Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Redfort! We have a Code Three in the gadget room!” Finch called through on the intercom. Had Ruby not already been out of her office, kneeling by the vending machine near the coding room with her arm reaching up the slot for a free chocolate bar, she probably wouldn’t have even bothered responding. 

As it was, she abandoned the vending machine and headed towards the gadget room. 

LB’s arms were much better for fishing around for a chocolate bar anyway. 

The corridor outside the gadget room was suspiciously quiet, and she knocked once on the door. It cracked open to reveal Finch peering through a tiny crack. 

“I don’t remember the password,” Ruby began, and what little she could see of his eyes rolled, before he stepped back to let her in. 

Ruby drew in a deep breath to begin her weekly lecture on respecting the sanctity of the gadget room (she had memorised Hal’s speech a long, long time again and trotted it out whenever needed to save her own brain cells the stress), when she was forced to do a double-take, sermon suddenly stuck in her throat. 

“Aren't there normally three of you?” 

One. Bradley, blonde and with a smudge of tomato sauce on his chin from his pizza slice from the canteen. His jumper was red and green, but if it was actually a Christmas jumper Ruby would never know from the indistinct patterning. He looked around, like he was also searching for the third kid that terrorised her life. His arms were innocently held behind his back and Ruby was willing to bet he was still trying to stuff the explosive-matchbook into his waistband. 

Two. LB, with her shoes slung around her neck by the knotted shoelaces. Ruby wasn’t sure why she didn’t just dump the shoes at the entrance of Ruby’s office as she never actually wore them, but at least this way Ruby wasn’t having to pay out expenses for a lost pair of plimsolls. LB rolled her eyes and Ruby let the disrespect go, mostly because she was still trying to count. 

Her eyes flicked to the space that Hitch would usually take up, squashed between Bradley and LB in his effort to be the centre of the action. 

“Yeah definitely three,” Ruby confirmed. Her mind immediately began racing about where the third child could be. Were Bradley and LB a distraction from the real plan Hitch was undertaking alone? Had one of the gadgets somehow zapped Hitch into a parallel universe where he was actually an adult Spectrum agent and Ruby was only a teenager? Or one where they were actually all werewolves? Or one where–

“Hitch is on his school trip,” Bradley informed her. That rang a faint bell in Ruby’s head. “He told you about it last week and you gave him a dollar to bring you back a souvenir.” 

“He took that dollar,” Ruby corrected. “I’d left that out for Monroe to fetch me a doughnut later. Is he still going to get me a souvenir, do you think?” 

Lb waggled her hand in the air. “It’s about fifty-fifty. But fifty percent that the souvenir is a rock he picked up on his way into Spectrum.” 

Ruby would accept those odds. And the rock too. 

“Where’s he gone?” 

Bradley shrugged, and wiped his mouth, neatly missing the area with the tomato sauce. “The Academy took them out along the bay to study coastal erosion.” 

Ruby had never heard people refer to Twinford’s Wealthy Academy for Traditional Gentlemen as anything else but its initials before, but now ‘the Academy’ sounded like a better option. 

“Do TWA- ah, does the Academy really care about the coastal erosion of Twinford Bay?” 

“Hitch sure doesn’t,” LB pointed out. “That’s why we thought it’d be nice if we grabbed him some stuff for when he comes back.” 

Ruby almost ‘awe’d at the kids’ solidarity, and then caught Elliot shaking his head at her slowly. Oh yeah, it was her stuff they were stealing. 

“Well, that’s a lovely idea, but maybe we could tell him we missed him when he comes back?” 

LB wrinkled her nose. “That’s lame, I wanted the pen that shot tranquilliser bullets.” 

Damn, Ruby wanted that too. Elliot started herding the two children and Ruby towards the door, settling into his new job as babysitter quite efficiently. 

“Anyway, I’ve got a job for the two of you.” Ruby clapped her hands, without anticipating the two groans that followed that statement. Regardless of the lack of enthusiasm, she began leading them down the hallways towards the vending machine that was stocked with the good snacks. 

“Is it me stealing stuff out of the vending machine again?” LB asked at the exact same time as Finch said, “Are you getting her to steal stuff out of the vending machine again?”

“Yes,” Ruby said, unashamedly. “And you can even grab yourself something.” 

Bradley punched the air in delight, jumping mid-step. “Can I have a packet of crisps?” He asked, and Ruby looked expectantly at LB, who nodded despite not looking happy about it. 

“I want a proper job,” She complained, and Ruby knocked once on Bradley’s head to remove the jinx. 

“Touch wood, we do not get a job,” Ruby warned her. “Then I’d have to do paperwork, and you wouldn’t be able to come into the office because you’re not technically an agent. And I’ll probably miss every episode of Crazy Cops for the next two weeks and someone will spoil it for me during a water-cooler conversation.” 

Finch patted Ruby’s shoulder to signal he was going to go on to do whatever his actual job was and Ruby absent-mindedly tapped him back. They would catch up properly over work drinks. 

“I did the entry exam,” LB complained, rolling her sleeve up to get her arm into the vending slot. “I should be given proper missions.”

LB had, in fact, completed and passed the entry exam. Ruby had left out two sheets for Hitch and Bradley, following her promise to Hitch that she’d give him a fair go of joining Spectrum. One exam had been completed long before either boy solved the code Ruby had left them for entry, and that was when Ruby had realised that they had a third child creeping around the halls of Spectrum. LB had visited Spectrum at least five separate times without being caught and had been convinced the halls were abandoned as she’d never seen a soul (she had actually been wandering around the accountant’s quarters, who all left Spectrum at exactly 4:30, and once, the laboratories after they’d been evacuated following a minorly-catastrophic incident). She’d found the entry exam and completed it between digging through Ruby’s drawers, like one would do a sudoku on the subway home from work. Camera footage did prove that she had completed it within the 99 minutes. Currently, LB was passing Ruby her snack over her shoulder before going back in for Bradley’s crisps

“You’ll just have to go and find your own mission to solve,” Ruby said, with the sort of unthinking bliss she got when she finally had a KitKat in her hand. “I can tell you, there is nothing going on in Twinford that needs solving, investigating, or otherwise interfering.” 

LB pulled her arm free, throwing the final bag of crisps to Bradley who immediately started tearing into them. 

“Maybe Ms. Bugwell will have a couple of dogs she needs walking,” Ruby suggested, as kindly as possible. “Or you could focus on your studies?” 

LB scoffed under her breath, and finally stood up with a tube of Fruit Pastilles in hand. “Can I have another look at the Quent case notes?” 

Ruby could never deny a child thirsting for power and knowledge and patted her shoulder with the hand not holding a Kit-Kat. “Of course you can. But first, we’re going to talk about stealing government property.” 

She swiftly reached over to grab a pocket mirror out of LB’s left hanging plimsoll. It was a nice antique-looking one, with the ability to take rudimentary pictures and also blind victims, if the holder so wished. 

“Better luck not getting caught next time,” She offered, ignoring the grumbles from both children as their plan was thoroughly dashed to pieces. 

A week later, Hitch had finally found the time to drop into Spectrum to chat to his favourite adult. Ruby was quickly discovering that she did not care about coastal erosion either. 

“The best part was when I wandered off,” Hitch said brusquely. He was clearly sore about not being attached at the hip to LB and Bradley for the week. “The guy in the surfers’ cafe gave me a hot chocolate while he waited for the Academy to come and find me again.” 

“That’s nice of him,” Ruby replied, pressing her finger into the fallen sprinkles of her doughnut, and licking it clean. “How exactly did you wander into the next town?” 

“The waders looked ugly. And all the other boys were trying to dunk each other underwater, so I just decided to get out and head in-land.” 

Hitch reached out for another biscuit from the plate of bourbons and cookies between him and Ruby. Mouse regularly took money out of Spectrum coffers to fund the staffroom’s snack supply, and Ruby had thought ahead to save some of the best biscuits for Hitch’s return. 

