I didn't know I paced, Ruth.
True story: once upon a time, I received a (random) prompt for a ficathon. I stared at that prompt for a while, trying to figure out why it was that it was so familiar looking, until I realized that the reason was because the author had taught me in college. True god damn story. RU RAH RAH!
Also: how the hell did this happen.
TITLE: Elocation (or, Exit Us)
FANDOM: Spooks
CHARACTERS: Ruth; Harry/Ruth (and Ruth/George)
SPOILERS: Series 8
SUMMARY: "Ruth doesn't know quite what to expect from exile, but it certainly isn't this."
NOTE: For delgaserasca and her ficathon. I do not - I cannot believe that in a lot of ways, this took me two years to write. I mean, yes I can, but still. Prompt and title by one Evie Shockley. I LOVE HOW DEPRESSING THESE TWO ARE, ALL RIGHT?
she's got a great heart, but that got her where?
+
I.
Ruth doesn't know quite what to expect from exile, but it certainly isn't this.
It's not intriguing, or interesting. There are no dead drops. There are no threatening shadows lurking across the street or hiding in back alleys. She actually tears the entire flat apart (which is in some generic Eastern bloc city; she thinks they might be in the Czech Republic, but she lost track after a while) looking for the coded message, but it isn't there. Just a closet full of clothes that aren't hers, that don't even fit. Belatedly, she realizes - because they're Fiona's size.
So she waits.
After two days, there is a knock on the door, and the sound jolts down her spine. The man is solid, generic; official-looking. Ruth can't tell if he's Six, a friendly, or an asset. Or- ...or.
"Fancy Camden town?" This is the control question Adam has given her to ask.
The man keeps eye contact, controlled, and oddly reminds her of Zaf. "More for Kings Cross, if you ask me." He has the thin threads of a Scottish accent.
She trusts him.
-
"I'm to tell you there'll be a car tomorrow."
He hands her two passports, both Irish. One says Ruth and the other says Naomi.
"Oh, that. You'll have to forgive my boys for it. I'm afraid they get a bit bored with all those Arabic types sometimes." At this, he smiles. Ruth trusts him regardless (she has to trust Adam; she has to), but now she also finds him repulsive. Not Six; probably just an asset, but still possibly a friendly.
"Use one now then burn it when you get there. Keep the other one just in case." He takes a pen out of his jacket pocket. "I'm going to give you a number. Memorize it and never write it down, ever. Barring the most unforeseen of circumstances, you can use it anytime, anywhere, to call anyone. Just punch in the country code and presto. I'm sure you lot have your procedures for that thing."
Ruth says nothing.
"Any questions?"
It's all so easy. Even now.
Her fingers hesitate over the passports on the table. "Which one should I-"
"Up to you, love."
Again, he smiles.
-
She doesn't sleep.
Instead, she stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom and tries to decide who she is going to be. Is she still Ruth? Ruth but in name only? Is she someone else entirely? Is she Naomi? Does she cling to a life she no longer has, or invent a new one already steeped in ironic mythology?
(is she a no-one now)
(is this such a terrible thing, considering)
(Yes.)
-
Naomi boards a flight in Prague.
She is so tired that she can't help but sleep. She dreams, too, which later feels like a luxury she shouldn't be allowed anymore. In her dream, Peter is chasing her beneath the boardwalk in Blackpool, zig-zagging in and out of the pylons as the surf comes in - he's shouting "we're free, Ruthie! We're free! We're free!" and she laughs along with him, feeling drunk and happy and effortless. (Ruthie never felt effortless; Ruthie was always awkward, always late, never cool - except in Blackpool. No one cared there; no one knew who they were. They were just kids. That much of her lie to Angela was true.) Eventually Peter catches up to her, but Peter is no longer Peter - he's Harry. He traps her against a wooden pylon, kisses her, and he tastes like salt. They're both by the ocean. They've both been crying.
Ruth wakes up in Greece.
+
II.
When she's known George for four months, she wonders if she should just tell him.
It doesn't matter that she can't imagine how to even begin that particular conversation. "Do you have a second? I thought I should tell you - actually, I'm not just an office temp. I'm a former member of the British Security Service, and a damned good one at that. I threw my life away because I was deliberately framed for murder and I couldn't let my boss take the blame. The work we did was good; it was the right thing to do. But I did it because I loved it, and him. Could you pass me the basil? I've decided to make us a pizza tonight."
Nico plays football after school with friends, and George asks her to move in with them. This is her life now.
-
He asks her to marry him, once.
"What would you possibly do if I said yes?"
"Well first, I'd have to kiss you."
He kisses her anyway.
"But I haven't said yes."
"You're thinking about it."
"I am not."
"You are." He says it with surety, and it's well-placed because she is. "I know you."
She swallows, and decides: "We can't get married."
Another kiss. "Of course we can."
"No- ...I mean it. We can't." Her mind swirls around the actual reasons - legal contracts and marriage certificates; she lives pretty much off the grid as it is, but could this identity truly stand the weight of something like that? An actual marriage, with governmental approval and the lot? She thinks about these things. She thinks about these things all the time. "There are too many... things."
"Things? What things?" He smiles, kissing her again and again, playfully. "Are you already married, Ruthie? Is that it?"
(Yes, yes, yes, yes. In a thousand different ways, yesyesyes.)
She puts her hand on his face. "Please don't ask me again."
George's face changes, almost sad. "You're serious. Aren't you?"
"Please don't," she says again. "It isn't because... I don't want you to think that this is-" She can't say it. God dammit, even now, she can't say it. It feels- it... feels-
(it feels like a betrayal, but to whom she isn't- or even why)
(she can't)
(yes)
(yes she can)
George kisses her, because he loves her. "I promise."
She believes him. It's almost not fair that she would never think otherwise about him.
-
Ruth meets Nico's mother once, a woman with the impossibly romantic name of Isabella. She is tall, with long wavy hair, stunningly beautiful and just everything Ruth never was or is. Strangely, she reminds Ruth of Juliet. They have the same glint of rebellion in their eye.
