fic: in which things aren't always
Alternate ending to episode 8.03. Written for afiakate for the spooky_doings not!Yuletide exchange. 2000 words. Un-beta-ed.
- - -
Coming back
Jo never expected to end up in IT, but then she never expected to end up a spy, either.
"Ros shot you," Malcolm repeats, deadpan.
"No, Ros shot the man in front of me."
Malcolm raises an eyebrow, and Jo is belatedly aware of the faint note of irritation in her voice. The next line is always something about Ros being a bad shot and she hates having to point out that if Ros was not such a good shot, things would be very different. But Malcolm says nothing.
"I thought you were going to read," she says, to change the subject. She glances around Malcolm's front room, which holds more computers than she can count, and probably a few more that she doesn't recognise as computers. "I've been filling a box of books by my front door, to bring to you."
"I am reading. But it's - well, harder than I thought."
Another thing she never expected: that Malcolm would be an adrenaline junkie. One whole month of leave and she is only just beginning to realise how much the service has skewed her perception of the real world.
By the time Lucas got back to the scene, his shoes still dripping water from Robinov's pool, it was all over. The billionaires had disappeared in luxury cars which, ironically, seemed to be what had attracted the press. The police were still playing the line that there was nothing for anyone to see.
Lucas managed to slip through the commotion, into the great marbled hall where he'd been sitting with Jo. CO-19 were clearing out. There were still wires all over the floor.
Jo had made him play twenty questions. To stop him pacing, he'd thought, because her heart wasn't in it either. They had sat on the floor, the marble column chilling his spine, taking it in turns to share childhood stories. Both with eyes fixed on the silent laptop as the numbers climbed.
"It's usually a good thing," she'd said, "when numbers go up instead of down."
He found her phone on the floor and pocketed it automatically. Someone behind him demanded to know what he was doing, but before Lucas could reply one of the CO-19 officers stepped in to explain. He didn't know the man's name. Jo did. Jo knew everyone's name.
It was impossible to escape those kind of cliches, apparently.
He nodded his thanks to the officer. The opulence of the place sickened him; even full of men with guns it was oppressive, the gilded angel staring at him stonily. He went back to the grid.
Ros was bent over her desk as he came through the pods. She spoke without looking up.
"I called the hospital already. Jo's going to be fine."
"I know. I called too. Are you?"
"Why wouldn't I be fine?"
"Because you shot your colleague," Lucas said, with weight.
Ros stopped writing long enough to give him a withering look. Her writing was tiny, he noticed, and nearly illegible.
"It doesn't happen every day," he added, when she returned to her work without speaking.
"You're right, it doesn't. Probably not since Tom Quinn shot Harry."
Lucas was backfooted. "What?"
Ros narrowed her eyes at him, slamming files closed. "Bloody hell, Lucas, keep up with your history. I'm going home."
"Ros - "
He tried to grab her arm but she sidestepped deftly, her hurry saying more about the state she was in than any amount of barbed comments.
He gave up. Harry had gone to comfort Ruth, which Lucas privately thought shouldn't be his top priority. He shivered suddenly, hit by a wave of exhaustion, and thought he understood Ros' need to get home. To be somewhere silence didn't mean other things. He took his coat from his desk.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Tariq at a computer, shrouded in darkness, idly pressing what sounded like a single key over and over again. Tariq must have seen him but had said nothing. Lucas wondered if it would be better just to leave. He paused with his back turned.
It was Tariq who spoke first. "Going home?"
"I guess so," Lucas replied evasively. "You're not?"
"Not yet."
Lucas pulled on his coat, slowly. Why did he want to get home so urgently, anyway? Some stupid notion that things would be fine there; he knew he wouldn't sleep. He thought about calling Sarah but remembered that Harry had burned that particular bridge on his behalf, at least for a few days. He thought about calling Malcolm but couldn't think what to say.
"Need a drink?" he asked.
Tariq looked up, surprised. He seemed almost to deflate a little in relief. "Okay."