“How far did you get?” Ruby asked, mildly horrified at the rate that Hitch was scoffing down baked goods. He was halfway through the plate already, which had contained two whole packets. 

“As far as Little Twinford on Sea,” Hitch gave an unimpressed snort, reaching for his glass of plain milk to wash down his cookie. “Which is about as good as dune succession. The only interesting thing about the place was some guy telling me a story about the mermaids and sea monsters.”

Ruby raised an eyebrow. “Ooh, mermaids,” she said, knowing her voice was condescending. 

“I didn’t come up with it! One of the customers was saying that there were boats taken down at sea, and all the sailors were dragged down by some kind of huge monster.” 

Something in a distant corner of Ruby’s temporal lobe lit up in red klaxons, but she pushed it away doggedly. 

“I told him it couldn’t have been a monster, because the government would have investigated it to hell and back. They’ve clearly got bigger things to worry about. The guy behind the counter, the one who gave me the hot chocolate, said I was right about there being bigger things to worry about, except he said that the monster was real, and I was lucky that I didn’t get pulled out to sea by it.” 

Ruby snickered under her breath. “Who was this guy anyway? I should send him a cheque for babysitting you.” 

“Rubes,” Hitch stated, and her fingers tightened on the edge of her desk for a fraction of a second. “Ruben something-something. He introduced himself but I wasn’t listening. It was dumb whatever it was.” 

Ruby released her grip and laughed. “Hey, people in glass houses and all that. I don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on.” 

Hitch sent her a withering look, clearly having not noticed her momentary panic. “I’m an expert on dumb names and Ruben Escapade is definitely a dumb name.” 

The conversation moved on quickly to what exactly Ruby had done without Hitch (nothing), and whether Ruby would allow Hitch to do anything fun now he was back (no). The clock ticked onwards until four, and Hitch noticed, cramming the last two biscuits in his mouth, and shrugging his blazer on again. Ruby noticed his sudden rush and frowned. 

“Do you have places to be or something? Don’t tell me you’ve double-booked yourself with me and the other secret spy agency under the city.” 

Hitch gave his best approximation of a smile through a wet mouthful of bourbon and chocolate-chip cookie. He mumbled something that seemed like, ‘sorry.’

Ruby sank back into her chair, feigning annoyance. “I can’t believe you come, eat all of my biscuits and leave me alone.”

Hitch’s smile wasn’t as angelic anymore. He jabbed a thumb at the clock, the second hand steadily ticking from the nine to the ten to the eleven. “No,” He mumbled, taking care to enunciate his words through baked goods, “I’m sorry.” 

The second hand hit exactly 4:00, and an alarm began to blare out across the halls of Spectrum. The specific two-tone klaxon– one Ruby had been forced to listen to and identify multiple times in her Head of Spectrum training– meant that governmental property was being removed from the building which could mean anything from the filing cabinets upon filing cabinets full of redacted information to problems with the CCTV cassettes. 

Or, maybe, new experimental technology was being taken from the gadget room, following the new alarm system Ruby had installed on some major gadgets that were potentially deadly if not contained within Spectrum walls or agent hands. 

And judging by the guilty face of the seven-year-old boy in front of her, it was the latter. 

Ruby was face-down on her desk when her watch began beeping. Her desk was overflowing with paperwork that she had completed, but not filed away yet, and new case files that needed her signing off on agent action or a new pair of eyes on coded messages. 

It had been a long day of work, interrupted only by Red entering to drop off a new pile of manilla files, and then picking through the mess to collect signed forms to be distributed to whoever had submitted them in the first place. The lack of interruptions was both a curse and a blessing, and Ruby had had no time to think independently, let alone wonder why she wasn’t being harassed by the Spectrum day-care pupils. 

But in the end, they had begun harassing her, via an insistent distress call, emitted from all three devices in turn. Ruby looked at the triangulation of the tiny flies that signified each child and saw how far from home they were. She looked at the paperwork, thrown carelessly across the desk, and immediately pushed herself to her feet. 

A cushy desk job was fun and all, but Ruby had missed a ‘proper job’ as LB had put it all those weeks ago. 

And now she had some children to save. 

The distress calls all centred in the very heart of Little Twinford on Sea, and when investigated further, within one of the only public businesses of the town, ‘The Drift-In.’ It seemed to double as a surfboard care shop, with waxing and selling boards, and a cafe. 

Ruby checked her watch as she trekked towards the bright windows of the cafe. Mouse had dropped her as close as possible before going to find parking: the streets of Little Twinford were sectioned off for pedestrian walking, and the nearest parking space was closer to the bay than the cafe. 

She opened the door and turned to push it shut after it stuck on the uneven floor. Her glasses had raindrops on them and were already fogging up as she dabbed at them with a damp sleeve as she scanned the cafe floor for three troublesome children. 

The cafe was empty except for the four of them, and Ruby grimaced, deciding to get them out as soon as possible so the poor waiter could go home early in such nasty weather. 

The three children swivelled to look at her, and all looked so guilty that Ruby’s heart sank. Bradley had his sweater sleeve in his mouth, chewing it nervously, and LB was tapping her fingers against the tabletop before she caught herself and swatted at Bradley to spit out a mouthful of wool. 

Hitch looked like he was bracing himself as he pushed himself off the stool he was on. Even in her worry about what trouble they had gotten into, she noticed that Hitch was still wearing shorts in the winter and added another item to her mile-long to-do list: buy Hitch stockings. Or maybe a pair of trousers. 

“Don’t be mad,” Was what Hitch had decided to start off with, and Ruby sighed. 

“All of you, out of the door now, Mouse should be coming up the hill, go walk with her back to the car. Let me pay for whatever you’ve broken, and you’ll be writing letters of apology to whoever you’ve upset as soon as we get back to–” 

“Letters of apology?” A voice behind her asked, humour lacing their warm tone. “Surely, they haven’t done anything too bad?” 

Ruby turned around, half-ready to start apologising and half-ready to start commiserating about what hellions the kids were when her gaze fell on the waiter standing behind her, hands pushed into the pockets of his apron, and an easy grin on his face. 

It had been ten years of crying since she had last seen Clancy Crewson Crew. It had been nine years of therapy, making up for the manic work-a-holic persona she had thrown herself into when she had first heard the news. It had been ten years of monthly sombre dinners with his sisters and parents, where no one mentioned his name once. It had been ten years of running a spy company alone, with no one to commiserate with, or bounce ideas off, or sympathise with.

Ruby made an ugly noise. “Oh god, hang on,” she said, bending over like she was about to be sick. Her heart had dropped to somewhere around her office in Spectrum, and pure dread had settled over her shoulders like the snowflakes from outside. 

Hitch made a panicked sound, and she straightened up, for his sake, not because the urge to vomit had passed. 

But Clancy had come out from around the counter in the time she had been out of action and was reaching out for her with a concerned hand. “Are you okay?” He asked, and Ruby swallowed hard. 

“Yeah,” She whispered. 

Clancy Crew was, unbelievably, ten years older than when she had last seen him. 

His face was still shaped like his mother’s, but he had stubble growing out around his jaw that he had kept clean as an agent. His hair was long, tied up in a little bun at the crown of his head, and curled at the edges, spilling out of the elastic. There were no bags under his eyes, and the scar he’d gotten from snurferboarding at 14 was still on his forehead. There were silver studs in his earlobes and Ruby was quite sure she’d seen a similar paisley shirt in her grandad’s wardrobe thirty years ago, but Clancy was wearing it buttoned up to his neck, tucked into a long midi skirt, which may have been mistaken for a baggy pair of trousers if you didn’t care to look. 

Hitch was babbling anxiously at her side, and she couldn’t even pull herself together to look at him. 