Later, over a bottle of a wine and Nico fast asleep, George confesses to her. About how Isabella was an artist and she got pregnant by accident; that he never wanted to marry her, much less have a child with her. How terribly guilty he felt, resenting the life growing inside her day in and day out - what a horrible human being he must have been then. About how everything changed the moment he saw Nico for the first time (Nico, short for Nicodermus although that's only on the birth certificate) - actually saw him, his son - HIS. SON. That it was Isabella who eventually couldn't take it; Isabella, who realized that she was not a mother. She left Nico with George when the boy was a year old and then didn't come back for seven months. George tells her he spent the entire time convinced that Nico knew he hadn't been wanted, ever, and doing everything in his power to make up for that. That he was still doing that, every day, and would continue to do so until the day he died.
"So there you go," he says, eventually. "Now you know everything about me."
Ruth licks her lips. She wants so badly to be able to tell him - about breaking her arm when she was eleven, about seeing Oxford for the first time; the nonsense mnemonic device for the threat assessment scale that she learned on her second day on the Grid.
"You're right," she muses. "You're a terrible human being."
George looks at her and she smiles; he sighs with a small measure of relief.
"I love you. You know that?"
She does.
"I do," she replies.
-
"My stepmother. Dreadful woman."
"Really?"
"Yes. But aren't all stepmothers already by definition awful? Why would I?"
"No, I meant-," George pauses. "You have a stepmother?"
Ruth gathers herself. They play this game so often - if we got married, who would we invite? - that sometimes she forgets who she is (was). "Yes," she says, truthfully. "And a stepfather."
"Was it amicable, then, your parents?"
She shrugs. "Too young. I barely remember it, actually."
It's a lie, and they both know it. Ruth was ten.
-
When she's alone in the house, Ruth practices.
From the garden to the bedroom: eight seconds. From the kitchen to the bedroom: eleven seconds (because you have to wind around the staircase and, well). Passports, overnight bag in the hall closet; car keys always left in the bowl on the tabletop in the hallway. It's a wonder George never notices all the provisions she's made around the house. Or maybe he has, and it's just another quirky thing about this woman he loves, Ruth. She always parks the car with the driver's side facing the house, and when it tells her it shouldn't matter how he parks it when he takes it out, she wants to shout at him: you have no idea - you have no idea how valuable those few seconds might be one day.
When she's alone in the house, she practices.
One day, it pays off. Ruth pauses for a moment, letting it all come at her for a split second, and then she is gone.
+
III.
Ruth finds out about her secondment to MI-5 on a Tuesday. It's a rather ordinary Tuesday actually, except in this regard.
On the morning of her first day, she is summoned to the office of Amanda Roke. Occasionally we will need you, Ruth is all that Amanda says. (She doesn't need to say anything else. The message is implicit. A government cannot betray itself to itself, can it? She has no idea how empty that argument will sound when parroted back to Tom Quinn later.) In total, the only thing that comes of this meeting is that she's late; she races through the security checks, hardly bothering to remember anyone's name, so when she slides open that door to the briefing room and everything comes crashing out of her arms on the floor, of course everyone looks at her like she's insane. She feels insane. Even though she knows Section D is where she belongs, she hardly believes it herself.
Malcolm and Colin are nice to her, because she's new. Tom, she feels, wants to trust her, while Zoe and Danny are worlds away. Sam makes decent enough tea, and Ruth figures out very quickly that most people probably underestimate her for that, so she remembers this and always recommends the girl for whatever projects she can.
Harry, though, she can't put her finger on Harry. He'll send her on a wild goose chase, and they'll both know it; she'll manage to make water out of wine, and he'll smile with satisfaction but tomorrow will be just the same. It's like she's being tested until her eyes bleed. At first she chalks it up to this job - this is just what's expected of officers at this level of the Security Service, but she quickly figures out that that's not the case. The worst part of all is that it's not even discouraging - she finds herself wholly invigorated by the challenge of proving her usefulness to everyone. Tom will ask for background on groups focusing on British eco-terrorism, and she'll give him that plus anarchists, techno-liberators, and anyone from the loony lefty groups who've started emigrating from the American Northwest (just in case). She won't say a word when occasionally Zoe wants shipping manifests of boats coming in from Russia and Eastern Europe. Danny - well, actually, Danny never wants anything specific unless someone tells him to ask for it first.
Ruth knows that sending that email to Amanda is probably wrong, but she does it anyway.
After all, it's just what someone told her to do.
-
"You knew."
They're at The George now, it's barely past noon, and Ruth has no idea how she managed to find herself alone with Harry, already on his third full whiskey. They've all been in lockdown for the past fifteen hours, so she figures that's his empty stomach more than anything else. Most of the other staff have retreated to private booths, but she and Harry are here at a table in the middle of it all. Perhaps Britain shouldn't know how far its Security Service has taken the day off today.
"What?"
"The lockdown. Of course you knew it was a drill."
"I didn't."
"You did."
"No. I didn't. None of us did."
His face gets cloudy. "So you really didn't know?"
"No! Have- ...have you even been listening to anything I've just said?"
Harry gathers himself in the seat across from her. "I'm terribly sorry, Ruth, but I had to do it."
She looks at him. If they were any other people, this might almost be something approaching a personal apology for the hell they just went through. Not two hours ago, she was staring down Tom Quinn, contemplating the end of the world as she watched him buckling under the moral weight of it all. Which of course will never show up in any official report, not that it probably needs to, they were all under a lot of stress, but still.
So she starts to says, quietly, "Harry, I think you should know-"
"Don't."
(How can he-?) "It's just that you should be-"
"I don't want to hear about, Ruth. Not now."
Three years later, she probably would have fought him on that particular declaration.
Today, she lets it go, and they drink in silence for a while.
-
"I think Tom Quinn's on the blink."
The worst part is that part of Ruth is hardly surprised at all.
"You stand by me on this, Ruth," he asks of her.
-
It's hours after the fact: a rare moment of quiet that can't have lasted more than a few seconds or so. Ruth is on hold with some foreign agency, and Harry is walking around the bullpen as if this will make Tom appear out of thin air. She doesn't actually notice at first that he's talking to her.
