Work Text:
Robin marched along Denmark Street, heels clicking, tears burning in the backs of her eyes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Men’s heads turned as she swept past them, tall and striking in her dusky pink dress, hair rippling in the spring breeze. She noticed none of them.
“I’m in love with you.”
The bastard.
Why now? Why, after all these years, say anything at all?
Because he wanted to stop her marrying Murphy, that was all. Strike wanted her to sit around waiting for him to decide what he wanted. Well, he was too late. He’d had plenty of time to say something, plenty of moments when they could have—
She threw a glance up and down the street out of habit and strode across to the opposite pavement. She had to get to the tube, get to the Ritz, get to her boyfriend, and—
Her steps faltered. And what?
And get engaged? Again, she shrank away from the prospect. But why? Ryan Murphy wasn’t running scared, refusing to declare his hand until it was almost— No, it definitely was too late. He was (in fact) doing entirely the opposite, trying to push her into a commitment she wasn’t ready for, but that was good, wasn’t it? He wasn’t scared to declare his feelings, say what he wanted.
She was on Charing Cross Road now. How had she got here? But she must cross this road too, get to the tube, find the train that would carry her to—
A shout behind her, a huge hand on her upper arm, a yank, the sudden looming of a wall of red metal in her peripheral vision and a screech of brakes, a nearby distressed yelp from an unseen female. The bus missed Robin by centimetres as she was dragged back onto the pavement, catching her heel on the kerb and almost collapsing. She had stepped out into the road without looking. And now, where she should have been gasping out gratitude, shaky thanks, there was only panic. How many times in her life had a man grabbed her from behind? She flung herself away from him, was aware of a deep voice apologising, a large black man stepping back from her, hands held up in supplication. She had a brief impression of a neatly pressed suit, kindly brown eyes.
It’s okay, a distant voice in her brain said. You’re on a crowded street, plenty of people around— But the panic lapped at the edges of her vision and she lurched away from him, cannoning into someone else in her blind panic and hearing an angry protest, and now she was ricocheting off people as she stumbled down the pavement, and the people were everywhere, all around her, concerned and annoyed faces looming into her tunnel vision—
A door appeared in front of her and she pushed her way through it into the welcome fug of a pub, warm and comforting. It smelled like the Flying Horse, though she didn’t recognise the interior. Away from staring eyes - the early evening drinkers all ignored her - Robin pushed her way to the bar and ordered a double Scotch in a high, shaking voice.
“You all right, love?” the kindly middle-aged woman serving asked her, and Robin managed a nod.
“Fine,” she gasped, pulling out her purse and fumbling for her bank card. “I’m fine.”
She paid, took her whisky and squeezed around a tiny table in the corner. It was technically unoccupied, but only because the next table was so busy, all the seats except this one wedged by the wall had been purloined. This suited Robin just fine - nobody was likely to try to join her. She sat, her back pressed against the wall, safe, and lifted her drink to her mouth with a hand that shook so much, the glass clattered against her teeth.
She swallowed a long, searing gulp of amber fire that burned its way down her throat.
She had nearly been run over. She could have died. She had literally just stepped out in front of a double-decker bus, and but for the swift reactions of a kindly stranger—
A sudden image, bizarre but crystal clear, rose into her mind, a stock image of a graveside, her mother in a black veil, her brothers standing around, and there, at the side of the grave, a grim figure dressed in a black suit that barely held his bulk. Strike—
Don’t be ridiculous. It’d be Ryan at your funeral, not Cormoran.
She swallowed more whisky and tried to marshal her errant thoughts, slow her pounding heart, steady her shaking hands. You’re okay.
She could feel the chair, firm beneath her. Smell the warm fug of beer and crowded bodies. Hear the jovial, Friday-night tenor in the voices around her. She was safe. She hadn’t been run over.
I can’t marry Ryan.
Yes, you can.
I don’t want to.
And there, in that tiny, defiant internal moment of truth, lay the problem. No matter what Cormoran Strike had said, her boyfriend was waiting for her, on his birthday, at the Ritz, with an engagement ring in his pocket that she didn’t want and yet didn’t know how to turn down. Somehow the net had tightened around her, as she had allowed, even encouraged it to, until she was trapped in a cage of her own making, unable to escape.
