A/N: So I am apparently completely bonkers, because despite working eleven-hour days all this week, and despite having written half of the next chapter of Something Wonderful, I have also somehow managed to write the first five chapters of this story. I offer you this first chapter, with the promise of more to come, and a new chapter of SW by the weekend. This story picks up at the beginning of 9.1.

Dawn stole slowly over them, the first weak rays of sunlight slanting in through the cracks in the curtains, pulling them up from the land of dreams into the cold, harsh reality of another morning. Ruth woke first, a rare event, since Harry was usually up and in the shower by the time her eyelids first began to flutter.

They'd spent every night of the last two weeks together, ever since the day of the bombing, when a distraught and overworked policeman had called Ruth's mobile from Harry's, telling her that someone needed to come and collect her husband, immediately. It was well past midnight by the time the call came through, the relief shift coming on to cover the Grid so her shattered team could get some rest, and apparently Harry was causing a scene at the bomb site, refusing to leave, refusing to relinquish his authority for a moment, despite the paramedics insisting he was in no fit state to remain. How the policeman had come to have Harry's mobile, or come to assume that she was his wife, Ruth still didn't know, but someone had to be there for him, someone had to take him home, and there was no one else she would trust with that task.

So she'd driven to the remains of the hotel, flashed her Security Services badge, and found Harry, shouting curses at the bomb squad, the plods, the paramedics; he was dirty and exhausted and there was dried blood crusted around his ears. In that moment, Harry looked quite mad, and it was clear from their expressions that everyone within shouting distance was terrified of him. One of the officers tried to stop her approaching him, caught her by the arm and warned her that he was a danger to himself and others, but she'd shaken the man off. She'd walked right up to Harry, mid-diatribe, placed a hand on his shoulder and drawn his attention onto her face.

Never in her life had she seen a man break quite so quickly. Harry took one look at her and dissolved in an instant, his curses dying on his lips as his shoulders sagged and his face fell. He took two steps, and then she was cradling him in her arms as he cried. Cried for Ros, and Jo, and Adam, and Zaf, and Fiona, for Ben and for Helen, for Danny, and even, just a little, for Connie. A reverent silence fell as the frantic activity all around them ground to a halt, as all these men in their dirt-splattered uniforms who had struggled for hours to contain his rage watched this small, unassuming woman accomplish with a single touch what none of them with all their years of training could ever hope to do.

For a time she simply let him cry, running her hands soothingly up and down his back whiles his tears stained her shirt, until finally his grief had run its course, and his breathing slowed. Without a thought for what it might mean, or how it might look to all the people watching, she kissed his temple once and whispered, "Let me take you home, Harry."

And so she had. That night, that first night, they'd simply slept, falling into his bed with their arms around each other, shielding one another from the horrors of the world outside his bedroom. Ros was gone, brilliant, brutal, unflappable Ros, Ros of the sharp tongue and the unshakable loyalty. The last connection to their life before Cotterdam, Harry's strong right hand; she was gone, and the vacuum left by her absence was stunning in its absoluteness.

After that, they were never out of each other's sight, presenting a united front as their section worked tirelessly to untangle the web of Nightingale's deceit. They received hourly updates on the recovery work at the hotel, and though they did not acknowledge it, they both understood that there was no real hope. From his hospital bed Lucas had explained in a voice devoid of emotion how Ros had been determined to save Andrew Lawrence, but simply lacked the physical capability to haul him out of the hotel by main strength; even Lucas himself would have struggled to carry a man that tall, a man who was rather well muscled, despite the relative slimness of his frame. Lucas had requested the schematics of the hotel, and guessed how far she might have progressed, based on where she was when he left and the time between his departure and the explosion. He was rather badly banged up himself, and the hospital insisted on keeping him an extra day, worried about the risk of internal injuries and the rather ferocious knock he'd taken to the head. Ruth had spoken quietly to the doctors, and told them to do everything they could to keep him there as long as they needed; she wouldn't have been able to bear it, if something bad should happen to him as well, when they could have prevented it.