"By the way, how did you manage it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The note. How did you get it passed the guard at the hospital?"
She actually blushes, shit. "Oh, you know."
"I don't, actually, it's why I'm asking."
Shit, shit, shit, shit. "I told them I - a story."
He inhales, and she swears, there's a small, impressed smile on his face. "So you lied."
"Yes." A beat. "It was for the good of the country, after all."
"Of course. Just out of curiosity, what did you-"
"No." She smiles, and honest to God, she must be that deprived of sleep or something. "I'll never tell."
"I'm your boss, Ruth."
"Even still."
Then of course, Adam interrupts them and with him comes an entourage of other officers - Ruth swears that Harry is still smiling even when he's not, and a while later, she is definitely aware that something has now changed between them, even in this very moment. He's my boss and I'm in love with him and I'm having his child. It came from nowhere, and it meant nothing except to get that piece of paper into the room, but it was - well - it was practically effortless.
Zoe and Danny are both quietly imploding. Adam is Adam. Harry now punctuates every sentence by looking at her at some point. It's all-
Well.
It's certainly something.
+
IV.
They sold her house.
Granted, she's technically been "dead" for two years so that was probably to be expected, but still. All of one's old personal possessions in storage with no place to put them - definitely one of the stranger elements of coming back to this particular life.
Malcolm takes her around to look at flats for rent (all completely vetted, of course), and after the second one is when he tells her that he's resigned from the Service completely. She stops dead in her tracks and demands that he take it back. She's sure that she's making a scene, and she doesn't care. But he's put in his papers, Malcolm explains, and even if he hadn't he still doesn't want this life anymore. He's made up his mind.
"Is this my fault?"
He blinks at her, genuinely surprised. "No," he says, kindly. She wants to believe him. "No, absolutely not. It was just my time."
She idles in place. "I don't know what that means, you know. Even after everything - I don't think I know what that means, 'my time.'"
Malcolm looks at her curiously. "I think it means you might miss it."
"No," she replies, too quickly. Dammit. She doesn't. She doesn't. She is Ruth, and her husband (not her husband) is dead and she is alone now in a country that she used to know, that she used to call home. Nothing more and nothing less. Nothing- ...nothing. "No."
"All right," Malcolm says, sensing her unwillingness. He steers the conversation elsewhere: "I think this next place is tremendously overpriced considering the area, but Jo owes the landlord a favor so let's at least give it a few minutes, shall we?"
Ruth smiles at this, and they lock arms.
-
She buzzes for hours. Can't sit still, can't calm herself, can't even focus on the telly for more than a few minutes (it's rubbish, all rubbish on now).
Malcolm is right. Despite everything (everything!), Malcolm is right.
She misses it, terribly.
When her phone rings, it's Jo.
-
Thames House, it still smells the same. She doesn't know why this surprises her, but it does.
The security guard at the front desk - Vernon, she remembers - gives her a blatant double-take. She remembers that his wife's name is Shirley. "Miss," he just keeps saying, "Miss! I never - I just didn't think I'd ever - hello!"
"Hello, Vernon."
He beams. "Oh goodness, you remember me."
(It occurs to her that it has been two years since she's been here, exactly here. Two years since she was led out of these same doors in protective custody; escorted to her house like a common criminal.)
She gestures towards her bag. "I'm sorry, I haven't got a-"
"No, no, it's all right, everything's been arranged." He swipes a card in the absence of her own; she half expects sirens to go off through the building, but they don't. "I trust you know your way?"
"Yes."
"So nice to have you back with us, ma'am."
Us.
She thinks about that word the entire elevator ride down.
-
(Baghdad is a half-forgotten memory, even before it should be. It's one weekend out of fifty-two in a year, if you can believe that. Adam is still on medical leave; oil reserves in this country are drying up by the dozen, so it isn't until the plane is in the air that Ruth realizes that this isn't right.
"Harry, what-"
They're flying commercially, under the radar. He cuts her off with just a look.
In country, they check-in at their hotel. There's one room, and a single bed; Harry explains they won't be staying the night, but it's still not lost on her. They've registered as a couple, married or whatever; he doesn't even leave his real name at reception, much less hers. At dinner, she is simply Ruth, and she doesn't have to tell anyone what she does because everyone already knows. She picks out the players soon enough: CIA, Six, Indian Intelligence, a few stragglers save one from the DGSE who depart before the second course. She is keeping the lone remaining Frenchman entertained when Harry suddenly emerges from his locked room and says, "Walk with me.")
("You can't be serious."
"I am and I will."
"They'll crucify you if it goes bad."
"Then so be it."
"I'm serious."
"I cannot allow this scenario to happen, Ruth. It isn't right and you know it."
"Is that why I'm here, then? Because you can't live with yourself if it all goes wrong?"
Neither of them have any idea at the time that this is the most honest conversation they'll ever have about themselves.
"Tell me you'll support me."
She shifts. "Harry."
"Ruth."
She bites her lip, then: "Yes. Of course I do.")
(When they get back, nothing is the same and no one else on the Grid quite understands it. Then again, how could they? Some say they slept together; others claim they've been at it for weeks now. To most, they are just Harry and Ruth - "you know how they are."
Of course, then there's a coup against the government, Adam comes back, and the world meets Ros Meyers. In short: life goes on.)
(Harry slides into the handshake smoothly; the other man flicks his eyes to Ruth with the hint of skepticism, and Harry's hand is quickly in the small of her back. "This is Ruth," he says, like that is supposed to mean something, and apparently it does: the other man then shakes her hand graciously, like she belongs. She supposes she does belong. She feels alive here, or maybe that's just the champagne.)
-
Jo is dead.
Adam is dead; Zaf is dead. Before she was gone, there was a small sliver of hatred for someone named Connie in Jo's voice, and Ruth feels like she should find out who this is, at least in memory of Jo.
(George is dead. She needs to remember that in her tally of lost souls - George; George, George, George.)
Ros remains mostly a blur to Ruth. She still exists solely as a figure standing in a hallway of a home that no longer belongs to her.