“We thought it would be a good idea, as soon as we figured it out, we thought we should tell you. I figured it out first, but I wasn’t sure so I told Brad and LB, and they said that we should tell you, but we didn’t want you to be angry so we lied about why you should come up here, and I thought you’d be happy because like, it’s been ten years but you’re crying so–” 

“Okay Hitch,” Was all that Ruby could manage to say, and belatedly rubbed under her glasses to wipe away tears. Clancy was backpedalling, reaching around the glass case of pastries to grab a stack of napkins, and offered them to her wordlessly. LB and Bradley had stood up and crept over. LB had shoes on and that made Ruby cry a little bit more. 

“Where have you been?” Ruby asked, like there weren’t painted handprints on the wall of the shop labelled with names, like there weren’t pictures of regulars hanging behind the counter, like each and every little cake in the display case didn’t have Clancy’s flourish of freeze-dried raspberries or chocolate icing, like he hadn’t ceased to exist for the past ten years of her life. 

“Uh, okay!” Clancy replied, clearly thinking she’d misspoken. “Business has been slow–” 

“Where?” Ruby said, and the kids stepped in a little closer, Hitch reaching up as if he was going to take her sleeve or maybe her hand and thinking twice. LB reached over and grabbed his hand instead, squeezing it. 

Clancy fidgeted with the buttons of his right-hand cuff, loosening the sleeves so he could push them up over his elbows and looked at the children like they would offer him help. “Here?” He said, and Ruby hadn’t expected anything more. 

“I tried looking for you,” The words were ones she had been practising for a decade now, but she was still horrified to hear her voice sound so choked. “Clance, I promise you there was no other way; I was convinced it was the right thing, that it was what you would have wanted. I had a hunch,” She tried offering him a smile that was not returned. 

“I’m just so sorry, I’ll explain everything to you.” 

“He doesn’t remember,” Hitch interrupted, his eyes squeezed shut like he was trying to avoid looking at the metaphorical plane crash in front of him. “We’ve asked and asked, but he doesn’t remember anything.” 

Clancy offered her a smile that was so clearly fake it broke her heart. “Art is right,” He offered. “I was in an accident a while back, I lost my memory. All I know is my name is Ruben Adelaide.” 

“It’s not,” Ruby argued, suddenly angry. Clancy shrugged his shoulders like that was the end of it. 

“It’s the last thing I said to the man who found me,” Clancy informed her. “Rube Adelaide.” 

“Your name is Clancy Crew,” Ruby said, and the syllables felt right in her mouth after so long not speaking them. “You were an agent for a government agency, and a very, very good one. You went missing ten years ago, and we never found you or your body.” 

Clancy’s face did not light up in recognition when she spoke his name. He took a deep breath and smoothed the front of his apron out. Across the chest was labelled ‘Drift-In’ in a curly blue font, with stylised waves and a shell-shocked bitter part of Ruby wanted to laugh. Clancy didn’t belong here at all, but Ruby was starting to imagine how he had found his way there. 

“I’ll go and make up some hot chocolate,” he said, side-stepping Ruby very carefully and heading to lock the front door and turn the OPEN/CLOSED sign. “You guys go and sit down, and I’ll be back in just a second.” 

The kids obeyed immediately, and Ruby drifted after them silently, keeping Clancy firmly in her peripheral vision, like if she even blinked he would disappear into thin air again. She tapped her watch face to activate it, and clicked out a message to Mouse, apologetically telling her that they would be tied up in Little Mountain Side for a while longer, and she was free to go, as long as she left the Spectrum car at HQ for Monroe to collect them later in the night. 

Hitch, Bradley, and LB sat, all stiff and quiet. As the milk-frother began whirring behind the counter, and Mouse’s simple acquiescent reply, Ruby finally spoke. 

“I am so, so angry with all of you,” She started, and all three winced. Hitch opened his mouth to protest, always ready to argue, and Ruby spoke quickly over him. “But very, very grateful.” 

Hitch looked like he was unsure whether to keep arguing or not. 

“I looked for Clancy for ten years, the whole of Spectrum was out looking for him. We never, ever found a trace, no one ever fit his description in the morgues or hospitals. We would’ve poured resources into dredging the entire bay, searching miles and miles out to sea, but Spectrum One shut us down after two weeks. His position was filled, his apartment was emptied, and possessions returned to his family, and we were forced to declare him dead in action after a year.” 

Hitch was still clutching LB’s hand, and LB was hanging onto Bradley’s sleeve under the table. Ruby heaved another sigh, albeit stifled so the kids didn’t get more scared. 

“You’ve done good, kids,” She promised. Out of the very corner of her eye, she watched Clancy’s blond head bob around behind the coffee machine. He had honest-to-God beach waves and sun-kissed skin. The Head of Spectrum Clancy she knew had been pale from all the pencil-pushing he did. Only Agent Clancy and their missions in sunnier climes had looked as tanned as this man did. “You’ve done what I couldn’t do in ten years.” 

Bradley slumped back in his seat like the recognition of their act – or maybe the knowledge that his ma would not be told– had finally allowed him to relax, and they all suddenly looked exhausted. Ruby wondered what Clancy– Ruben– thought when he looked at them. Did he think that she somehow had three step-kids? God, she probably looked old enough for children now. 

She knew he didn’t recognise her, but she couldn’t help thinking about how she’d changed in ten years, aside from the obvious stress lines. Her hair was shorter than how she used to keep it, and her roots were growing in after a mission required her to darken her hair for anonymity. She wasn’t much taller, had kept her usual frame of glasses through the years, but there were more changes in a person in a decade than how they styled their hair. There was something different to the set of Clancy’s jaw, to the way he looked at the world around him, that she couldn’t explain. 

Ruby hadn’t changed as much as that, had she? 

Clancy returned, balancing all five mugs of hot chocolate on a tray, with several sweet treats. LB helped him unload the tray, and Clancy reached for a mug she had passed to Hitch and slid it in front of Ruby. 

“That one has a couple of extra espresso shots in it,” Clancy explained, and Ruby’s heart leapt at the thought of Clancy remembering how she liked her mochas. “You look like you could do with it.” 

That was not exactly the reason Ruby had been hoping for, but she curled her fingers around the mug anyway and took a sip. 

Clancy sat in the available seat across from Ruby, next to Bradley, and stirred his mug. “So, you knew me before the accident? And you somehow know these three?” He jabbed his thumb at the children.

“We worked together for years,” Ruby explained, trying to keep her voice as level as if she were holding talks with a global-level arms-dealer. “Our job meant we had to work closely, we were partners.” 

She was aware of how closely the children were listening: they had never heard this story before. They’d heard the disappearance of Agent and Head of Spectrum Clancy Crew from Monroe and Finch and the other Spectrum agents, and they had seen the photos, the gadgets, the way Ruby could turn manic in her avoidance of the subject of him. 

“You were on a submarine,” Ruby started, very slowly. All four faces are turned towards her, fully engrossed. “You were coming back from a mission, waiting to be picked up by a bigger ship to come home. It was deep-sea exploration, supposedly, but you hated the idea of ever finding out what was in that ‘giant bathtub’. Supposedly there was this huge octopus somewhere in Twinford Bay, but we never actually found it,” With a single exhalation, Ruby remembered every time she’d been told to keep it zipped and blabbed.

“Your mission was actually to explore the possibility of deep-sea weapons and technology: from a port for submarines to dock in the event of war, right up to mapping out potential areas for underwater habitation. You’d undergone so much preparation for becoming an aquanaut: air compression tests, testing the new technology for breathing and living down there. It was a new way of living on Earth, something no one else had ever done. Expanding into the ocean is our only option, and our research into it was almost entirely ignored by every government. The focus is elsewhere, so the ocean really was all ours.” 

“I was at home, this was when you were Head of Spectrum, I was waiting for you to get back for an informal debrief. I’d put on the TV, wanted to check if Crazy Cops had recorded right, but it was just a video, zoomed in so far, I could barely make anything out. It was bobbing around, and I realised it was a boat. The phone rang and it was this voice, scrambled and coded to the bottom of the ocean and back, asking me to make a choice.”

