Liberare Veritam 

Author: Sefkhet

Email: sefkhet@gmail.com

Rating: PG-13

Archive: Britslash and Sundive OK, anywhere else, just tell me where you're putting it.

Spoilers: Post-ep to "A Game of Soldiers", also minor ones for "Secrets of the Dead" and the short story "The Last National Service-Man".

Disclaimer: So not mine.

Notes: I began this in January 2004, almost immediately after the episode was aired, when I had no way of knowing whether or not Wieldy's absence was a one off. I've taken the creative liberty of ignoring the fact that he probably hasn't been on holiday in Wales for two years. I owe Elfin an enormous debt of gratitude for her enthusiasm, her beta, and the pokes, without which I would probably never have finished it. I owe everyone else an apology for the pretentiousness of the title (translated, "Saving The Truth") but I needed to call it something.

Liberare Veritam 

The woods, normally deserted this time of night, with only the hooting of the owls and the occasional sound of a car passing far in the distance to break the silence, had been overrun by Wetherton CID.

An unmarked Fiat was stationary at the edge of the trees, the doors left open where both driver and passengers had abandoned them in their haste, flanked by two empty squad cars. A crime scene van and another couple of squad cars were parked more carefully a further two hundred yards outside the wood, one uniformed officer sealing off the area, his partner gently but firmly turning away curious tourists and concerned locals. The moon glinted off a pair of handcuffs, ensnaring the wrists of a thickset man who had finally given up his protests and was being escorted to one of the squad cars by a blond woman. A veritable battalion of white-suited scene of crime officers and yellow-jacketed police officers were prowling the area, the silence broken by the snapping of twigs underfoot and the occasional static from a radio.A senior detective was sitting in the back of the ambulance that had arrived only minutes behind the police, too exhausted to protest at the oxygen mask that the paramedics had insisted on covering his nose and mouth with, covered in an overcoat that was not his own. The activity outside was such that only one man noticed when the DI, in his shirtsleeves and loosened tie and looking just as wrung-out as his colleague, climbed up into the ambulance too. 

He laced his fingers through the older man's and buried his nose in the thinning hair, a fleeting touch of lips to the bowed head.

"God, Andy," he whispered. "You stupid bloody sod." 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

EARLIER


They had optimistically predicted that the journey from Aberystwyth to Enscombe would take three hours, four tops, and had left Wales after a late breakfast. It had become clear that their estimates were way out when a blanket of fog had descended across Dollgelau and forced them to take most of the A494 at a crawl, and the M60 put the icing on the cake when it turned into a gridlock just past Manchester. Wieldy had put his radio to good, if not technically professional, use when he turned it on for the first time in ten days to find out from despatch that there was a multi-vehicle RTA three miles ahead, but, as he pointed out somewhat helplessly, knowing what the delay was wasn't going to get them past it any faster. By the time they were coming off the back end of a 200 mile journey that had taken all of six-and-a-half hours, Edwin was prophesizing a two hour time-delay between them opening the door and Ed starting to, in his words, prowl the kitchen like a caged tiger.

In point of fact, it had been sixty-nine minutes by the clock on the microwave before his partner sheepishly mumbled something about just making sure that they hadn't killed each other and not being long, and Edwin had kicked him out with a kiss, rolling his eyes.

Wieldy's intention, he would tell him later, had been to check that the building was still standing, weed out the worst of the rainforest he anticipated in his in-tray, and make sure that Andy and Peter still had the right number of limbs attached. He was so used to his senior officers disappearing on wild goose chases that he hadn't thought much of it when, turning into the car park, he just barely missed clipping Andy's wing mirror as the Fat Man sped past in the opposite direction. He had noted with relief that nothing structural seemed to have collapsed and headed upstairs to the bullpen. The omnipresent board, covered in Peter's distinctive chicken-scratches and Andy's neater but no less recognizable square print, told him that whatever had gone down while he had been at the other end of the country was still officially an active case; but with the CID room almost empty of officers and the fax machine giving only the occasional beep and whirr, Wieldy had been on the force long enough to know when the loose ends of a case were being tied up versus when one was truly active, and he turned his attention to what he could have sworn had been his desk when he left but now resembled nothing so much as a waste paper recycling plant. 