The first time they meet again properly is a few hours after It Happens - Harry goes down there to intervene with the local authorities, to keep the press from completely blowing the Bendorf Group situation to epic proportions (unlikely, but still). Lucas gets back to the Grid as fast as he can and takes Tariq into a quiet corner. Ruth hates this. She can hear Tariq shouting, "No - NO!" - she hates that the sound doesn't break her. After everything - despite George - Ruth sobers up fairly quickly; it's truly awful. Ros comes back a short time later, and is immediately shunted into Harry's office and he turns down the blinds. She disappears a short time later, but her time in the open is long enough to catch Ruth's eye across the hubbub. Oddly, Ruth remembers, she had to burn this woman's coat, and she feels bad about that. It was a nice coat.
Tariq has been staring at his computer for ten minutes now.
"Um," Ruth begins, but she doesn't know how this conversation is supposed to start. She never did. "If you want to go home, I could-"
"No," he cuts her off. Tariq gathers himself. "I'm fine, I just-"
Ruth sighs. "I'm sorry."
"Is this what it's like then?" he asks, suddenly.
"I'm sorry?"
"People you know dying. Is this what it feels like? It's a little empty actually."
Ruth wishes she had an answer for that question. She suspects tons of people probably want this answer.
"You knew Jo well then?" she manages.
Tariq shrugs. "She recruited me." She inhales sharply, remembering the sound of car alarms mixed with broken glass and gunshots. The girl had been so young when Adam found her; completely innocent and sweet. Now she was dead. They both were. "Why? Did you?"
Ruth finds herself nodding vigorously, which is almost a lie because she didn't, really. "The first time I met her, she saved my life."
"I didn't know that."
She feels old. "She was a journalist before. Did you know that? Followed us all to this safe house we were in, God knows why. There was a strike team following us, too, and if it wasn't for her..." Ruth starts remembering it all again, living in the adrenaline and crouched behind a sofa for safety, and she isn't sure that that was ever her life, not really. Not now. "I owe her a lot, I guess," she decides.
Tariq just looks at her. Ruth thinks about Sam, who disintegrated in front of her eyes at the news about Danny, who left the Grid that afternoon and never - never - came back. But she doesn't see that level of desperation in Tariq's face, and she supposes that's good. At least. (Good for whom, though?)
"Anyway," Ruth winds back, "if you need to-"
"No," Tariq decides. "I'd rather work, actually. If you don't mind."
There will be a time to grieve, Ruth.
There was actually a time in her life when Danny's sacrifice was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. A time when she ranked zipping open that body bag with closing her father's eyes or the sounds of the syllables assigned to the phrase Harry's been shot.
"Right, that's-" Tariq has already turned back to his computer screen, and she doesn't blame him. Not at all. "Right."
-
The world is always ending, she quickly remembers. It's not just officers in the field who get addicted to the adrenaline rush.
The Grid today is relatively quiet. Ros has been embedded with an investment firm for two weeks, but that's mostly benign. Lucas is getting bored running the names of first responders who keep turning up to a peculiar string of ordinary emergency situations. Ruth has her twenty-seven assets to monitor while Tariq juggles the task of bouncing between the three of them and flirting with Sara from Section C. Mostly he's just been doing the latter.
"This Section is not a dating service," Harry reprimands her. "Put a stop to it."
"Says the man currently supervising an operative cavorting with a member of a foreign service for the purpose of gaining possibly valuable intelligence, and who once flew a girl all the way to Iraq just because he couldn't be bothered to ask her to dinner properly."
He looks up at her, and she could almost call his face grateful. "I did ask you properly, though, Ruth."
"Yes. Eventually."
"And as I recall, it was you who put a stop to the whole affair."
Her cheeks flush at the word affair. "The point still stands," she counters, smiling slightly.
"Does it?"
Sometimes she feels years older than the rest of the world. Like she has seen everything there is to be seen, and ticked off every experience in life like it's all on a sort of list. Everything that happens now is just extra - that she can actually joke about events that led to things that led to people's deaths, people whom she loved, because honestly what else is there? She could wallow in it, but it wouldn't do her any good. It certainly wouldn't bring George back, no matter how hard she tried. Maybe that's the way she's decided to honor Jo, the person Who Saved Her Life.
Ruth is halfway out the door when Harry says her name, quietly. She turns to him.
He starts to say something, but she stops him. "I'll be sure to remind Tariq to stay focused. Don't worry."
"Thank you, Ruth," Harry says, licking his lips.
-
All she wanted was from him was to stop her.
I love you, she screams in her head. I love you, now stop me from leaving because you love me, too. It wasn't going to work, of course. This was their only play, at least if they wanted it to last, and they both knew it. But she was going away forever, and he should have tried. He should have tried. She wants to pretend that the idea of him going to jail to protect her is enough - and it should be enough, it's outrageous and ridiculous to a disproportionately romantic degree. But it isn't.
He doesn't stop her.
She still got on that god damned boat.
+
V.
Ruth has spent the entire car ride twisting the hem of her jacket in her fingers.
"Are you all right?" Harry asks her, when they're about a half of a block away.
She looks at him. Danny is dead. Danny is still dead, and Zoe is gone, and Tom is gone, and she doesn't - she doesn't - she has no idea who or what she is anymore. She can't picture Danny's family, but she certainly doesn't want to meet them. She doesn't! She wants to run away from here, far far far away from here. Sam had the right idea. No one has heard from Sam since this happened, except that she is alive (supposedly).
The car stops at a red light.
"Ruth," Harry prompts. She doesn't say anything. "Ruth."
"Someone should tell her," she mutters. Harry looks at her, so she elaborates, "Zoe. She should know."
"We can't."
"She should."
"You can't."
The pronoun shifts doesn't escape her.
"But she loved him." Harry looks at her, hard. "Harry. They loved each other."
"It doesn't matter anymore."
She reels. "Doesn't it?"
The car comes to a stop outside the church. Harry gets out first to open her car door, and never answers her question.
like a half-red sea
permanently parted, the middle she'd
pass through, like the rest, in a wheeling rush,
afraid the divide would not hold and all
would drown - city as almighty ambush -
beneath the crashing waves of human hell.