Tariq wasn't actually sure why Lucas wanted company to drink. Despite looking wrecked, cold and exhausted, he was apparently totally able to deal with whatever he was feeling, if anything at all. The mess of Tariq's feelings graciously made way for irritation. He'd conceded a lot in the last few weeks, including his childish show of individuality in clothing, but he wasn't about to accept that Jo getting shot was just another day at the office.
The bar was quiet. He was uncomfortable away from his computer, burying his hands in his pockets to stop himself fidgeting. He asked for a coke.
"Don't tell me you're not eighteen," Lucas said incredulously.
"Twenty. I don't drink."
Lucas looked like he could kick himself for being so stupid, and Tariq felt a little guilty for being short with him. No reason he was meant to be different from every single other stranger Tariq had ever gone for a drink with.
"Besides," he offered after a pause, "my mum would kill me. She's already mad I gave up my high-flying corporate career."
Something like amusement flickered across Lucas' face. "I imagine government wage hardly compares."
Was this what he wanted, a normal conversation? Tariq could do normal. "You're telling me."
"Does she know what you're doing? Your mum?"
Tariq shook his head. It was part of the reason he didn't want to go home, not until he thought he could make it across the kitchen without someone grabbing his arm and asking who had died.
"You should tell her. It'll make it easier."
He shrugged, dismissive. "She didn't understand my old job, anyway. She thought I was looking up the search requests that people typed in to google."
Another almost-smile.
"Did you tell your parents?"
Lucas nodded. "They didn't mind so much. But I was older than you are."
Tariq glanced at the tattoo circling Lucas' wrist. "I bet they minded about that."
For a second Lucas' gaze was sharp, changing his features so suddenly that Tariq was startled, getting an idea of how exactly Lucas had dealt with Robinov so quickly. The expression was gone in an instant.
"You could say they weren't impressed," he said lightly.
Tariq had no idea what mistake he'd made but he had no intention of asking. He'd already learned that the hard way when he'd asked Ruth if she had children and she'd run from the room. I do computers, not people, he told himself. I'm not a spy. It had become something of a mantra.
"Why did you, then?" Lucas asked presently. "Give up your high-flying career."
Tariq took a long drink. A string of excuses ran through his head, but he couldn't lie, not now. "Jo," he said abruptly. He knew he must look utterly miserable and half of the reason was that he had no right to look miserable at all, but he'd given up trying to apply logic to that particular problem.
"Ah. Same thing happened to Jo, you know."
"Really? You?"
Lucas looked faintly surprised, then smiled wryly. "No. Someone more... charming."
Tariq tried to imagine Jo young and impressionable. Just yesterday he'd attempted a light hack into the personnel files, to find out if she had a boyfriend, and had come up against a firewall apparently planted by his predecessor. He could have got through it, probably, but shame had put paid to idle curiosity.
The memory made him hot with embarrassment, and he let it play over and over in his head because he preferred it to the other which was backgrounding it - the glimpse he'd seen of the CO-19 footage, Jo on the floor clutching her arm, blood everywhere. He rubbed at his face with his hands.
"I suppose there will be a few more new people around soon, anyway," he said eventually, dragging his thoughts into order with effort.
Lucas looked puzzled. "She'll come back."
"Really? I wouldn't."
Lucas took a long time to reply. "Sometimes," he said, "it's the easiest option."
Tariq thought that was just about the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.
After she is discharged from hospital, Jo spends a week with her parents, until her arm stops aching enough that she can move her fingers. Even then the simplest things are difficult, but she finds a perverse pleasure in surviving on her own. A jar of jam nearly defeats her until she thinks to put it in the freezer and then under the hot tap. It splits open like a seedpod.
She speaks to Lucas on the phone, and Harry. It's nice to hear their voices but she doesn't ask them to visit and they both stop short of arriving uninvited.
"I got a new bike," Tariq tells her. "That means I get my social life back."