There was always escape. There had to be. Was she really going to get married, again, just because she was too cowardly to stop it, again?
And was she going to do it because she was unsure of her feelings for Cormoran Strike, again? She had come full circle, and now that the protective cape of anger she had wrapped around herself since Strike’s hurled admission on the stairs outside their office had dissipated, there was only herself and the truth that was trying to stare her in the face, no matter how hard she tried to avoid its gaze.
Her glass was empty. Robin squeezed out from behind the tiny, sticky table and made her way back to the bar.
~~~~~~~~~
Cormoran the fish suitably attended to, placed in isolation with his medicinal peas, Cormoran the man turned his attention to his own needs. A medicinal Friday night pint was what human Cormoran needed.
He had tended to the fish slowly and methodically, until he’d realised he was listening for footsteps on the stairs, waiting for them. He was half hoping that Robin would come back. Impatient with himself, he pulled on his coat and left the fish it its margarine tub, locked up the office, descended the stairs and walked, slowly and painfully, his knee and ear aching, to the Flying Horse, telling himself he wasn’t looking out for Robin’s red-gold head and that stunning dusky pink dress all the way.
Time would tell if he had annoyed her as much as she believed, or if he had at least given her pause, given her another option. It had lowered his spirits to hear that she knew that Murphy was going to propose, and was going to the dinner anyway. The fucker knows what he’s doing, Strike thought grimly. Robin was too nice to say no to a man who’d got down on one knee in a very public setting. And once the ring was on her finger, even if she told herself she could break it off later…
No, Cormoran Strike needed to steel himself for the sight of another engagement ring on Robin’s finger on Monday morning. And if she was foolish enough to say yes again to a man she didn’t love—
What if she does love him?
Could she? Could she truly be in love with another man, when what they shared, Strike himself and Robin - their history, their in jokes, their partnership that meant so much to him - surely must mean as much to her?
Well, if she loved Murphy, then she would say yes, and Strike would say no more on the subject. Friendship would have to be enough. He wondered if Robin would stay at the agency, after what he had just said, while she planned her wedding and married another man, with Strike’s declaration hanging in the office air. Perhaps it would be too awkward.
He had reached the door of the Flying Horse and reached to push it. It was pulled open from the inside as he did so, and he almost pitched forward into the pub, having expected the door to take some of his weight.
“Sorry, mate—” he began to the unknown person who had pulled the door open, and then he stopped. It was Robin.
They stared at one another in the dingy doorway.
“Robin,” Strike said stupidly. “What are you doing here?” For a wild moment he wondered if Murphy was here too.
“Looking for you,” she replied, pale and tense. “I was just leaving.”
Strike swallowed, feeling a sudden flicker of hope. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Okay,” she replied, and moved to sit at a small table by the wall, tugging a free stool across from the next table.
The service at the bar, never speedy at the best of times in the Flying Horse, felt glacial tonight. Strike was acutely aware of the time pressure. Robin had been bordering on late for the Ritz when she’d left the office nearly an hour ago. She couldn’t possibly have long, but she obviously had something she wanted to say.
At last he managed to procure a pint of Doom Bar and a small white wine, and he carried them to the table Robin had bagged. He placed the drinks and sat, and an awkward silence descended, a silence that no amount of Friday-night joviality from the tables around them could fill.
Strike took a breath, unsure where to start, and Robin blurted:
“Did you mean it?”
He gazed at her levelly. There were many things in their shared history, both said and unsaid, that Robin might wonder about and doubt. This must not be one of them. “Yeah,” he said clearly. “Every word.”
Robin picked up her glass with a shaky hand, took a gulp of wine, set it back down.
“How do I know?” she asked, staring at him, looking for answers. “How do I know this isn’t just something you’re saying to stop me marrying Ryan?”
Strike was very still suddenly. “You think I’d make this up? That I’d lie about something so big?”
It was the wrong choice of words, and he knew it. How many times had Robin heard him lie to girlfriends? But she was different; couldn’t she see that?
“Not make it up, exactly,” Robin said slowly. “But you didn’t say it until you absolutely had to, until you thought I was about to get engaged.”
“I told you, I’ve been trying to find the right moment. I wanted it to be just the two of us, with time for me to say it properly, to explain—”
“It’s just the two of us now.”
