, and she was aware she was smiling too much. "You like him," Harry said, and it wasn't a question.

"I –" Ruth stammered.

"It's all right, Ruth. It isn't disloyal to Tom that you like him. Adam Carter is very easy to like." Then, gently, he added. "Not so very easy to know." Ruth heard a subtle warning in his voice, a reminder that she shouldn't have needed, not to be too taken in by a friendly smile and a pleasant manner. A man like Adam Carter was never not working.

"You want to bring him on," said Ruth. "Won't Six –?"

"Owe us one. For saving the security services from political death," said Harry, and he had subtly shifted gears again. Now she was both an audience and a sounding board for an idea that was still forming in him. "Adam will like it too, I think. He has a young son. Five will let him stay closer to home."

A young son, Ruth remembered, and a wife who was getting expensive lingerie for her birthday. And a man who didn't care that the entire office knew that was a man acting like he had nothing to hide, which, in their world, made him the most mysterious creature of all.

"He won't be like Tom," Ruth said. "Not right away. Not ever." She looked closely at Harry. "I know I'm very new here myself. But Tom was one of yours. It's almost as though you raised him in the service. Adam won't be like that."

"No," said Harry. "I mean, yes. That's it exactly." Harry lifted the wine bottle and, though he knew it was empty, tipped it over as though to catch the last drops in his glass. "A father," he said, "and I do speak as a father – a father of children who no longer speak to me – A father sees certain qualities in his own children that no one else sees. But he also misses signs. So close up, so obvious. We're all blind, in certain ways, to the people we see every day."

"We were all blind to Tom," he went on. "If anyone else had – everything he'd been through. And it wasn't just Herman Joyce and the frame job. It wasn't just a sleeper agent, or a girlfriend with the Company, or a mentor turned traitor, or a contact who died in his arms. He was never preparing a legend to run off to Slovakia. When we heard that, it rang false, because that wasn't Tom's way. He could never slip away into the night. He was have to make an exit. He couldn't leave without saying --."

Harry's eyes widened, then, and he reached for the book again. "Mandelshtam," he read from the spine. "Tristia. I remember." He looked down at the Russian side of the text, then the English, and put the book down as he recited the poem's first line. " 'I have studied the science of good-byes.' When did you say he gave you this?"

Ruth picked up the book and frowned. She weighed it in her hand, trying to remember. "A few months ago. Around the time of the Colombian op." When Mariela Santiago died, Ruth thought. The contact that Tom and Zoe recruited to capture her boyfriend.

"Even then he must have known," said Harry. "Maybe he didn't even know he knew. But he was --"

"Studying the science of good-byes," Ruth repeated. "And he was trying to tell – me? Well, why? Why not Danny – or Zoe – or you?"

"Oh, I'd imagine he tried each of us, in his own way." Harry looked down at his chest and laughed. "Dear God, Ruth, he pointed a shotgun at my chest and pulled the trigger. Try that on your boss in most professions and see what it gets you."

Ruth drained her glass and felt a little impish as she said, "A promotion?"

Harry looked at the bottle and he looked up. And then he smiled, and then he laughed.

Ruth met his eyes and she joined in, shaking with laughter, fighting for breath.

"You know why this is funny?" Harry demanded, when he got hold of himself.

"Not at all," Ruth admitted, "It certainly wasn't my joke." She started laughing again.

"We've been going on as though we were at a bloody funeral. Tom Quinn isn't dead, Ruth." The laughter hit him again. "We are. You understand? We're still spooks. He's gone back to the living. We should be throwing him a celebration. Not a wake." He lifted his empty glass. "To Tom."

"As properly symbolic as your gesture may be –" Ruth stood up and straightened her skirt. "I believe this celebration calls for another round of vile South American plonk." She went to the kitchen and came back with a second bottle and a corkscrew.

Harry held out his glass, and, as she poured, his eyes narrowed, "Speaking of my time in the hospital."

"As long as we're dealing in high comedy, why not?"

"I've been meaning to congratulate you," said Harry, "on an excellent piece of field work."

Ruth shook her head and sat, pouring another glass for herself. "I don't know what you mean."

"Oh don't you? You got the nurse to pass me a note. There were guards everywhere. She must have had a notion this was a secure operation and I wasn't to be bothered. And even in normal circumstances, only family would be allowed. So I have been wondering, Ruth. What exactly did you say to convince that young lady to become a co-conspirator?"

"Well, sir, I told her." Ruth looked down. But she had to admit. Part of her had been hoping that Harry would ask. "I told her, sir, that you were my lover." And, when Harry's eyebrows shot up in surprise, she added, "I said I was carrying your child." She coughed. "In retrospect, that final part might have been overkill."

"No," Harry said thoughtfully. "That was exactly the right touch. People are brought up on the most ridiculous soap operas. The more absurd, the more likely they are to believe it. Especially," he smiled, "if she managed to figure that the security services were involved. People will believe absolute romantic rubbish when spies are involved."

"Perhaps," Ruth said thoughtfully. "Perhaps they might believe that Christine Dale was willing to go to jail for Tom Quinn."

Harry nodded. "Yes, yes, I see your point. Come to that, wait until you get a chance to read the full file on Mr. and Mrs. Carter. And that's just the official version."

"Love is a powerful force in this job," Ruth said quietly. "I don't see any reason it should only be there for the young and the pretty."

"Yes, I –" Harry stopped and looked at her. "Hold on, Ruth. You and I are hardly old and decrepit."

"No," Ruth answered. "After all, I don't suppose that we are." And she thought of the last lines from the poem Harry had begun. Everything has happened before and will happen again. But still the moment of each meeting is sweet.

She smiled at Harry over her raised glass. "To the moment of each meeting," said Ruth. "And to Tom Quinn. We who are already dead salute you."

END