Bradley was squirming slightly in his seat, still tethered to both of his friends, but Hitch’s eyes on her were steady, huge dark eyes that trusted her every word wholly. She knew each child would argue vehemently if she stopped or suggested that they leave the room for the story, and she knew that each needed to hear it, to understand what they had entered into, and how to leave it for good and close the door behind them. 

“The voice said the sub was rigged with explosives, and I knew undoubtedly that it was correct. I’d believe that they’d rigged it before you ever left, just waiting for when you were close enough home to contact me. I was asked to blow a hole in your sub, certainly drowning and killing you, or allow two-thousand-and-three civilians to die.”

LB, two seats down, sucked in a deep breath while Bradley went dead-still in his chair. Hitch’s gaze darted to Clancy, clearly gauging his reaction, and then back to Ruby. 

Ruby had done many difficult things in her life, but meeting eye contact with Clancy Crew in that moment was not up there. The guilt had eaten her alive over the years, had very nearly killed her in one way or another, but Clancy was alive. Attempted murder, with intent to kill, was no better than murder of the first degree, but Clancy was alive and the hope for a second chance was so thick on Ruby’s tongue she could choke on it. 

“Allow them to wipe out a whole town, or kill my best friend?” Ruby whispered, like it was her first time considering the question. “Who can answer that?” 

“You,” Clancy’s tone is cool, hands resting on the table in front of him with the fingers interlinked. “You chose to save two thousand people.” 

“I chose to kill you.” 

“You did what everyone wants to do in that situation: the morally-correct, heroic option.” Clancy had always been her soundboard, to bounce ideas off of when Ruby’s brain tangled itself up into codes, and hearing his calm tone slowly unpick the cause of her downward spiral of the past nine-something years was like a balm. “You said you had a hunch?” 

“I’d hoped that that was the choice you would want me to make. I couldn’t have faced you knowing the blood of those civilians was on my hands. I’d have lost you either way that day.” 

“I get hunches,” Clancy offered, looking down at his hands with a furrow between his brows. 

“Ever since you were a kid. Could tell when pop quizzes were going to be sprung, whether I was hiding something from you, whether there was something we were missing about a mission.” Ruby’s smile was turning watery again. She did not reminisce about Clancy often, only with a very select number of people who had known him before he was a bigshot Head of Spectrum. 

“You had a hunch earlier,” LB reminded Clancy, leaning forward suddenly. Clancy grinned, with a chipped front incisor. 

“I did have a hunch,” He agreed, and Ruby had known that Clancy would be great with kids, that he would get on well with the three children that Ruby had somehow taken under her wing, but it still made her heart ache to see how all three kids perked up when Clancy paid attention to them. 

“I believed that you guys were telling the truth.” 

The words hit her like a punch to the gut, but she did not turn her face away. “What makes you think that?” 

“No one talks like that if they’re lying,” Clancy said simply. “And I haven’t had any other suggestions since they pulled me out of the water, so I’ll take any explanation given.” 

“What did you think had happened?” Ruby asked, and found herself leaning in, knowing a Clancy-Crew story was the best kind of story. 

“A beachcomber found me one evening while he was walking his dogs,” Clancy said, taking one last sip from his coffee. “I’d been brought in by the tide, was passed out on the waterline when he was passing, and he got me up, took me into the hospital and then gave me his spare room.” 

“You hadn’t drowned,” Ruby murmured, slotting pieces together in her head. “You hadn’t inhaled so much water you drowned between the crash in the afternoon and being found in the evening. You’d gotten yourself to shore, could’ve swam the entire way, and then collapsed. The blast would never have killed you.” 

I didn’t look hard enough, were the words Ruby did not say. She was certain Clancy was thinking them though. Surely everyone was thinking it. 

“It damn well tried. Broken ribs, head trauma, some minor decompression sickness, and a broken leg. I was just covered in infected cuts and bruises. He thought I’d clung to some wreckage the majority of the way,” He almost sounded like he was going to say something else and then paused. 

Ruby already had so much to process that she didn’t mind the few moments’ silence as she tried to reconcile everything she thought she’d known, with everything she’d just learned. 

“Did they never find the sub?” Bradley asked. 

Clancy shook his head. “The locals were convinced that I’d been attacked by a sea-monster, and somehow survived to wash up on their cove. There were some rumours about mermaids when I first arrived, but I never grew a tail so that died down pretty quickly.” 

“You told me mermaids weren’t real, the first time we met,” Hitch declared. 

“They aren’t–” 

“You didn’t tell me that you were the mermaid in the story the customer was telling me.” Hitch barrelled on and Clancy chuckled. 

“It’s a good story to tell visitors. Everyone wants to hear about sea monsters and mermaids, no one wants to hear about my near-death experience,” Clancy paused to give Ruby a familiar sidelong smile. “Except you four, obviously.” 

“What’ve you been doing?” Ruby asked, with the feeling that the children already somehow knew exactly what Clancy had been up to, having learned somewhere between Hitch’s first wanderings to Little Twinford, and whatever meeting they’d had to discover that Ruben Adelaide was actually Clancy Crew, minus all of his memories. 

“Running this place mostly,” Clancy gestured at the affectionately-tacky surfboard decor around them. There was a sign that said ‘Live, Love, Surf’ over the counter, and some action shots that, upon closer inspection, were actually Clancy, on a yellow and blue surfboard on a great curling wave. “The man who found me, he offered me his son’s old room, and helped me try to figure out where I’d come from.” 

Again, Clancy paused. Ruby waited him out, trying to look as neutral as possible. 

“And when we couldn’t find anything, he gave me a job and then left the cafe to me. I didn’t try looking much after the first few months or so, the cafe was all I needed, and I couldn’t find any missing person cases. No one in the area knew anyone was missing, and no visitors to town had any idea either. I just accepted that I was too far from home for anyone to look for me, and I had everything I could want: friends, a job, a home. I was happy.” 

Ruby nodded throughout his admission, hearing the guilt in his voice for telling her, and trying to press down her own guilt for not trying harder. She had interviewed everyone at Twinford Bay that day for information on the submarine accident– a boat collision according to the public–, had personally observed dozens of potential cadavers in morgues, scoured hospital bays and safehouses, and begged every contact she had ever been owed a favour from. But Clancy had ended up miles and miles away from the Bay. The informal interviews she’d conducted had nearly cost her a brand-new Head of Spectrum role, and even the resources from that job could not help her locate her best friend. Having killed him, the least Ruby could have done was find his body for his family. But she’d fallen short, again and again. 

LB stood up suddenly and began loudly clattering empty mugs onto the tray again. “We’ll wash up,” She announced. Both Hitch and Bradley pulled a face. 

“Bagsy not,” they chimed in unison and LB gave them both a glare that Ruby couldn’t have copied ever as effectively. The boys stood up and trailed after her to the small kitchen area. Here was when LB’s plan petered out, she put the tray down and very slowly began to fill the sink with hot water. They were all very clearly trying to give some semblance of privacy whilst clearly listening in on the conversation. 

“Do you believe me?” What she would do if Clancy did not believe her, Ruby didn’t know. But she had to ask. 

“Yes. And I don’t blame you either.” 

A laugh bubbled out of Ruby, and she buried her face in her hands. “How can you just accept it like that?” 

“Because I can see that you are completely torn apart by it. And I feel like I know you, but I can’t remember anything at all before the beach. But I feel like you wouldn’t lie to me.” 

Ruby tried to discreetly wipe her face as she removed her hands, but Clancy huffed a little laugh, retrieving a napkin from his apron pocket to offer to her. The gust of air set one of his trailing curls bouncing. She accepted the napkin and tried to tidy herself up for what felt like the tenth time that evening. 

“If you’ll come back with us to Twinford, I can show you pictures. Maybe a home environment will jog something: the old apartment sold, but I still have the majority of your stuff from it.”

Clancy nodded slowly, fingers flexing like he was trying to shake a cramp. “I have ends to tie up here, I can’t just leave.” 

Ruby wanted to point out that Clancy had left once in the past, and had been fine for it, but as it was, she only nodded silently, swallowing hard. “I understand.” 