He had still been wondering ten minutes later where on earth to start and beginning to think that he would have been best served by persuading Edwin into an early night – not, he reflected, that it would have taken much persuading – and living in denial until the morning, when a shadow had fallen into his line of vision.

"You're on the ball."

Wieldy leaned back from the desk and looked up at his boss. "Had to make sure the place was still standing, didn't I?"

"Don't trust us?"

"I've known you both too long."

"And did you leave Wales in one piece? Or had the mortality rate tripled by the time you left?"

"It was nice." He had noticed the postcard, the one that he had been practically browbeaten into sending, tacked up on the bulletin board. "Think it did us good. Think he appreciated me not disappearing at all hours of the night to go and look at dead bodies." 

The answering nod had been heartfelt. "I can imagine."

They both knew better than to delve any further into Peter's past marital problems, problems that, Wieldy could only gather from the offhand remarks and secondhand information about the DI's less-than- successful trip to Florida over a year earlier, still seemed to be lurking in the background in spite of a divorce and a redefining of `personal space' to `a few thousand miles of water apart'.

"So." He raised one eyebrow minutely at the incident board. "I've been catching up on about nine years' worth of sleep. What've you been up to?"

Wieldy's expression remained impassive for most of the five minutes it took Peter to brief him on the D'Amato case – "Murder, insurance scam, suicide, another murder to cover up the first murder and the 
suicide," the DI told him succinctly – with a barely perceptible twitch of his face when they reached the part that wouldn't go in any file, the part about Dalziel spending most of the last three days chasing after the local DS with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The look on Peter's face told him that he was wincing internally. His reticence might fool a lot of people, but Peter had known him for the better part of a decade, and the facial twitch and silence meant only that the interrogation would wait until they were in the Bull with a pint, where they were guaranteed relative privacy, rather than in the nick, where the walls could talk and 
nosy coppers came on special order by the truckload.

"Where's he sodded off to now, then?"

The change in subject was smooth but unmistakeable and said as clearly as if he had emblazoned it in neon on the wall that they would be coming back to it.

"Coffee and a smoke, he told me."

"Well, he was on his way out of the car park like a bat out of hell when I got in. Looked like he had got one of his ideas in his head."

A blink. "There's an all-ports warning out on both of them. Interpol have been alerted. There's been a road-check set up on every road between here and London, and here and Glasgow. The authorities in Massachusetts are searching all the incoming planes from anywhere in the UK on the off-chance that they got out before we caught on. It's only a matter of time before someone finds them. What ideas could he have got?"

They both turned to look at the photos tacked up.

"Gus D'Amato didn't like to leave loose ends, looks like."

"Special Forces." Peter's voice was contemplative. "Homicide detective. He knew what he was doing, but it's not like we didn't know that already."

"Knew how to cover his tracks, too." 

The simultaneous click was almost audible. Blue eyes met grey. 

"Hell," Wieldy said eloquently.

"And Andy's gone after him."

It took the two of them all of three minutes to herd almost everyone in the building into the same room, and Peter had got halfway through the fastest and most impromptu briefing of his career before the ACC appeared in the door. He explained what was going on. He was all too willing to admit, ma'am, that sending fourteen of Wetherton's finest after Superintendent Dalziel, who could, he supposed, have been so fed-up with the palaver of the last few days that he had simply taken off and gone home, could well be construed as overreacting, but given the lack of answer from either mobile or landline and the tendency of the Superintendent to go off on one like a, well, like a blue-arsed fly, if ma'am would pardon the language, when he got an idea in his head, he, Peter, wasn't much inclined to risk it.

They took the silence as consent, and Wieldy gave her a semi-grateful nod as he, Peter, and Spike thundered down the stairs and ran for the car.

He recalled dimly, some case from probably before Peter had even come to Wetherton, that the village was about a forty minute drive away, twenty-five if you had a siren going and were so inclined, but Dalziel probably hadn't been so inclined. A siren and a car doing close to sixty miles an hour on a stretch of road with a 30mph limit weren't the way to not draw attention to yourself and the fact that he had gone off on his own suggested that he hadn't wanted to go in with guns blazing. 
 
Wieldy had no such qualms and flicked the lights and sirens on. A bit of luck and a lot of speeding and they would be there barely fifteen minutes behind Andy.