Evie Shockley; "Elocation (or Exit Us)"
Also: how the hell did this happen.
TITLE: Elocation (or, Exit Us)
FANDOM: Spooks
CHARACTERS: Ruth; Harry/Ruth (and Ruth/George)
SPOILERS: Series 8
SUMMARY: "Ruth doesn't know quite what to expect from exile, but it certainly isn't this."
NOTE: For delgaserasca and her ficathon. I do not - I cannot believe that in a lot of ways, this took me two years to write. I mean, yes I can, but still. Prompt and title by one Evie Shockley. I LOVE HOW DEPRESSING THESE TWO ARE, ALL RIGHT?
she's got a great heart, but that got her where?
+
I.
Ruth doesn't know quite what to expect from exile, but it certainly isn't this.
It's not intriguing, or interesting. There are no dead drops. There are no threatening shadows lurking across the street or hiding in back alleys. She actually tears the entire flat apart (which is in some generic Eastern bloc city; she thinks they might be in the Czech Republic, but she lost track after a while) looking for the coded message, but it isn't there. Just a closet full of clothes that aren't hers, that don't even fit. Belatedly, she realizes - because they're Fiona's size.
So she waits.
After two days, there is a knock on the door, and the sound jolts down her spine. The man is solid, generic; official-looking. Ruth can't tell if he's Six, a friendly, or an asset. Or- ...or.
"Fancy Camden town?" This is the control question Adam has given her to ask.
The man keeps eye contact, controlled, and oddly reminds her of Zaf. "More for Kings Cross, if you ask me." He has the thin threads of a Scottish accent.
She trusts him.
-
"I'm to tell you there'll be a car tomorrow."
He hands her two passports, both Irish. One says Ruth and the other says Naomi.
"Oh, that. You'll have to forgive my boys for it. I'm afraid they get a bit bored with all those Arabic types sometimes." At this, he smiles. Ruth trusts him regardless (she has to trust Adam; she has to), but now she also finds him repulsive. Not Six; probably just an asset, but still possibly a friendly.
"Use one now then burn it when you get there. Keep the other one just in case." He takes a pen out of his jacket pocket. "I'm going to give you a number. Memorize it and never write it down, ever. Barring the most unforeseen of circumstances, you can use it anytime, anywhere, to call anyone. Just punch in the country code and presto. I'm sure you lot have your procedures for that thing."
Ruth says nothing.
"Any questions?"
It's all so easy. Even now.
Her fingers hesitate over the passports on the table. "Which one should I-"
"Up to you, love."
Again, he smiles.
-
She doesn't sleep.
Instead, she stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom and tries to decide who she is going to be. Is she still Ruth? Ruth but in name only? Is she someone else entirely? Is she Naomi? Does she cling to a life she no longer has, or invent a new one already steeped in ironic mythology?
(is she a no-one now)
(is this such a terrible thing, considering)
(Yes.)
-
Naomi boards a flight in Prague.
She is so tired that she can't help but sleep. She dreams, too, which later feels like a luxury she shouldn't be allowed anymore. In her dream, Peter is chasing her beneath the boardwalk in Blackpool, zig-zagging in and out of the pylons as the surf comes in - he's shouting "we're free, Ruthie! We're free! We're free!" and she laughs along with him, feeling drunk and happy and effortless. (Ruthie never felt effortless; Ruthie was always awkward, always late, never cool - except in Blackpool. No one cared there; no one knew who they were. They were just kids. That much of her lie to Angela was true.) Eventually Peter catches up to her, but Peter is no longer Peter - he's Harry. He traps her against a wooden pylon, kisses her, and he tastes like salt. They're both by the ocean. They've both been crying.
Ruth wakes up in Greece.
+
II.
When she's known George for four months, she wonders if she should just tell him.
It doesn't matter that she can't imagine how to even begin that particular conversation. "Do you have a second? I thought I should tell you - actually, I'm not just an office temp. I'm a former member of the British Security Service, and a damned good one at that. I threw my life away because I was deliberately framed for murder and I couldn't let my boss take the blame. The work we did was good; it was the right thing to do. But I did it because I loved it, and him. Could you pass me the basil? I've decided to make us a pizza tonight."
Nico plays football after school with friends, and George asks her to move in with them. This is her life now.
-
He asks her to marry him, once.
"What would you possibly do if I said yes?"
"Well first, I'd have to kiss you."
He kisses her anyway.
"But I haven't said yes."
"You're thinking about it."
"I am not."
"You are." He says it with surety, and it's well-placed because she is. "I know you."
She swallows, and decides: "We can't get married."
Another kiss. "Of course we can."
"No- ...I mean it. We can't." Her mind swirls around the actual reasons - legal contracts and marriage certificates; she lives pretty much off the grid as it is, but could this identity truly stand the weight of something like that? An actual marriage, with governmental approval and the lot? She thinks about these things. She thinks about these things all the time. "There are too many... things."
"Things? What things?" He smiles, kissing her again and again, playfully. "Are you already married, Ruthie? Is that it?"
(Yes, yes, yes, yes. In a thousand different ways, yesyesyes.)
She puts her hand on his face. "Please don't ask me again."
George's face changes, almost sad. "You're serious. Aren't you?"
"Please don't," she says again. "It isn't because... I don't want you to think that this is-" She can't say it. God dammit, even now, she can't say it. It feels- it... feels-
(it feels like a betrayal, but to whom she isn't- or even why)
(she can't)
(yes)
(yes she can)
George kisses her, because he loves her. "I promise."
She believes him. It's almost not fair that she would never think otherwise about him.
-
Ruth meets Nico's mother once, a woman with the impossibly romantic name of Isabella. She is tall, with long wavy hair, stunningly beautiful and just everything Ruth never was or is. Strangely, she reminds Ruth of Juliet. They have the same glint of rebellion in their eye.