At the end of the first full work day after the bombing, Ruth had quietly traversed the Grid, sending everyone who looked dead on their feet home for a few hours' sleep. She'd gone to Harry around one in the morning, saying softly, "You need to rest." He'd looked at her with heartbroken eyes and responded, "We need to rest." And just like that, without another word on the subject, they went back to his house, together. That second night, they didn't just sleep.

There was too much anger, too much grief, too much frantic activity in the air for anyone on the Grid to take note of their comings and goings, and so the fact that Harry and Ruth left the Grid together each night and arrived together each morning went unremarked for the first few days. By the end of the second week, however, Ruth knew there were murmurings, however stealthy their fellow agents might try to be. It had begun to worry her, these last few days, that people were talking about her, talking about them, again. There had been whispers, when she first arrived back on the Grid after Mani; that's her they'd said, that's the one. I heard she died. I heard she was a traitor. I heard he loved her. Back then she tried to ignore it, tried to throw herself into her work, reminding herself every day that the only people who knew the truth were her and Harry, and they were the only people who mattered. Eventually, their coworkers realized there was nothing untoward between them and the gossip died down, and Harry's image remained untarnished. Now, though, now there was a grain of truth to the rumors, and that frightened her.

One day soon she would have to make a decision, would have to actually talk to Harry about this thing that had sprung up between them, and she was dreading it. So far they had just been reacting, responding to their rage and the years of pent-up longing between them, but it had been less than a year since she'd seen the man who could have been her husband shot through the head, for no other reason than that Harry loved her. Ruth wasn't sure she had it in her, to finally give in to everything she felt for Harry, to finally face all the things they had done, all the horrors they had witnessed, together.

She leaned back against the headboard, propping herself up on the pillows, naked in his bed, and scanned through her phone, reading her messages and skimming the news sites for signs of imminent disaster. Beside her Harry shifted restlessly, slowly dragging himself into wakefulness, and she smiled softly at the disgruntled little sounds he made. With a low groan he rolled over, flinging one arm across her hips as his head came to rest against the bare skin of her stomach.

"Good morning," she murmured, unable to resist the temptation to reach down and run her hand over his rumpled hair, her fingertips teasing his scalp lightly.

Harry did not answer her, but she knew his silence was not an indication that he had fallen back to sleep, but rather a gauge of just how good this morning wasn't. Ros's funeral was today; in just a few hours they would go to the church, and say goodbye to one of the fiercest, bravest women either of them had ever known. The recovery team had worked tirelessly, day and night, but finally a dowdy-looking man had come looking for Ruth, telling her in a quiet, understanding tone of voice that the families should go ahead and hold a memorial service, that the chances of finding any remains were slim to none, after all this time. It was Ruth who called Ros's mother, and broke the news as gently as she could. It was Ruth who went to Harry, who stood beside him on the roof and said, it's time to say good-bye, Harry, when what she meant was the time has come for us to grieve.

She cradled his head in her hands, massaging his skin in a way she'd learned he liked. "It will be all right, Harry."

He pressed a gentle kiss against her stomach but made no move to leave the sanctuary of her embrace. "You're sure, about the reading?" he asked in a voice rough from sleep. He'd asked her to do a reading, for the service, since so few of them would be in attendance, and – though he did not give voice to this particular reason – since he did not trust himself to speak on this occasion.

"I'm sure. You're sure about the poem?" Ruth wasn't sure; it wasn't anything she would have picked. Solitude seemed too…pastoral, for Ros, too simple and too rustic, for a woman who had spent her life in the midst of the high melodrama of the intelligence services, for a woman who had killed and lied and bled for the sake of others. Ros had not lived the life the poem described, and perhaps that was why it bothered Ruth so, that she should have to read what was in truth a lament for the sort of life that Ros had never had the chance to enjoy.

"Ros picked it," Harry answered. How very Ros, Ruth thought, to have planned the details of her own funeral so far in advance, down to the poem she wanted read. Likely Ruth would not have been the blonde woman's first choice for a eulogizer, but needs must.

"Solitude it is, then," Ruth agreed.

They lay like that for quite some time, unspeaking as Harry rested in Ruth's lap and she held him close, running her hands over every part of him she could reach. A truly unendurable day stretched out before them, and neither of them could bear the thought of leaving the little bit of peace they had carved out for themselves.