His ETAs proving more accurate when they were on home turf than when he was stuck on a motorway, they were entering the village twenty-three minutes later, tailed by three squad cars, when Peter's mobile 
finally made a triumphant chirp, signalling connection to the network on what had to have been the forty-sixth time of trying. Andy's mobile must have only rung once or twice before he answered it, judging by the length of time it took Peter to snap, "What in the bloody hell did you think you were doing?" rapidly followed up by, "Is everything all right? Are you okay?" concluded with, "We'll be there in a couple of minutes," and, as he terminated the call, followed up by a statement aimed at nobody in particular, "I'm going to kill him."

"There!"

Spike's finger came out of nowhere to point at the silver Audi parked at the side of the church graveyard, and Wieldy took a sharp left, ignoring such niceties as indicating, and heading down what might charitably be called the dirt path that separated the church grounds from the woodland. They had only gone about five hundred yards when the sweep of headlights picked out two figures slumped against a tree, and he came to an emergency stop and killed the engine, only a couple of strides behind Peter and Spike, both out before the car even stopped moving, as they abandoned the Fiat and sprinted for their boss.

Sirens were chasing them.

Wieldy's subconscious was doing a good job of picking up on what was going on around them. It noticed that the first squad car had only been seconds behind them and had braked hard. It picked out the sound of sirens drawing progressively closer and recognized that the slight variation in tone meant that at least someone had had the presence of mind to call an ambulance. Things that his conscious mind would normally have been cataloguing and analyzing, but his conscious mind was focused on Andy's closed eyes and shallow breathing, on the limp fingers being held in a clutch that looked like it would break them, and on the sheer blind panic on Peter's face.

"Andy."

"The paramedics'll be here in a minute, Pete. And he were all right a couple of minutes ago, on the phone, weren't he?"

It was pointless, empty reassurance and he knew it. They were both remembering the last time, when there had only been a couple of minutes between all right and semi-conscious, in the throes of a heart attack that had damn near killed him.

"I can… hear every word… you two… are… saying."

"Andy?"

"Yeah."

"Are you all right, sir?"

The eyes had finally flickered open. "Wieldy. Starting to wonder if Edwin was goin' to let us have you back."

"Not for want of trying, sir." He didn't try to hide the smile in his voice, but repeated the original question. "You all right?"

"Bloody knackered, if you must know."

Knackered, shaken up, and sporting a collection of scrapes and grazes that he privately thought had only been rivalled by Rosie the first time he had seen her after she got her first bike. Probably going to be one big bruise in the morning and lucky that it hadn't been a whole lot worse. He didn't miss the fact that Andy hadn't let go of Peter's hand yet, or that Peter's free hand was rubbing the back of Andy's neck. Certainly didn't miss the murderous glint in Peter's eye as he looked over Wieldy's shoulder, watching Spike read Gus D'Amato an impressive list of charges, along with his rights.

"Superintendent Dalziel?"

He had noticed the last of the sirens shutting off, just has he had noticed that the emergency lights had all been left on, the one suctioned to the roof of his own car included, casting an oddly eerie blue glow across the trees. He had been completely oblivious to the paramedic coming up behind him, but did a good job of covering his surprise, straightening up and wincing briefly.

"DS Wield." He thought about looking for his warrant card but decided that under the circumstances she would be unlikely to challenge him. "He's all right, I think. Exhausted. We'll feel better if he gets checked out."

"He will."

"Thanks."

She bent over. "Superintendent?"

"Andy." Peter reluctantly prised his fingers from Andy's grip, brushed a hand through his hair, and stood up. "His name's Andy."

~

It was almost eleven when Peter, blowing on his too-hot-to-drink coffee and busy working himself into a funk, saw his sergeant's head appear around the door of the hospital cafeteria. Over six hours had passed since they had arrested Charlie Stubbs. More than four since Andy had disappeared and almost three since they had found him. The two of them had sat in A&E at Wetherton General for the better part of two and a half hours until, fifteen minutes earlier, Andy had been called by the triage nurse, who had promptly told Peter, although not in so many words, to bugger off for a bit. 

