Chapter Text
Morse stands in the shadow of the pylon in a field full of blown wheat, not far from where Max is kneeling beside the body of a little girl in a blue gingham dress and crowned with flowers.
He hears movement though the fields, then—a stirring that sends the grasses whispering as soft as murmured words of comfort to the child who looks as if she might be sleeping. And so he turns, looks up, to see two officers approaching through the river of grain: Thursday, striding alongside of DCI Box.
His heart leaps under the snug, blue wool uniform at the sight.
Thursday.
Morse has left messages at the house—three, four, five—but Thursday never picks up, never answers, never rings back.
And now—as if from out of nowhere—after all of these long months, here he is, right before him.
“Sergeant Jago says you found the body,” Box says.
But Thursday says nothing; there’s only the barest glimmer of recognition in his weary eyes.
Morse nods to Thursday anyway, breathes the word so that it’s barely audible, just one more whisper in the grain.
“Sir.”
“Sergeant Morse, sir,” Thursday says, acknowledging him at last. “A former colleague. From Cowley.”
Morse’s heart tightens, stops for a moment under the weight of them, those eight words.
It seems strange to hear himself described so, almost as if he were a near-stranger, a man Thursday might have merely passed coming and going on the way from the door to his office, through the crowded nick.
A former colleague from Cowley? he wants to ask.
Surely I was more than that?
Wasn’t I?
But Thursday won’t meet his eyes.
Morse swallows. They are only words—eight little words—but they leave behind their sting.
Because they don’t begin to cover it—do they?—all that has lain between them. The late nights poring over files in the old, poorly-lit Cowley nick. The mornings Morse stood in the pale green hallway of Thursday’s home, waiting for him to come down the stairs, or else standing in the gold-wallpapered dining room, watching from the corner as Mrs. Thursday handed him his sandwich and straightened his lapels.
Come home safe.
It doesn’t begin to cover Gull and Vince Casper and Blenheim Vale. That late night at the lake house when Thursday had sat vigil for him in an overstuffed chair. All of the long, rainy afternoons they sat together in a pub, in companionable silence, as Morse worked out the crossword. Their shared worry over Joan.
It doesn’t begin to cover Fancy.
Say not the struggle nought avalieth.
They’d seen the best and the worst of one another.
Surely he had been more to Fred Thursday than a “colleague,” and a former one at that?
Box smiles, folds his arms, looks down on him, clearly amused, and Morse’s descent is complete.
He is merely a speck on the wide expanse of a landscape, insignificant. He’s isn’t sure when he’s ever felt so small, in Thursday’s eyes.
Box’s gaze flickers over him, running over his uniform as if it says it all, as if it somehow renders Morse less than fully human. He’s not so much a person as he is a role, a prop.
“Oh, I remember,” Box drawls. “I didn’t recognize ya.”
Despite himself, Morse ducks his head, casts his gaze down.
He takes a steadying breath, then, and begins his recount of what happened, of how he came to find the child, lying as if dreaming in the golden field... but his voice sounds heavy, wooden, even to his own ears.
As if he’s become the device that Box wanted him to be.
And then, Box dismisses him before he’s even come to the end of his sentence.
Morse blinks, catches himself, catches a dying ray of that old, hot defiance.
“It’s standard practice to ask if there was anyone unusual in the area, in a case like this,” he protests.
“Has there been?”
“Yes,” Morse says, emphatically.
“Stick it in your report. Make sure it’s in my box by ten,” Box says.
Morse grimaces in the face of it, of that unabashed aggression.
It’s quite as if he’s told him to stick it somewhere else.
“Next time, try to remember we put a cordon down so that so uniform don’t go tramping all over the scene of crime with their size nines. Standard practice, in a case like this,” he says with a satisfied smirk—one that god-only-knows does not belong here, in this place of mourning, this hallowed spot.
Not in this field full of crushed beauty.
Morse finds himself casting one last glance to Thursday, but Thursday remains silent.
What’s even worse is, Morse can see that he sees it, Thursday. Morse can see that he recognizes the plea in his eyes.
Say something.
Don’t let a man like that walk all over me.
Over you.
Over us.
But it was true, what he had told Strange.
There is no us, no we.
Not anymore.
The only answer he gets is no answer. A silence that pains him to the very core.
It’s an answer that he can live with, that he’ll have to live with… but then, he just catches it—the answering plea in Thursday’s eyes.
To go along.
To not make a fuss.
Not to get “how he gets.”
Not to be so … Morse.
And then, there it is. The worm, the twist of the knife.
Is it the emptiness of Thursday’s expression?
The disappointment?
The defeat?
Whatever it is, it finishes off whatever hope had risen, briefly, inside his chest when he saw Thursday’s familiar form approach.
Morse bows his head, looks down at his shoes, tries not to think of them as his size nines.
“Right,” he says simply.
And then he slowly turns away.
He concentrates on holding his head high, keeping his strides steady and even as makes his way back through the blaze of yellow fields, which now seem heavy and overripe, missing a harvest that should have long since past.
Even though he feels Thursday’s eyes trained on his back as he goes, finally looking at him, seeing him, albeit thirty seconds too late.
Even though he feels like the last piece of his heart with strength enough to feel something—anything—is breaking.
But there’s nothing to do but to walk away. To take one step, and then another, and then another, leaving Thursday, along with some part of himself—of his youth, of his idealism, of even his faith—which he knew not he had—somewhere off behind him.
It’s a long walk, back to the patrol car.
A thousand steps away.