"You still have time for a social life? God, don't let Ros find out."
Ros, who associates apology with regret, calls only once. Jo knows Ros has other ways of finding out how she is doing: questions via Malcolm, the occasional blank postcard. She is comforted, in an odd way, by the respect in Ros' distance.
There are books, she notices the next time she visits Malcolm. Under keyboards, on top of boxes. Classics, poetry mainly. A manual on growing fruit trees. A history of Tiger Moths. Something which looks like a small guitar, ornately carved, resting in a corner.
"What is that?"
"That? A mandolin."
"Can you play it?"
"Yes," says Malcolm shrewdly.
A pause. "Will you play it?"
"Ah." Malcolm sips his tea. "No."
So this is life, she remembers. The little things resting in the corners. Her own flat looks empty. She buys pot-plants.
Ruth turns up on her doorstep with a basket of food and flowers. "I haven't been back, since you've been gone. I can't." In validating her decision all Ruth's doubts and fears are circling back like a flock of restless birds.
"Was I the only reason you came back?"
Ruth flushes, fingering her necklace.
It is only then that Jo realises the decision is hers, too.
To Malcolm's surprise, Jo is very good for business. She listens attentively, learns quickly, and most importantly, sprouts technical-sounding words mixed with enough layman's speak to impress and not intimidate.
"HR wanted to turn me into a permanent recruiter," she explains, when Malcolm is having to turn clients away. "I found your replacement, actually. Wasting his skills building timebombs into the Google system so that he could solve them later. Give a few more years and we'd probably have been arresting him."
"What's he like?"
"Oh, you know. Sweet. Young."
"And you so old yourself," Malcolm says wistfully.
Jo doesn't know what to say to that.
At home that evening, she goes through the mountains of stuff in the hall cupboard, finding old Christmas cards and university notes and Zaf's Top Gear magazines in a plastic bag on the top shelf like a porno collection. She goes through every one for secret messages and finds a coded note from Adam discussing her birthday present.
She cries, finally. Then she makes her decision. It is hard to believe there ever was a decision to make at all.
- - -
- - -
Coming back
Jo never expected to end up in IT, but then she never expected to end up a spy, either.
"Ros shot you," Malcolm repeats, deadpan.
"No, Ros shot the man in front of me."
Malcolm raises an eyebrow, and Jo is belatedly aware of the faint note of irritation in her voice. The next line is always something about Ros being a bad shot and she hates having to point out that if Ros was not such a good shot, things would be very different. But Malcolm says nothing.
"I thought you were going to read," she says, to change the subject. She glances around Malcolm's front room, which holds more computers than she can count, and probably a few more that she doesn't recognise as computers. "I've been filling a box of books by my front door, to bring to you."
"I am reading. But it's - well, harder than I thought."
Another thing she never expected: that Malcolm would be an adrenaline junkie. One whole month of leave and she is only just beginning to realise how much the service has skewed her perception of the real world.
By the time Lucas got back to the scene, his shoes still dripping water from Robinov's pool, it was all over. The billionaires had disappeared in luxury cars which, ironically, seemed to be what had attracted the press. The police were still playing the line that there was nothing for anyone to see.
Lucas managed to slip through the commotion, into the great marbled hall where he'd been sitting with Jo. CO-19 were clearing out. There were still wires all over the floor.
Jo had made him play twenty questions. To stop him pacing, he'd thought, because her heart wasn't in it either. They had sat on the floor, the marble column chilling his spine, taking it in turns to share childhood stories. Both with eyes fixed on the silent laptop as the numbers climbed.
"It's usually a good thing," she'd said, "when numbers go up instead of down."
He found her phone on the floor and pocketed it automatically. Someone behind him demanded to know what he was doing, but before Lucas could reply one of the CO-19 officers stepped in to explain. He didn't know the man's name. Jo did. Jo knew everyone's name.
It was impossible to escape those kind of cliches, apparently.