Clancy stood up, and she clenched her fingers into fists, slip-shod again at the thought of him leaving her behind again, choosing something else over her. 

“I just need to make some calls. Get someone to feed my cat, make sure the opening shift at the cafe tomorrow is covered, maybe pack a bag if you think it’ll take a while,” Clancy was saying and Ruby’s head snapped up. 

“You’ll come home?” Her voice was breathless. 

“Of course,” Clancy Crew promised, and his arms were beginning to stir at his sides, hands flexing in excitement. “You only get one chance to have your coming-of-age, initiation into a secret spy organisation phase right?” 

“Not you,” Ruby said warmly, getting to her feet and pushing the chair under the table. “You get another chance.” 

In the heady excitement of getting her best friend, her right hand, back in a stroke of luck and nosy children, Ruby had missed one of the biggest mysteries of her life.

Luckily, aforementioned nosy children were on top of all mysteries at the moment. Maybe if they hadn't been, Ruby’s life could have gone back exactly how it was a decade again, with Clancy at her side, and her job secure. But then again, if Hitch and LB and Bradley weren’t the aspiring detectives they were, she wouldn’t have Clancy at all. 

As Ruby and Clancy smiled at each other, Bradley jumped up, hands planted on the counter as he bounced in place. “But that doesn’t explain everything!” He called out.

“What’s left?” Clancy asked. “Surely that’s enough answers for a lifetime?” 

“But who is Adelaide?” Bradley asked urgently, and Ruby’s hand fumbled in tucking her chair in, making it screech across the floor. 

"Someone important enough to have been the last person on my mind when they found me," Clancy was saying. "Ruby turns into Rubes, turns into Ruben."

"Maybe the person who made your boat explode!" Hitch suggested excitedly. "You could have guessed someone was after  the deep-sea exploration too, or had rigged your sub up with explosives and was trying to tell Ruby." 

Ruby couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes in the cosy cafe, not Clancy’s and not the three small children who trusted her to keep them safe. 

“I think I know who Adelaide is.” 

The next morning, after a long night in a safehouse discussing Clancy's entire life with him, alongside photograph albums of the pair at every birthday, life event and mission, Ruby tapped her watch against the doorknob to her home and listened for the click of magnets that meant the security mechanism was unlocked. 

No one observing her would have been able to tell where Ruby produced the key from, whether she had had it in her hand all along, or if it had been sequestered up her sleeve, except that suddenly it was in her hand and unlocking the door in a fluid motion. 

The door unlocked, and Ruby slipped through, before immediately locking it again, trusting that the magnets in the door frame and handle had been separated, rendering the lock un-pickable. Setting the alarm system behind her, she dropped the keys in the wonky hand-made pottery bowl on the side table and shrugged her coat off to be hung on the coat stand. 

“In the kitchen!” A voice called from down the hallway. Normally that would bring a smile to Ruby’s face, but today she only pushed her glasses aside to rub at her eyes. 

The hallway walls she passed were lilac, and hung with pictures and paintings at intervals, just above Ruby’s head height. She kicked over the corner of the woven rug on the floor, so she didn’t trip over it later. The door to the kitchen was half-shut and Ruby took a deep breath as she pushed it open, knowing that everything she had built up over the past fifteen years was over. 

It had been a nice life, the one they had built together, probably more than Ruby had deserved for leaving her best friend for dead after she killed him and stole his job. 

The door swung open silently, but the person still turned their head to look. 

Del Lasco, with a tea-towel thrown over her shoulder and still in her pyjamas, stood at the oven cooking a round of cheese-and-spinach omelettes for breakfast. They smelled heavenly, with toast already cooling in the rack on the kitchen table and Ruby's favourite coffee mug laid out for her by the kettle.  

“Hi honey,” She greeted, as she did every morning, as if Ruby  hadn't not come home the night before, leaving Del to eat her dinner and go to bed alone. “Breakfast’s almost ready, take a seat.” Ruby wavered in the doorway, hand still on the doorknob, like if she slammed it quick enough she could cut off every discovery she had made yesterday. 

Ruby Redfort made her decision, even though it broke her heart, and stepped onto the cold flagstones of their shared kitchen, closing the door behind her with a quiet but sure click. 

“Hi,” She replied, and it came out in a cracked whisper. Del’s face fell at the sound of it, and she quickly shifted the frying pan to an unused ring, turning the heat down and turning to her partner. She wiped her hands on the tea-towel absentmindedly as she approached and her hands were dry and clean, with a gold ring on her left-hand ring finger, and covered in so, so much blood. 

“What’s the matter?” Adelaide Lasco asked, her voice low with concern as she ushered Ruby into a seat at their small dining room table, complete with yellow tablecloth and jug full of flowers that Ruby had bought Del three days ago. They both sank into chairs, in the same positions they sat in every breakfast and dinner. The radio on the windowsill over the sink was still burbling out some prog-rock channel. Del’s face was pulled down into perfect worry, with no surprise nor anticipation. Ruby found herself silently categorising every feature of her face like she’d never see it again. 

In a deathly-quiet, grief-filled tone, Ruby ruined every nice thing she’d ever allowed herself. 

“We need to talk.”

Chapter Text

Hitch, LB and Bradley sat in the back seat of the Spectrum car, all strapped in at Ruby’s request, but leaning in close to Hitch in the middle seat. 

He hadn’t let go of either of them the whole walk from the cafe to the car. Bradley had his head resting against Hitch’s shoulder, eyes on the adults in the front seat. 

Ruby was in the middle of the bench-like front seat, mostly because she was the smallest. Mouse was driving and had rolled with the fact that Clancy Crew was still alive with only a blink and a firm handshake. Clancy had a hastily packed duffel bag on his lap, fiddling with the strap. After the long conversation in the cafe, Clancy had run upstairs to pack an overnight bag. He had told Ruby, quietly so as not to be overheard, that his stay would be a short one. Bradley, Hitch and LB had overheard, their own conversation silencing after the first whispers from the kitchen carried through, that it would be a long weekend, he wouldn’t stay in Twinford on a permanent basis. At least at first, Hitch thought to himself. He doubted either one of them could stay away from each other for too long. 

Upon getting into the car, Ruby had instinctively turned the radio down, but no conversation had been struck up to fill the silence. 

They pulled up in the old parking lot outside the movie-theatre and the adults piled out, Ruby following Clancy out of his door feet-first. The doors slammed and none of them looked back to coax the children out. Ruby was talking to Mouse, presumably releasing her from her duties for the night. Mouse pulled her into a brief hug, and then shook hands with Clancy again. 

“Does she know him?” Bradley whispered, trying to work out Mouse’s neutral behaviour towards the missing man and LB scoffed. 

“‘Course. She’s playing it cool because Ruby already gagged at the sight of him. She doesn’t want to freak him out.” 

“She gets anxiety cramps,” Hitch pointed out loyally. “Although it was a bit rude.” 

None of them moved just yet, half-hoping that they’d be allowed to stay out instead of being ushered home and half-not wanting to let go of each other just yet. There was a beat of silence, and the seven-year-old’s patience ran out abruptly. 

“We won’t be like that, will we?” Hitch asked in a whisper. “All sad and guilty and killing each other?” 

“Of course not,” Bradley said but his sleeve was creeping towards his mouth in a nervous tic. 

LB flopped back in her seat impatiently, having craned forward to lip-read Mouse and Ruby. She wasn’t very good at it. “We won’t be in that position. We’ll have fail-safes, we’ll stop the explosion.” 

“Would you kill me? If you had to?” Bradley mumbled, like he didn’t really want to know the answer. 

“You did what everyone wants to do in that situation: the morally-correct, heroic option.” Clancy said with the patience and understanding of a man who had repented for all of his sins already. Ruby watched him with an expression Hitch couldn’t quite describe. Like he was her whole world, or something, or like he was her Bradley-and-LB rolled into one.