When they had gone to take their turn around the grounds everyone else had left, even the vicar. So it was that despite the implosion that had been their confessional by the fence, they were forced to return to the Grid in the same car. Harry sat in a contemplative, isolated silence, and Ruth twisted her hands together in her lap and refused to look at him.

Marry me, Ruth.

How could he? How could he stand there, dressed in mourning for a woman who had died following his orders, doing what he had taught her to do, and ask Ruth to marry him? How could he think that two weeks of frantic, mindless sex were enough of a foundation to build a life upon?

It wasn't that Ruth didn't want to marry him, it wasn't that she didn't love him, it wasn't that she didn't need him as badly as she needed oxygen in her lungs; she could not marry him now, and she could not understand how he had come to the opposite conclusion. His proposal had shocked her to the core, had shaken her very understanding of him, and it left her reeling, terrible, cutting words spilling out of her before she had a chance to think them through. And now there was no going back; she had hurt him too much for him to ever trust her with his heart again.

There have been thousands of moments…

She thought about her own words, as he drove along, shoulders stiff and eyes staring straight ahead. There had been moments, perhaps not a thousand of them, but moments nonetheless in which if he had asked her, she would have agreed. She would have said yes, if he'd asked her this morning in a voice lazy and gruff with sleep, his head resting in her lap. If he had said I love you or I want you in my bed, in my life, always, she would have said yes. But he hadn't. He'd spoken of funerals (as if they had to be married for her to mourn for him!), and he hadn't said a word about his heart, his feelings, his love for her. How could she marry a man who couldn't even say I love you?

You're not much better, came a treacherous whisper in the back of her mind.

She did love him, had done for years, but she'd never come any closer to speaking those words aloud than he had. All her life she had been something of a wallflower, fading from view while her more glamorous peers claimed the spotlight, and there was still a part of her that wondered how a man as dynamic and charismatic as Harry bloody Pearce could possibly have chosen her. She couldn't tell him she loved him, not until she was sure he felt the same, until she heard him speak the words and knew without a doubt that what he felt for her was not lust, not guilt, not a desperate gamble to hold onto the only bit of affection in his life, but was in fact a love as true and deep and unshakeable as her own. She needed to hear the words, and, even in the midst of a marriage proposal, Harry had not spoken them.

And now they were shattered, unable even to look at each other.

Oh, how quickly they had fallen apart, as she always secretly feared they might. The feelings between them had always frightened her; they were so different, he so confident, headstrong and passionate, and she so hesitating, so analytical and deeply terrified of sharing herself with another. It would never work, could never have worked, and she told herself that whatever relief she had found in his bed could only ever been temporary. This was her greatest fear, realized; that she might reach for him in a moment of capitulation and reckless abandon, and the heat of him would scorch her, strike her down as sure as lightning, and leave them broken, unable to ever regain the trust and affection and understanding they had shared for so long. Ruth had known, had felt the beginnings of her own ruin in his embrace, and she had fallen into him anyway.

Now she would have to face the consequences.

We move on from this, he'd said.

And so they did. They threw themselves back into work, and if anyone noticed the sometimes frosty silences that sprang up between them, no rumors of a lover's quarrel reached Ruth's ears. In the days that followed the funeral, Harry was distant but civil, so courteous that it set Ruth's teeth on edge, to hear him speak to her in such an impersonal way, and she often found herself avoiding him, for that and many other reasons. She had her suspicions, about the demise of Nicholas Blake, but she kept them to herself. In their world, sometimes justice was meted out in unconventional ways, and if Nicholas Blake's death had been the result of something slipped into his glass of whiskey, rather than a heart attack, well, so be it. Harry seemed more drawn, more careworn in the days after the former Home Secretary's death, and it was Harry's discontent more than anything else that revealed the truth to Ruth. She was fiercely, viciously proud of Harry for what he'd done; it wasn't proper, it wasn't ethical, it certainly wasn't legal, but it was right, that Blake should pay the price for his sins.

Seven years ago, such a thought never would have entered her mind. Back then, before the endless parade of loss and impossible choices, before the hard betrayals and the harder truths, Ruth had been too idealistic to support the vigilante killing of anyone, no matter his crimes. Now, though, Ruth was a spook to her very core, and she approved of Harry's decision. There would be no trial for Nicholas Blake, but he hadn't gotten away with it; they'd thwarted his conspiracy to destabilize their beloved realm, and Harry had made damn sure he answered for the murder of Rosalind Myers. His death wasn't enough, not nearly enough, but it would do.