Later, over a bottle of a wine and Nico fast asleep, George confesses to her. About how Isabella was an artist and she got pregnant by accident; that he never wanted to marry her, much less have a child with her. How terribly guilty he felt, resenting the life growing inside her day in and day out - what a horrible human being he must have been then. About how everything changed the moment he saw Nico for the first time (Nico, short for Nicodermus although that's only on the birth certificate) - actually saw him, his son - HIS. SON. That it was Isabella who eventually couldn't take it; Isabella, who realized that she was not a mother. She left Nico with George when the boy was a year old and then didn't come back for seven months. George tells her he spent the entire time convinced that Nico knew he hadn't been wanted, ever, and doing everything in his power to make up for that. That he was still doing that, every day, and would continue to do so until the day he died.
"So there you go," he says, eventually. "Now you know everything about me."
Ruth licks her lips. She wants so badly to be able to tell him - about breaking her arm when she was eleven, about seeing Oxford for the first time; the nonsense mnemonic device for the threat assessment scale that she learned on her second day on the Grid.
"You're right," she muses. "You're a terrible human being."
George looks at her and she smiles; he sighs with a small measure of relief.
"I love you. You know that?"
She does.
"I do," she replies.
-
"My stepmother. Dreadful woman."
"Really?"
"Yes. But aren't all stepmothers already by definition awful? Why would I?"
"No, I meant-," George pauses. "You have a stepmother?"
Ruth gathers herself. They play this game so often - if we got married, who would we invite? - that sometimes she forgets who she is (was). "Yes," she says, truthfully. "And a stepfather."
"Was it amicable, then, your parents?"
She shrugs. "Too young. I barely remember it, actually."
It's a lie, and they both know it. Ruth was ten.
-
When she's alone in the house, Ruth practices.
From the garden to the bedroom: eight seconds. From the kitchen to the bedroom: eleven seconds (because you have to wind around the staircase and, well). Passports, overnight bag in the hall closet; car keys always left in the bowl on the tabletop in the hallway. It's a wonder George never notices all the provisions she's made around the house. Or maybe he has, and it's just another quirky thing about this woman he loves, Ruth. She always parks the car with the driver's side facing the house, and when it tells her it shouldn't matter how he parks it when he takes it out, she wants to shout at him: you have no idea - you have no idea how valuable those few seconds might be one day.
When she's alone in the house, she practices.
One day, it pays off. Ruth pauses for a moment, letting it all come at her for a split second, and then she is gone.
+
III.
Ruth finds out about her secondment to MI-5 on a Tuesday. It's a rather ordinary Tuesday actually, except in this regard.
On the morning of her first day, she is summoned to the office of Amanda Roke. Occasionally we will need you, Ruth is all that Amanda says. (She doesn't need to say anything else. The message is implicit. A government cannot betray itself to itself, can it? She has no idea how empty that argument will sound when parroted back to Tom Quinn later.) In total, the only thing that comes of this meeting is that she's late; she races through the security checks, hardly bothering to remember anyone's name, so when she slides open that door to the briefing room and everything comes crashing out of her arms on the floor, of course everyone looks at her like she's insane. She feels insane. Even though she knows Section D is where she belongs, she hardly believes it herself.
Malcolm and Colin are nice to her, because she's new. Tom, she feels, wants to trust her, while Zoe and Danny are worlds away. Sam makes decent enough tea, and Ruth figures out very quickly that most people probably underestimate her for that, so she remembers this and always recommends the girl for whatever projects she can.
Harry, though, she can't put her finger on Harry. He'll send her on a wild goose chase, and they'll both know it; she'll manage to make water out of wine, and he'll smile with satisfaction but tomorrow will be just the same. It's like she's being tested until her eyes bleed. At first she chalks it up to this job - this is just what's expected of officers at this level of the Security Service, but she quickly figures out that that's not the case. The worst part of all is that it's not even discouraging - she finds herself wholly invigorated by the challenge of proving her usefulness to everyone. Tom will ask for background on groups focusing on British eco-terrorism, and she'll give him that plus anarchists, techno-liberators, and anyone from the loony lefty groups who've started emigrating from the American Northwest (just in case). She won't say a word when occasionally Zoe wants shipping manifests of boats coming in from Russia and Eastern Europe. Danny - well, actually, Danny never wants anything specific unless someone tells him to ask for it first.
Ruth knows that sending that email to Amanda is probably wrong, but she does it anyway.
After all, it's just what someone told her to do.
-
"You knew."
They're at The George now, it's barely past noon, and Ruth has no idea how she managed to find herself alone with Harry, already on his third full whiskey. They've all been in lockdown for the past fifteen hours, so she figures that's his empty stomach more than anything else. Most of the other staff have retreated to private booths, but she and Harry are here at a table in the middle of it all. Perhaps Britain shouldn't know how far its Security Service has taken the day off today.
"What?"
"The lockdown. Of course you knew it was a drill."
"I didn't."
"You did."
"No. I didn't. None of us did."
His face gets cloudy. "So you really didn't know?"
"No! Have- ...have you even been listening to anything I've just said?"
Harry gathers himself in the seat across from her. "I'm terribly sorry, Ruth, but I had to do it."
She looks at him. If they were any other people, this might almost be something approaching a personal apology for the hell they just went through. Not two hours ago, she was staring down Tom Quinn, contemplating the end of the world as she watched him buckling under the moral weight of it all. Which of course will never show up in any official report, not that it probably needs to, they were all under a lot of stress, but still.
So she starts to says, quietly, "Harry, I think you should know-"
"Don't."
(How can he-?) "It's just that you should be-"
"I don't want to hear about, Ruth. Not now."
Three years later, she probably would have fought him on that particular declaration.
Today, she lets it go, and they drink in silence for a while.
-
"I think Tom Quinn's on the blink."
The worst part is that part of Ruth is hardly surprised at all.
"You stand by me on this, Ruth," he asks of her.
-
It's hours after the fact: a rare moment of quiet that can't have lasted more than a few seconds or so. Ruth is on hold with some foreign agency, and Harry is walking around the bullpen as if this will make Tom appear out of thin air. She doesn't actually notice at first that he's talking to her.
"By the way, how did you manage it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The note. How did you get it passed the guard at the hospital?"