Hitch wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a hero, and keep his friends safe, and be an agent just like Ruby. He was starting to think that those things could not exist together. 

“Would’ya want us to?” 

Bradley sighed, slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can make that decision.” 

Ruby rapped on the window, and Bradley opened the door instead of rolling the window down. “Home-time kids,” She declared, and they all groaned. “C’mon, it’s been a long day, Mouse is going to walk you all home before it gets too dark.” 

When they were all standing on the same side of the car, having been forced to let go of each other for ease of getting out the backseat, Ruby waved. 

“I’m sure I’ll see you kids soon,” She said, with an air of awkwardness. LB batted her hand away and dragged Hitch in by his elbow into a hug. Bradley had the emotional intelligence to follow them in for a group embrace. Ruby had to bend just a bit at the knees to wrap them all up, and Hitch craned his neck up to try and breathe in air that wasn’t coming from anyone else’s airways. 

“Thank you,” Ruby murmured sincerely into the space beside his ear, and he grunted noncommittally, but patted her shoulder the best he could. “Now get home before you all wind up in even more trouble.” 

The group disentangled, and Hitch compulsively straightened the lapels of his blazer. With a neat sidestep of Ruby, he was in front of Clancy. 

“Clancy’s a better name than Ruben,” He declared. He didn’t know what else to say. He had been friends with Ruben the longest, out of Bradley and LB. Clancy/Ruben was clutching his duffel bag strap with two white-knuckled hands but as Hitch spoke, his face relaxed. 

“Thanks Hitch,” He said kindly. Hitch knew a thing or two about bad names. “I’ll see you around Spectrum sometime, huh?” 

Hitch glanced at Ruby, expecting her to claim that he wasn’t actually an agent of Spectrum, and he shouldn’t get his hopes up to be included in the rest of the Clancy Crew/Ruben Adelaide sage, but Ruby wasn’t even looking at him, didn’t even look like she could conjure up any words with her quick tongue. She was watching Clancy again with an expression that Hitch still couldn’t decipher. 

“Sure will,” Bradley said for him, drawing himself up to his full height next to Hitch. “We’ll see you real soon.”

LB said something along the same lines as Bradley, but Hitch was still watching Ruby, brain working overtime to try and guess what she was thinking. 

“Are you still in the old apartment?” Clancy asked, and Ruby blinked, tuning back into current events. 

“No,” She said apologetically, and Mouse buttoned her cardigan up before smiling at the small gaggle of children. “I sold it about a year after you… left. Couldn’t stand being in it, I spent most nights in HQ honestly.” 

“C’mon Hitch,” Mouse coaxed in her usual gentle tone. Hitch took a reluctant step away from the car and Ruby and Clancy. They were still talking, still unpacking the events of the past ten years, and Hitch wanted to know. He wanted the puzzle pieces of the mystery he’d uncovered, and he wanted to fix everything. 

“Get home safe,” Ruby called as he finally turned his back and trailed after Mouse, LB and Bradley at his sides. There was something firm to her tone, like if she said enough with enough confidence, it would work, and she wouldn’t lose anyone else. Mouse waved again, and LB threaded her arm through Hitch’s elbow, despite the height difference. 

“I’m skipping swimming tomorrow,” She declared, and Bradley looked at her curiously. 

“How come?”

“So we can go and find out everything,” She reminded him. “Ruby knows who Adelaide is, and I bet we can figure it out ourselves.”

Hitch looked up at Mouse, who was just a step in front of them. He couldn’t see her face properly, even in the glow of the streetlamps, and couldn’t tell if she was listening. But she was a spy, so he’d bet that she was listening. So he just nodded in response to LB. 

“Meet at the arcade tomorrow,” LB said, as they drew level with the row of townhouses that she usually took her leave by. Hitch had never worked out which one she lived in; him and Bradley had lingered a couple times after walking her home and they could never pinpoint at which door she ducked inside. 

Mouse spoke up for the first time in about ten minutes. “The arcade was closed down a couple of days ago,” She warned. “Try the phone box by the North subway entrance, or the bakery on Seventh Street.”

LB nodded very importantly. “We do all fit in the phone box,” She agreed. LB gave Hitch one last hug and ran off down the pavement, lit up every few seconds by the lamplights she dashed under. Bradley was left at the doorstep of his house in a similar fashion and then all that was left was for Hitch and Mouse to walk up the long drive of the school. 

They were trudging along in silence, before Hitch’s curiosity finally overwhelmed him. 

“Do you know Adelaide?” 

“No,” She said with a smile that was nearly hidden by the darkness, and Hitch thought she was telling the truth. 

“Where do you live, anyway?” His interrogation had quickly run out of relevant questions, and although Ruby seemed to trust her, Hitch wasn’t sure how much of his own investigation he wanted to give away to Mouse. He didn’t want her taking all the credit. 

“In the town centre,” Mouse supplied, and Hitch turned to walk backwards, looking at the few lights that shone from houses. 

“That’s ages away,” He told her, and she laughed. 

“I know. But someone needs to be walked home so he doesn’t walk straight back into Spectrum.” 

Hitch scowled. “How long have you known Ruby?” 

“Just over twelve years. Clancy hired me while he was the Head of Spectrum and I worked under him on a few missions before the accident.” 

She was fixed with a hard stare by Hitch, made difficult by his backwards stance, but it didn’t even make her smile waver. “Why are you answering my questions? Shouldn’t you be keeping it zipped?” 

“I’m answering them because you need answers. Or else you wouldn’t be asking the questions, would you?” 

“Well, yeah.”

“These are all questions that Ruby would have answered herself. You need to look deeper, find the answers that I can’t tell you,” Mouse spoke slowly and surely, and Hitch tried to read between her words. She… wasn’t telling him to stop investigating. 

Hitch opened his mouth to ask another question, trying to press deeper like she’d told him to, but he tripped backwards suddenly, foot connecting with something hard. He turned around to find that they’d reached the steps up to the Academy front door already – he’d nearly fallen up them in his distraction— and Mouse was on the third stair. 

“We’ve pushed curfew a little bit,” Mouse winced, reaching for the doorbell as soon as she was close enough. “C’mon Hitch.”

There was a brief, and apologetic on Mouse’s half, conversation above his head before he was ushered off to bed. Mouse had already begun descending the stairs when Hitch looked back for her in the gap of the door, and he turned his back too, slowly, and then faster when Matron swiped at him. 

Later that night, Hitch lay awake listening to the soft snores of the other boys in their bunks. Ruby knew who Adelaide was and wasn’t telling anyone. And if Ruby knew something, it would probably be written down somewhere. 

One thing Ruby loved was a list. Every day was another to-do list, often reaching into the high-twenties, and every mission was a mind map. She encoded them until they couldn’t make sense to anyone but her and often burned old lists, or soaked whole notebooks until they were waterlogged. All three of the kids had tried multiple times to intercept a list for decoding, but a combination of nonsense inked characters printed over her handwriting, water damage, and soot had finally beaten them.

But maybe, she hadn’t destroyed the lists and mind maps about Clancy’s disappearance. She hadn’t given up hope, not really. She’d been forced to abandon the case after Spectrum 1 sent cease and desists. So maybe she still had them tucked away in a filing cabinet somewhere, in case new leads cropped up. 

And, Hitch thought excitedly, maybe Clancy could decipher them, with their weird best-friends staring-counts-as-a-conversation thing they did. Between Clancy, LB, Bradley and Hitch, they could probably do it. 

He could barely sleep, he was so excited to get to the arcade the next day to tell LB and Bradley his plan. It would work, he was sure of it. They just had to find the files. 

And Hitch would figure it all out and solve the case. They were already halfway there.

Chapter Text

It had come to pass that Hitch had a young, estranged aunt on his father’s side– Irene, known informally as ‘Reenie’-- who had turned her back on the family business, and joined a convent within Twinford, the Lady of Mercy Order. Despite the frosty relationship between Art Hitchen Zachery Senior and Irene, Art Hitchin Zachary Junior and Irene got on famously. 