Harry had grown practically despondent, though, as the days trudged on, and Ruth wondered if perhaps he lacked her certainty that what he'd done was the right thing. Their brief, painful conversations during the Abib operation gave her pause, and when he finally revealed his plans to retire, Ruth had been almost physically ill at the very idea. He couldn't leave, couldn't just abandon her, not now, not after everything they'd been through together. A selfish part of her wanted to shout at him, to remind him that he had dragged her into this world of lies and swirling darkness, and he had no right to leave her down here alone. She couldn't bear the thought of a life without him in it, even if they could never again recapture the closeness they'd shared in the immediate aftermath of Ros's death. Even a cold, aloof Harry was better than none at all, and the thought of never seeing him again left her feeling lost and terrified. She'd spoken to him harshly, she knew, accusing him of feeling sorry for himself when it was her own self-pity that made the bile rise in the back of her throat. Fear had overwhelmed her though, made her speak without a care for the damage she might cause. What would she be without him? Who would ever know her, ever understand her (ever love her) the way he did?

When the dust settled, Ruth left Beth and Lucas speaking quietly to one another on the Grid, donned her coat, and made her up to the roof, to Harry. She owed him more than the recriminations and scorn she'd given him during their brief interlude in his office; she owed him the truth. Not all of it, certainly, but more of it than she had given him so far. That she loved him, that she feared her love was not enough, those were words she could not give him. She would tell him that she needed him, that she wanted to continue to face this world with him by her side; that would have to do.

She stood there beside him, looking into those soft brown eyes, so hopeless as he gazed at her, and lost all control over her tongue. Her carefully planned apology vanished in an instant, and what came forth instead was a deluge of words, all tangled up as she gave vent to some of her darkest fears. We've forfeited the chance for that sort of life, she told him, believing it wholeheartedly. They could never be some quiet, ordinary couple, would never have found trust and understanding with one another outside the confines of the Grid. We couldn't be more together than we are right now, she told him, wondering if he understood. He relied on her, and she on him; he trusted in her, and she in him; they carried one another through, when the weight of their struggles became too much to bear, and if they could not succeed at romance, if they could not survive together as lovers, at least they had this, this sure and certain knowledge that each would be there for the other, always, no matter what.

"Will you sort out Beth's clearances?" he asked her, and she very nearly smiled at him. She couldn't manage a full smile, not when her throat was tight and her eyes were glassy with unshed tears, but the corner of her mouth ticked up all the same. He had heard her, after all. He would never be her husband, but he could count on her to do what needed to be done, whatever it was, and there was a note of capitulation in his voice, a sort of quiet agreement, that told her he would be content with this state of things. They were not lovers, then, not even friends, but two old soldiers, fighting on, together.

"I will," she promised him, and walked away, leaving him standing there alone before the tears overcame her and she broke down completely.

All she wanted was to go home, but as she went to gather up her bag she stopped to talk to Lucas, and immediately, desperately wished she hadn't. They chatted for a moment, and then Lucas dropped the bomb- he wanted Beth to stay in Ruth's flat, and since he was her Section Chief, and he viewed this as an operation of sorts, he had every right to make that demand of her. Never mind that Ruth's heart was breaking, never mind that what she needed now was a large glass of wine and a good cry; she would have to do her duty, and she would have to find the new girl, and take her home.

Lucas left her leaning up against the desk, shell-shocked and distraught. Any chance she had of something more (something wonderful, she thought, and almost began to sob right then) with Harry was lost, and nine people had died because of him (because of her) and now she could not even seek solace in her own flat. So dazed was she that her hands acted of their own accord; she reached out, picked up the phone, and called up to the front desk, asking them to stop Beth leaving, or send someone out to catch her, if she'd made her way to the bus stop already. The night guard assured her that Beth was still in the lobby, and she thanked him faintly before setting the phone down again.

It was time to go and collect her new flatmate, and to carry on pretending that her world wasn't crumbling around her ears.