He nodded his thanks to the officer. The opulence of the place sickened him; even full of men with guns it was oppressive, the gilded angel staring at him stonily. He went back to the grid.
Ros was bent over her desk as he came through the pods. She spoke without looking up.
"I called the hospital already. Jo's going to be fine."
"I know. I called too. Are you?"
"Why wouldn't I be fine?"
"Because you shot your colleague," Lucas said, with weight.
Ros stopped writing long enough to give him a withering look. Her writing was tiny, he noticed, and nearly illegible.
"It doesn't happen every day," he added, when she returned to her work without speaking.
"You're right, it doesn't. Probably not since Tom Quinn shot Harry."
Lucas was backfooted. "What?"
Ros narrowed her eyes at him, slamming files closed. "Bloody hell, Lucas, keep up with your history. I'm going home."
"Ros - "
He tried to grab her arm but she sidestepped deftly, her hurry saying more about the state she was in than any amount of barbed comments.
He gave up. Harry had gone to comfort Ruth, which Lucas privately thought shouldn't be his top priority. He shivered suddenly, hit by a wave of exhaustion, and thought he understood Ros' need to get home. To be somewhere silence didn't mean other things. He took his coat from his desk.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Tariq at a computer, shrouded in darkness, idly pressing what sounded like a single key over and over again. Tariq must have seen him but had said nothing. Lucas wondered if it would be better just to leave. He paused with his back turned.
It was Tariq who spoke first. "Going home?"
"I guess so," Lucas replied evasively. "You're not?"
"Not yet."
Lucas pulled on his coat, slowly. Why did he want to get home so urgently, anyway? Some stupid notion that things would be fine there; he knew he wouldn't sleep. He thought about calling Sarah but remembered that Harry had burned that particular bridge on his behalf, at least for a few days. He thought about calling Malcolm but couldn't think what to say.
"Need a drink?" he asked.
Tariq looked up, surprised. He seemed almost to deflate a little in relief. "Okay."
Tariq wasn't actually sure why Lucas wanted company to drink. Despite looking wrecked, cold and exhausted, he was apparently totally able to deal with whatever he was feeling, if anything at all. The mess of Tariq's feelings graciously made way for irritation. He'd conceded a lot in the last few weeks, including his childish show of individuality in clothing, but he wasn't about to accept that Jo getting shot was just another day at the office.
The bar was quiet. He was uncomfortable away from his computer, burying his hands in his pockets to stop himself fidgeting. He asked for a coke.
"Don't tell me you're not eighteen," Lucas said incredulously.
"Twenty. I don't drink."
Lucas looked like he could kick himself for being so stupid, and Tariq felt a little guilty for being short with him. No reason he was meant to be different from every single other stranger Tariq had ever gone for a drink with.
"Besides," he offered after a pause, "my mum would kill me. She's already mad I gave up my high-flying corporate career."
Something like amusement flickered across Lucas' face. "I imagine government wage hardly compares."
Was this what he wanted, a normal conversation? Tariq could do normal. "You're telling me."
"Does she know what you're doing? Your mum?"
Tariq shook his head. It was part of the reason he didn't want to go home, not until he thought he could make it across the kitchen without someone grabbing his arm and asking who had died.
"You should tell her. It'll make it easier."
He shrugged, dismissive. "She didn't understand my old job, anyway. She thought I was looking up the search requests that people typed in to google."
Another almost-smile.
"Did you tell your parents?"
Lucas nodded. "They didn't mind so much. But I was older than you are."
Tariq glanced at the tattoo circling Lucas' wrist. "I bet they minded about that."
For a second Lucas' gaze was sharp, changing his features so suddenly that Tariq was startled, getting an idea of how exactly Lucas had dealt with Robinov so quickly. The expression was gone in an instant.
"You could say they weren't impressed," he said lightly.
Tariq had no idea what mistake he'd made but he had no intention of asking. He'd already learned that the hard way when he'd asked Ruth if she had children and she'd run from the room. I do computers, not people, he told himself. I'm not a spy. It had become something of a mantra.