Or at least… that was what Twinford’s Wealthy Academy of Tradition was told when Ruby picked up her phone (the one shaped like a butler dressed to the nines proffering a tray which held the mouthpiece of course). Exactly eight people in the world had this number (one being the President of the United States), except Hitch had broken into his headteacher’s office to change his own records and family contact forms to re-direct them to call Ruby’s personal Spectrum number. Ruby had not just been promoted to Head of Spectrum Eight because her best friend had gone missing, but because she had an uncanny knack of ad-libbing herself into and out of any number of situations, a skill which her mother and teachers had called ‘telling porkie pies’ when she was a child. Upon being asked if she had confirmed Hitch’s absence from school, she found herself spinning a long yarn about blessed Reenie’s time in the convent halfway up the mountain side and the fresh veg that they grew themselves in the water-irrigated gardens. Ruby had put the phone down, and her head in her hands.

Now, Twinford’s Wealthy Academy of Tradition was thoroughly bought into the nun story, tempted with store-bought jars of honey that had their labels soaked off in the Spectrum staffroom sink and replaced with a bit of paper and sellotape that Ruby had made up herself, and Hitch being collected of a Friday afternoon by the curiously-named Agent Red, head of the costume department who absolutely delighted in taking on the habit and nodding serenely to members of the public with her hands tucked into her sleeves. Once she had told Hitch (who obviously had to be seen in public with her) that she was never a field agent, due to her skill in the costume department keeping her behind her sewing machine and researching various methods to make bullet-proof clothes, but getting to don her own spy outfit and roll the little rosary beads between her fingers was almost as good as being a real field agent. 

Hitch had disagreed vehemently, and then the nun and the child had gotten into a rather heated discussion outside of the Double Doughnut. 

Anyway, all this to say, Hitch used this loophole to skip out on any lesson he deemed boring. On Wednesdays, which it was, Hitch had Physical Education, specifically cross-country running where Hitch wouldn’t be head-counted back inside of the building, immediately followed by History told by the most dreary and blind old man on this side of the Atlantic. Hitch usually sat in the back corner of the room, just outside of where the old coot could see without his spectacles, and would hopefully, as long as no one pointed it out, not be missed. He would collect a new jar of honey for Matron from the storeroom either way, and who would ever tell a nun that her nephew couldn’t visit her?

This was the perfect slot to sprint down to the nearest entrance to Spectrum, hang around Ruby for an hour or two, and eat all of Spectrum’s biscuits. He had promised to meet LB and Bradley by the arcade after their day at school, but hadn’t promised not to go into Spectrum by himself. He would call it reconnaissance (albeit with a slight lisp as his front teeth were missing), if they ever found out. 

The nearest entrance was just a five minute-walk from the school (not including the trek down the hill itself) and down a small alleyway. Hitch had wandered into the wrong door once, because Ruby hadn’t been clear enough in her instructions on how to actually get in. She’d laughed for about ten minutes when Hitch told her the story, mostly because the shop-owner on the other side of the door had thought he was the milkboy, and demanded to know where his glass bottles were. Hitch was sure Ruby kept opening this particular entrance up on purpose because of that. 

Hitch took the long way down the halls, running and jumping every couple of steps to try and tap the wall above the streaks of colourful paint, but he didn’t bother stopping and trying to jiminy his way into any closed doors. Ruby was probably expecting him, and he had a lot he wanted to ask her. After their usual doughnut/biscuit snack-time of course. 

He didn’t bother knocking on the door, just leaning his whole body weight against it as he tried to push the heavy fire door open. “Hullo,” He called, heading straight for the teaservice Ruby kept by her desk. 

Ruby wasn’t at her desk, but stood in the back corner, on tiptoes to try and reach something inside a filing cabinet drawer. Hitch watched her with some interest, as he opened the biscuit tin, only looking away from her to squint at its contents. He’d never actually seen Ruby using the filing cabinets, except to dump piles of paperwork in when she was supposed to be tidying up. 

He munched happily on a Rich Tea, waiting to be acknowledged. This was new, but working perfectly into his favour. He’d wanted to have a peek inside the filing cabinets, in case that was where the information about Clancy and Adelaide was. Ruby turned around suddenly, and Hitch gave her a smile, already on his second biscuit, waiting for her usual comment about his silly black gym-shorts and vest top, tucked into his waistband which was hiked high up. He had finally found his sports jersey hidden under another boy’s bunk bed and tied it around his neck, but Spectrum was kept warm enough that he didn’t need it. Sneaking out of cross-country was easy when he wiggled under a hedge at the very edge of the school ground, but his uniform was a huge downside. 

Ruby walked past Hitch, who neatly side-stepped her to avoid being trodden on, and straight to another bookcase near the door. The Rich Tea was starting to taste dry in his mouth. 

The Head of Spectrum was squinting at a piece of paper in her hand as she pulled books off of the shelves, clearly trying to find some kind of order to the chaos she kept her office in. 

“Hey,” Hitch chirped, finishing his biscuit but hesitating before his third. “What are you looking for?” 

Ruby flicked quickly through a book she’d grabbed seemingly at random, and then shook it by the front cover, but nothing fell out. When that didn’t work, she changed direction again, heading diagonally to yet another filing cabinet. 

Hitch swayed slightly in his spot, head swivelling to follow Ruby as she darted around the room. He still had a tight grip on the biscuit tin. It was fashioned to look like a rotary telephone, all hammered tin and black lacquer paint. 

“Ruby?” he asked, with only a hint of tremble to his voice. “What’s happening?” 

Ruby didn’t even glance at him as she swept past again, suddenly with a stack of papers in her arms. Something fell off the top but she didn’t bother retrieving it. Hitch instinctively went to catch it and read it, but hesitated just before his eyes grazed the page, waiting for Ruby to chide him for looking in the first place. Instead, she was hunting through drawers with a sort of manic frenzy. 

The piece of paper Hitch had picked up was a single sheet of stationery with ‘FROM THE DESK OF’ printed across the top in copperplate. There was no name following the statement, thoroughly anonymising its sender. 

‘Following our last correspondence, I will ask, politely, again, that you cease and desist in the search for Agent Crew. 

Per my last letter, We will not fund the land-and-sea search beyond 14 days after the first report of the equipment’s malfunction. Agent Crew is Missing-In-Action, presumed dead. No evidence has been found as a result of the current search. It has been decided, by unanimous vote, that further searching is a misuse of resources. 

To clarify, if the search is not called off by midnight on 12/08/1954, your position and privilege as Head of 8 will be brought into question, and revoked. 

Condolences on the loss of Agent Crew.’ 

There was a stylised ‘1’ where the signature would usually be placed on letters. Hitch read it twice, and then helped himself to another biscuit. 

“Is this about Clancy?” Hitch asked softly, just before he took a bite. 

Somehow, that was the thing that got through to Ruby. She turned around, and finally seemed to see Hitch for the first time. 

“Art,” she said, clearly doing some mental maths to try and work out why exactly he was standing in her office. “What are you doing here?” 

“Irene needed help harvesting carrots,” He reminded her. Her gaze dropped to the letter in his hand and he offered it out to her quickly. “You dropped it, is it about Clancy?” 

She seemed to recognise the document without getting any closer, and seemed to spark with anger when she saw it. “Yes.” 

When she didn’t seem eager to take the document, Hitch put it carefully on the desk, on the most clear part of the surface that he could, which was the spot with only three layers of folders on top. Ruby was still staring at it, so Hitch rummaged in the biscuit-tin for a Jammy Dodger. 

“Do you want a biscuit?” He asked, and held that out to her as well. For a moment, it looked like she would refuse, but then her anger disappeared and she managed to smile, reaching over the desk to take it from him. 

“Thank you,” Ruby chewed for a silent moment where Hitch looked down into the depths of the biscuit tin and peered up at Ruby through his eyelashes, keeping a careful eye on her. 

But she didn’t drift back towards the piles of paper that she had left scattered across the office, and he reached in for another biscuit. 