She actually blushes, shit. "Oh, you know."
"I don't, actually, it's why I'm asking."
Shit, shit, shit, shit. "I told them I - a story."
He inhales, and she swears, there's a small, impressed smile on his face. "So you lied."
"Yes." A beat. "It was for the good of the country, after all."
"Of course. Just out of curiosity, what did you-"
"No." She smiles, and honest to God, she must be that deprived of sleep or something. "I'll never tell."
"I'm your boss, Ruth."
"Even still."
Then of course, Adam interrupts them and with him comes an entourage of other officers - Ruth swears that Harry is still smiling even when he's not, and a while later, she is definitely aware that something has now changed between them, even in this very moment. He's my boss and I'm in love with him and I'm having his child. It came from nowhere, and it meant nothing except to get that piece of paper into the room, but it was - well - it was practically effortless.
Zoe and Danny are both quietly imploding. Adam is Adam. Harry now punctuates every sentence by looking at her at some point. It's all-
Well.
It's certainly something.
+
IV.
They sold her house.
Granted, she's technically been "dead" for two years so that was probably to be expected, but still. All of one's old personal possessions in storage with no place to put them - definitely one of the stranger elements of coming back to this particular life.
Malcolm takes her around to look at flats for rent (all completely vetted, of course), and after the second one is when he tells her that he's resigned from the Service completely. She stops dead in her tracks and demands that he take it back. She's sure that she's making a scene, and she doesn't care. But he's put in his papers, Malcolm explains, and even if he hadn't he still doesn't want this life anymore. He's made up his mind.
"Is this my fault?"
He blinks at her, genuinely surprised. "No," he says, kindly. She wants to believe him. "No, absolutely not. It was just my time."
She idles in place. "I don't know what that means, you know. Even after everything - I don't think I know what that means, 'my time.'"
Malcolm looks at her curiously. "I think it means you might miss it."
"No," she replies, too quickly. Dammit. She doesn't. She doesn't. She is Ruth, and her husband (not her husband) is dead and she is alone now in a country that she used to know, that she used to call home. Nothing more and nothing less. Nothing- ...nothing. "No."
"All right," Malcolm says, sensing her unwillingness. He steers the conversation elsewhere: "I think this next place is tremendously overpriced considering the area, but Jo owes the landlord a favor so let's at least give it a few minutes, shall we?"
Ruth smiles at this, and they lock arms.
-
She buzzes for hours. Can't sit still, can't calm herself, can't even focus on the telly for more than a few minutes (it's rubbish, all rubbish on now).
Malcolm is right. Despite everything (everything!), Malcolm is right.
She misses it, terribly.
When her phone rings, it's Jo.
-
Thames House, it still smells the same. She doesn't know why this surprises her, but it does.
The security guard at the front desk - Vernon, she remembers - gives her a blatant double-take. She remembers that his wife's name is Shirley. "Miss," he just keeps saying, "Miss! I never - I just didn't think I'd ever - hello!"
"Hello, Vernon."
He beams. "Oh goodness, you remember me."
(It occurs to her that it has been two years since she's been here, exactly here. Two years since she was led out of these same doors in protective custody; escorted to her house like a common criminal.)
She gestures towards her bag. "I'm sorry, I haven't got a-"
"No, no, it's all right, everything's been arranged." He swipes a card in the absence of her own; she half expects sirens to go off through the building, but they don't. "I trust you know your way?"
"Yes."
"So nice to have you back with us, ma'am."
Us.
She thinks about that word the entire elevator ride down.
-
(Baghdad is a half-forgotten memory, even before it should be. It's one weekend out of fifty-two in a year, if you can believe that. Adam is still on medical leave; oil reserves in this country are drying up by the dozen, so it isn't until the plane is in the air that Ruth realizes that this isn't right.
"Harry, what-"
They're flying commercially, under the radar. He cuts her off with just a look.
In country, they check-in at their hotel. There's one room, and a single bed; Harry explains they won't be staying the night, but it's still not lost on her. They've registered as a couple, married or whatever; he doesn't even leave his real name at reception, much less hers. At dinner, she is simply Ruth, and she doesn't have to tell anyone what she does because everyone already knows. She picks out the players soon enough: CIA, Six, Indian Intelligence, a few stragglers save one from the DGSE who depart before the second course. She is keeping the lone remaining Frenchman entertained when Harry suddenly emerges from his locked room and says, "Walk with me.")
("You can't be serious."
"I am and I will."
"They'll crucify you if it goes bad."
"Then so be it."
"I'm serious."
"I cannot allow this scenario to happen, Ruth. It isn't right and you know it."
"Is that why I'm here, then? Because you can't live with yourself if it all goes wrong?"
Neither of them have any idea at the time that this is the most honest conversation they'll ever have about themselves.
"Tell me you'll support me."
She shifts. "Harry."
"Ruth."
She bites her lip, then: "Yes. Of course I do.")
(When they get back, nothing is the same and no one else on the Grid quite understands it. Then again, how could they? Some say they slept together; others claim they've been at it for weeks now. To most, they are just Harry and Ruth - "you know how they are."
Of course, then there's a coup against the government, Adam comes back, and the world meets Ros Meyers. In short: life goes on.)
(Harry slides into the handshake smoothly; the other man flicks his eyes to Ruth with the hint of skepticism, and Harry's hand is quickly in the small of her back. "This is Ruth," he says, like that is supposed to mean something, and apparently it does: the other man then shakes her hand graciously, like she belongs. She supposes she does belong. She feels alive here, or maybe that's just the champagne.)
-
Jo is dead.
Adam is dead; Zaf is dead. Before she was gone, there was a small sliver of hatred for someone named Connie in Jo's voice, and Ruth feels like she should find out who this is, at least in memory of Jo.
(George is dead. She needs to remember that in her tally of lost souls - George; George, George, George.)
Ros remains mostly a blur to Ruth. She still exists solely as a figure standing in a hallway of a home that no longer belongs to her.