"Why did you, then?" Lucas asked presently. "Give up your high-flying career."
Tariq took a long drink. A string of excuses ran through his head, but he couldn't lie, not now. "Jo," he said abruptly. He knew he must look utterly miserable and half of the reason was that he had no right to look miserable at all, but he'd given up trying to apply logic to that particular problem.
"Ah. Same thing happened to Jo, you know."
"Really? You?"
Lucas looked faintly surprised, then smiled wryly. "No. Someone more... charming."
Tariq tried to imagine Jo young and impressionable. Just yesterday he'd attempted a light hack into the personnel files, to find out if she had a boyfriend, and had come up against a firewall apparently planted by his predecessor. He could have got through it, probably, but shame had put paid to idle curiosity.
The memory made him hot with embarrassment, and he let it play over and over in his head because he preferred it to the other which was backgrounding it - the glimpse he'd seen of the CO-19 footage, Jo on the floor clutching her arm, blood everywhere. He rubbed at his face with his hands.
"I suppose there will be a few more new people around soon, anyway," he said eventually, dragging his thoughts into order with effort.
Lucas looked puzzled. "She'll come back."
"Really? I wouldn't."
Lucas took a long time to reply. "Sometimes," he said, "it's the easiest option."
Tariq thought that was just about the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.
After she is discharged from hospital, Jo spends a week with her parents, until her arm stops aching enough that she can move her fingers. Even then the simplest things are difficult, but she finds a perverse pleasure in surviving on her own. A jar of jam nearly defeats her until she thinks to put it in the freezer and then under the hot tap. It splits open like a seedpod.
She speaks to Lucas on the phone, and Harry. It's nice to hear their voices but she doesn't ask them to visit and they both stop short of arriving uninvited.
"I got a new bike," Tariq tells her. "That means I get my social life back."
"You still have time for a social life? God, don't let Ros find out."
Ros, who associates apology with regret, calls only once. Jo knows Ros has other ways of finding out how she is doing: questions via Malcolm, the occasional blank postcard. She is comforted, in an odd way, by the respect in Ros' distance.
There are books, she notices the next time she visits Malcolm. Under keyboards, on top of boxes. Classics, poetry mainly. A manual on growing fruit trees. A history of Tiger Moths. Something which looks like a small guitar, ornately carved, resting in a corner.
"What is that?"
"That? A mandolin."
"Can you play it?"
"Yes," says Malcolm shrewdly.
A pause. "Will you play it?"
"Ah." Malcolm sips his tea. "No."
So this is life, she remembers. The little things resting in the corners. Her own flat looks empty. She buys pot-plants.
Ruth turns up on her doorstep with a basket of food and flowers. "I haven't been back, since you've been gone. I can't." In validating her decision all Ruth's doubts and fears are circling back like a flock of restless birds.
"Was I the only reason you came back?"
Ruth flushes, fingering her necklace.
It is only then that Jo realises the decision is hers, too.
To Malcolm's surprise, Jo is very good for business. She listens attentively, learns quickly, and most importantly, sprouts technical-sounding words mixed with enough layman's speak to impress and not intimidate.
"HR wanted to turn me into a permanent recruiter," she explains, when Malcolm is having to turn clients away. "I found your replacement, actually. Wasting his skills building timebombs into the Google system so that he could solve them later. Give a few more years and we'd probably have been arresting him."
"What's he like?"
"Oh, you know. Sweet. Young."
"And you so old yourself," Malcolm says wistfully.
Jo doesn't know what to say to that.
At home that evening, she goes through the mountains of stuff in the hall cupboard, finding old Christmas cards and university notes and Zaf's Top Gear magazines in a plastic bag on the top shelf like a porno collection. She goes through every one for secret messages and finds a coded note from Adam discussing her birthday present.
She cries, finally. Then she makes her decision. It is hard to believe there ever was a decision to make at all.
- - -