“What’s been happening?” Hitch asked, gesturing around the room with a half-eaten cookie. 

“Um,” Ruby started, as though Hitch wouldn’t notice that she was just filling the silence instead of actually replying with words. “It’s been… busy.” 

“Can I help?” Hitch asked, slipping a biscuit in his pocket for later, and stuffing his mouth again. His mother had been forgetting to send him tuckboxes recently, and the canteen never served biscuits or sweets, only custard and apple crumble, or jelly. 

“This isn’t a good time,” Ruby said, reading a folder on her desk upside down. Her attention was fading, and Hitch’s shoulders slumped in. “I’m super busy.” 

Hitch watched Ruby in silence for a few more moments before replacing the biscuit tin on its shelf, and headed to the door. He heaved it with all his weight and glanced back at Ruby, who was now arranging pieces of paper on the floor. 

“I’ll be back,” He told her, knowing he shouldn’t leave without telling an adult, no matter how he flaunted that rule at school, and Ruby wasn’t being the best grown-up right now. 

“Yuh-huh,” Ruby murmured, and Hitch caught the door as it swung shut to close it gently. 

Hitch half-skipped half-ran down the corridors, basically with full permission to poke his head into every single one. He was looking for Rube… Clancy, because the most fun adult Hitch knew was acting really boring. Once or twice, when Hitch opened a door there was someone sat at a desk or table, working with their attention all on their work and Hitch got out of there straight away. He was quite a few corridors away when he finally opened a door to find Clancy sat on a sofa, reading a newspaper with an empty cup on the floor beside him. The room altogether was pretty bare but Hitch didn’t look closely once he’d found his goal. 

Clancy looked up sharply, and looked confused when he saw Hitch although he tried really hard to look excited. “Hitch!” he said. “Isn’t it school-time?” 

“I can leave school basically whenever I want,” Hitch boasted breezily, coming beside Clancy to read the newspaper he’d put aside. “Are you using the puzzle pages?” 

Clancy grinned and waved a hand towards it. “Not at all. Hey, have you seen Ruby?” 

Hitch picked the puzzle pages out of the sheaf, and tucked them into his pocket safely. His own book of wordsearches and crosswords had gone missing a while ago. “That’s what I came to find you about,” He told Clancy, now walking himself back out of the door. “She’s gone cuckoo.” 

“Are you just allowed to walk around here like this?” Clancy said, following him into the corridor. “I didn’t get the impression it was very…” he fought with his selection of words for a moment. 

“It’s easy to navigate. And Ruby lets me do what I want to.” 

When they reached the office again, Hitch leading the way with confidence, Ruby was on the telephone, so they slunk in quietly to sit on the small sofa in one corner. She didn’t even appear to notice them, leaning on her desk with her back to them, pinning the phone between her shoulder and ear to flick rapidly through a set of papers. 

Hitch slowly drew his feet up onto the seat below him, holding one of his ankles tight to keep his body as tucked up and small as possible. 

Him and Clancy watched Ruby fret about the room in silence. 

“Is…” Clancy inclined his head towards Hitch to murmur quietly out of the side of his mouth. “Is she normally like this?” 

Hitch didn’t look at him, but leaned his head in closer as well. “Um, not really.” 

Ruby looked tired, and strung-out, and if she were teaching Hitch’s Anatomical Sciences lesson, would probably have been reduced to tears by the heckling boys. Instead of giving up following whatever had happened to her in the hours since Hitch last saw her, she was doubling down, whipping herself up into such a frenzy that Hitch didn’t think she could stop if she tried. 

“What do we do?” Clancy asked, like he was a fellow-school-boy waiting outside the Headmistress’ office for a scolding. Hitch turned away from his watchful eye on Ruby to squint at Clancy in disbelief.

“How am I supposed to know?” He asked derisively. “I’m seven.” 

Clancy winced. “Okay.” 

“Where are my glasses?” Ruby muttered furiously to herself and Hitch pointed to his forehead to help her out. 

“Top of your head,” Clancy called helpfully. The sudden voice seemed to snap Ruby out of her mania and she looked over at them with surprise, reaching to lower her glasses back onto her nose. 

“What are you two doing here?” She asked. 

“Been here all along,” Hitch reminded her. “Sebastian is covering for me in Phys Ed.” 

Ruby blinked blankly and Hitch realised she really wasn’t following what he was saying. Normally she would have shooed him back to school, with a promise to collect him later during his free time, but now she only nodded vaguely. 

“Cool, cool,” She muttered. “Clance?” 

“I work here,” Clancy stated, but it sounded like more of a question. “Is there anything we can… do?” 

Ruby shook her head, with her silver necklace chain caught between her teeth. Her eyes were drifting back to her sheets already. Hitch watched her bite the links of the chain thoughtfully, and realised what was missing: the locket pendant that was usually strung on the chain. If Ruby wasn’t biting the chain, she was compulsively clicking the locking mechanism open and shut. 

Hitch had been meaning to investigate the contents of the locket the next time Ruby fell asleep on her desk, but it seemed like there would no longer be an opportunity. 

“Is it lost?” Hitch piped up, and Ruby blinked herself out of her fixation again. 

“Hmm?” 

“Your pendant,” Hitch clarified. “Did’ya lose it?” 

The chain dropped from Ruby’s mouth and she looked back at the sheets, but now it was a purposeful distraction.

“Mm, no.” 

“I’ll help you find it,” Hitch offered, getting up from the couch quickly, eager to escape the room. “I’ll ask about it, see if it’s in the halls somewhere.” 

Clancy sat up, looking warily between Hitch and Ruby, who was shaking her head forcefully. 

“No, nah Hitch, it’s not lost.” 

“It’s not on your chain,” Hitch reminded her. “I’m real good at finding stuff, I found LB’s lucky badge once, and Charles’ tiddliwinks set and–” 

“I threw it away,” Ruby batted at a pile of papers impatiently and Hitch abruptly stopped talking. She wasn’t angry enough to have spilled the stack properly, caring too much about her current task to sabotage herself like that, and she began shuffling them together again. She took a deep breath, still not looking at him but Hitch didn’t feel afraid. 

He’d done some proper bad things to Ruby before, and she’d never yelled at him once. 

“Why?” 

Ruby stood up, rolling her shoulders, and turned her back. Clancy had stood up fully now, one arm held out to Hitch like he was trying to hold him back. Hitch pushed it down, knowing Ruby and him couldn’t push each other’s buttons enough in any real way. Ruby wasn’t like his parents, or his teachers, or Matron. 

“It wasn’t sentimental anymore,” Ruby was retrieving her desk chair from where she pushed it aside earlier, to have a better access to the whole surface of her desk. She sat in it heavily, and half-heartedly turned a piece of paper over. 

“Why?” Hitch asked again, and Ruby put the piece of paper down again. 

“Art–” Ruby didn’t sound mad, she sounded like she was trying to scrape her patience together, but Hitch was stuck on the pendant. 

“Don’t worry about that,” Clancy said soothingly, “Something’s happened in Spectrum, Hitch, and we need to figure out how far it goes.” Clancy’s voice was pitched low and conspiratorial, trying to make it sound like a game, and Hitch was falling for it, despite Ruby’s weird behaviour and lunch waiting for him at school. 

Ruby looked at Clancy, and smiled like she wanted to join in on the joke. “There’s a double agent,” she said softly, like she didn’t want to hear herself. “Someone, ten years ago, knew exactly where Clancy would be during his mission and had the plan to kill him. We have one clue, what Clancy told the person who rescued him after the wreck.” 

“Ruby Adelaide,” Clancy finished for her, and Hitch was looking at Ruby for the pendant so he saw her wince. “We think that– I think that I had figured out who set the explosion, I was trying to tell them who it was.”

“It’s okay Ruby,” he chirped. “I don’t think you set the trap.”

"No," Ruby murmured softly, looking at Clancy like... like Hitch didn't know what. "You were trying to warn me."