Strike looked around helplessly. It might be his favourite pub, but crammed into a corner in the Flying Horse in the busy, post-work, jubilant hour was not how he had envisaged this conversation happening.
No matter. The time for kairos moments had long gone. He had possibly a very limited amount of time to convince Robin of his sincerity.
“Well, if I’m honest,” he began, “I’ve been trying to find the right time since—” He thought back. Since he’d tried, clumsily and with a neon-lit get-out clause, to tell her that Charlotte has always known that he was going to fall in love with her, Robin? Since he’d sat, tied to a hospital bed by tubes, watching her walk away to her first date with Ryan bloody Murphy? Since—
“I didn’t want you to marry Matthew,” he said at last. “And I couldn’t watch you do it again. Maybe that’s why I said it now.”
Robin gaped at him.
“That was years ago. Years.”
Strike shrugged. “Yeah, well,” he said, gruffly. “You’d been with him since before we met. I couldn’t exactly make a pass, could I? But when you split up…”
“Why didn’t you say anything then?”
Strike hesitated, sighed. “I dunno,” he said at last. “I had this idea that we couldn’t work together and be together, that the agency had to come first. We always worked so well as a team, you and me, and I’ve never had that with a woman before. I told myself it was just that, it was friendship and connection and a good working partnership…” He tailed off, seeing Robin’s expression. “I was wrong,” he finished quietly. “At your wedding—”
Robin realised she was holding her breath.
“I nearly did it then,” Strike confessed. “When we hugged on those steps, I nearly said it. I nearly asked you to run away with me.”
Tears spilled from Robin’s eyes now. “I know,” she whispered. “I felt it.” She swallowed. “I’d have gone,” she said, quietly.
They stared at one another while possibilities, missed chances and moments, wreathed around them amidst the background chatter and the clinking of glasses.
“I rang you,” Strike said suddenly. “Well, I rang Masham looking for you. Your dad said you were on your honeymoon, so I thought I’d imagined it—”
Robin wiped tears from her cheek with a shaky hand. “I rang you, too, from the Maldives,” she said. “But a woman answered, and then Matt got sick—”
A woman?
Fucking Coco. Strike sighed.
“I should have left Matt then,” Robin said sadly. “Well, I shouldn’t have married him in the first place. Then I should have had it annulled when we got back. But I thought I must have imagined what I felt when you and I hugged, because you went straight to…” She tailed off.
It would have been much better, Strike thought, if he’d been able to say that it had been Lucy who had answered, or that he had lost his phone and a stranger found it, or— But sadly, the truth was exactly what Robin had feared it was. He sighed heavily.
“Yeah,” he said, gruffly. “I thought I’d imagined it, too, when I heard you’d gone on your honeymoon anyway. And then Wardle dragged me out to the pub, and April brought her mate, and…” He raked a hand through his curly hair, frustrated. “That’s not who I am any more, though,” he said earnestly. “I don’t—” He hesitated.
“Don’t what?”
“Sleep with other women to keep from thinking about you,” Strike said with brutal honesty, and Robin stared at him.
“Is that what you were doing?”
“With everyone since Elin, yeah. And no, I’m not proud of it. And—” he risked flashing her half a grin “—it didn’t work.”
Robin, blushing, dropped her gaze to her lap.
“So what now?” she asked in a small voice.
Strike sat back. “I dunno,” he said. “I know what I want. But isn’t Murphy still sitting at the Ritz?”
Robin sighed. “Yeah.”
“Well, then.”
Robin nodded. “I’d better go.”
She got to her feet, leaving her wine barely touched, and Strike watched her, his heart twisting.
Robin stood for a moment, looking down at him, and then on impulse she bent and swiftly pressed her lips to his. She had straightened up again before he could respond.
“I’ll call you,” she said, a little breathlessly. “But probably not tonight.”
“Okay,” Strike managed, resisting the urge to raise his fingers to his mouth, which burned with the shape of hers.
“Try not to sleep with anyone while you’re waiting.”
Strike barked a startled laugh. “I won’t.”
And then she was gone in a flurry of handbag and perfume, and Cormoran Strike, watching the woman he loved walk away from him towards another man yet again, grinned.