The first time they meet again properly is a few hours after It Happens - Harry goes down there to intervene with the local authorities, to keep the press from completely blowing the Bendorf Group situation to epic proportions (unlikely, but still). Lucas gets back to the Grid as fast as he can and takes Tariq into a quiet corner. Ruth hates this. She can hear Tariq shouting, "No - NO!" - she hates that the sound doesn't break her. After everything - despite George - Ruth sobers up fairly quickly; it's truly awful. Ros comes back a short time later, and is immediately shunted into Harry's office and he turns down the blinds. She disappears a short time later, but her time in the open is long enough to catch Ruth's eye across the hubbub. Oddly, Ruth remembers, she had to burn this woman's coat, and she feels bad about that. It was a nice coat.
Tariq has been staring at his computer for ten minutes now.
"Um," Ruth begins, but she doesn't know how this conversation is supposed to start. She never did. "If you want to go home, I could-"
"No," he cuts her off. Tariq gathers himself. "I'm fine, I just-"
Ruth sighs. "I'm sorry."
"Is this what it's like then?" he asks, suddenly.
"I'm sorry?"
"People you know dying. Is this what it feels like? It's a little empty actually."
Ruth wishes she had an answer for that question. She suspects tons of people probably want this answer.
"You knew Jo well then?" she manages.
Tariq shrugs. "She recruited me." She inhales sharply, remembering the sound of car alarms mixed with broken glass and gunshots. The girl had been so young when Adam found her; completely innocent and sweet. Now she was dead. They both were. "Why? Did you?"
Ruth finds herself nodding vigorously, which is almost a lie because she didn't, really. "The first time I met her, she saved my life."
"I didn't know that."
She feels old. "She was a journalist before. Did you know that? Followed us all to this safe house we were in, God knows why. There was a strike team following us, too, and if it wasn't for her..." Ruth starts remembering it all again, living in the adrenaline and crouched behind a sofa for safety, and she isn't sure that that was ever her life, not really. Not now. "I owe her a lot, I guess," she decides.
Tariq just looks at her. Ruth thinks about Sam, who disintegrated in front of her eyes at the news about Danny, who left the Grid that afternoon and never - never - came back. But she doesn't see that level of desperation in Tariq's face, and she supposes that's good. At least. (Good for whom, though?)
"Anyway," Ruth winds back, "if you need to-"
"No," Tariq decides. "I'd rather work, actually. If you don't mind."
There will be a time to grieve, Ruth.
There was actually a time in her life when Danny's sacrifice was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. A time when she ranked zipping open that body bag with closing her father's eyes or the sounds of the syllables assigned to the phrase Harry's been shot.
"Right, that's-" Tariq has already turned back to his computer screen, and she doesn't blame him. Not at all. "Right."
-
The world is always ending, she quickly remembers. It's not just officers in the field who get addicted to the adrenaline rush.
The Grid today is relatively quiet. Ros has been embedded with an investment firm for two weeks, but that's mostly benign. Lucas is getting bored running the names of first responders who keep turning up to a peculiar string of ordinary emergency situations. Ruth has her twenty-seven assets to monitor while Tariq juggles the task of bouncing between the three of them and flirting with Sara from Section C. Mostly he's just been doing the latter.
"This Section is not a dating service," Harry reprimands her. "Put a stop to it."
"Says the man currently supervising an operative cavorting with a member of a foreign service for the purpose of gaining possibly valuable intelligence, and who once flew a girl all the way to Iraq just because he couldn't be bothered to ask her to dinner properly."
He looks up at her, and she could almost call his face grateful. "I did ask you properly, though, Ruth."
"Yes. Eventually."
"And as I recall, it was you who put a stop to the whole affair."
Her cheeks flush at the word affair. "The point still stands," she counters, smiling slightly.
"Does it?"
Sometimes she feels years older than the rest of the world. Like she has seen everything there is to be seen, and ticked off every experience in life like it's all on a sort of list. Everything that happens now is just extra - that she can actually joke about events that led to things that led to people's deaths, people whom she loved, because honestly what else is there? She could wallow in it, but it wouldn't do her any good. It certainly wouldn't bring George back, no matter how hard she tried. Maybe that's the way she's decided to honor Jo, the person Who Saved Her Life.
Ruth is halfway out the door when Harry says her name, quietly. She turns to him.
He starts to say something, but she stops him. "I'll be sure to remind Tariq to stay focused. Don't worry."
"Thank you, Ruth," Harry says, licking his lips.
-
All she wanted was from him was to stop her.
I love you, she screams in her head. I love you, now stop me from leaving because you love me, too. It wasn't going to work, of course. This was their only play, at least if they wanted it to last, and they both knew it. But she was going away forever, and he should have tried. He should have tried. She wants to pretend that the idea of him going to jail to protect her is enough - and it should be enough, it's outrageous and ridiculous to a disproportionately romantic degree. But it isn't.
He doesn't stop her.
She still got on that god damned boat.
+
V.
Ruth has spent the entire car ride twisting the hem of her jacket in her fingers.
"Are you all right?" Harry asks her, when they're about a half of a block away.
She looks at him. Danny is dead. Danny is still dead, and Zoe is gone, and Tom is gone, and she doesn't - she doesn't - she has no idea who or what she is anymore. She can't picture Danny's family, but she certainly doesn't want to meet them. She doesn't! She wants to run away from here, far far far away from here. Sam had the right idea. No one has heard from Sam since this happened, except that she is alive (supposedly).
The car stops at a red light.
"Ruth," Harry prompts. She doesn't say anything. "Ruth."
"Someone should tell her," she mutters. Harry looks at her, so she elaborates, "Zoe. She should know."
"We can't."
"She should."
"You can't."
The pronoun shifts doesn't escape her.
"But she loved him." Harry looks at her, hard. "Harry. They loved each other."
"It doesn't matter anymore."
She reels. "Doesn't it?"
The car comes to a stop outside the church. Harry gets out first to open her car door, and never answers her question.
like a half-red sea
permanently parted, the middle she'd
pass through, like the rest, in a wheeling rush,
afraid the divide would not hold and all
would drown - city as almighty ambush -
beneath the crashing waves of human hell.
Evie Shockley; "Elocation (or Exit Us)"