Wieldy crossed to the coffee machine, dropped in some change, and punched three buttons with an ease born of practice and of long hours spent waiting exactly here for any one of the countless things that brought a detective into contact with a hospital on any given day, for a suspect or a victim or a colleague or a witness. Eyeing the overfull plastic cup of watery, tasteless coffee warily, he navigated the tables and chairs and abandoned crutches with care, not wanting to trip and accidentally dump the boiling liquid on some old gentleman's head, and sat down opposite Peter with something that sounded a little like relief.

"How's he doing, then?"

"Complaining."

"Must be feeling better."

"They're doing tests," Peter offered. "Something about concussion and not wanting to run risks with his heart."

"You'll be here for hours." He would no more think to suggest that Peter should go home and that Andy could get a cab when they finally turned him loose than he would contemplate doing the Highland Fling 
in the middle of the incident room on Monday morning. It simply didn't cross his mind. "Only there's industrial action at the WRI, and with it being kicking out time in twenty minutes…"

Peter nodded. He didn't need to be told that with Andy awake and talking, when the bar brawls and alcohol poisonings and drunk and disorderlies came in, as they inevitably would, they would take priority over him.

"Talk to me about Gus D'Amato."

"There's nothing that can't wait until the morning."

"Wieldy."

"We've charged him and we've put him in a cell, and that's where he can stay until the rest of us have had a bit kip. Won't do him any harm to spend the night working up a bit of a sweat."

"And his wife?"

"She won't be going anywhere either, sir," he told him. "We've sealed the scene off and left a couple of uniforms there. The SOCOs are back at first light."

Judging by the expression on Peter's face, he appeared to be trying to decide whether he should be grateful that Wield had done what had needed doing in spite of his two senior officers disappearing without thinking to leave even the simplest instructions with anyone or disgruntled that there now seemed to be no work for him to do for at least the next seven hours or so. He had just spent a week veering wildly between working all the hours God sent to try to distract himself with the case and trying to spend as much time with Andy as possible in an attempt to prove that their friendship was exactly the same as it had always been, and, with a temporary inability to do either, he found himself coming down on the side of disgruntled.

"What's going on?"

He shook himself out of his reverie. He had been miles away while Wieldy had been talking, and tried to bluff his way out of it. "Nothing that can't wait until the morning," he echoed with a faint smile. "Besides, you know most of it. There's only the fine print and the paperwork left. You get off home before that man of yours starts thinking we're a bad influence."

"I was talking about you and the boss, sir."

The smile disappeared. "I think, considering the subject, you might as well drop the `sir', Wieldy."

"This going to happen every time I leave you on your own?"

"You hardly left us on our own," Peter protested.

"Spike's a good copper, Pete," he said, his normally impassive face crinkling briefly. "But she hasn't learned yet that you and him need a keeper."

He thought about mumbling something half-hearted to the effect of them not being that bad, but dismissed the idea as pointless, given that most of Wetherton knew that they were exactly that bad, and satisfied himself with, "I was deluding myself about some things and I made an arse of myself. Give us a few days and we'll be back to normal."

"He moved you back in with him," Wieldy pointed out.

"The landlord didn't want to renew my lease. Neighbours sick of me traipsing in and out at all hours of the day and night."

"He didn't want you to move out in the first place. Made all of our lives miserable that week you took off to move into the flat."

"We were working late the night you and Edwin left." Peter went on talking as though Wield hadn't opened his mouth, determined to get the rest of his story out now that he had started telling it. "Things were quiet and we were going to go and have a pint in the Bull before we went home, but there was an accident. A man shot his father, walked into the nick with blood splattered over his shirt, handed the gun over to the duty sergeant, and gave himself up. I had been down in the interview room with him while he signed his confession. I went into Andy's office to tell him that we could go home, and I kissed him."

Wieldy appeared stoically unsurprised by this development. "And then what happened?"

"It was awkward, like before Ellie chucked me out. We spent the better part of a week like we were total strangers living in the same house and putting on a good enough show at work to fool most of CID, and then, he'd known DS Etterick in Scarborough, so when she turned up in Thorpburgh when they found Mary Taylor's body, I suppose it was as good an opportunity as any for him to put out signals that I'd misread the signs." 

"I should get off home before that man of mine starts thinking you're a bad influence," said Wieldy, mouth turning up as he repeated Peter's line back at him.

"I'll see you in the morning, Wieldy."

"But if you want to know what I think," he went on, "He panicked about being offered something like that from someone like you. He's wanted you for the better part of the last ten years and never considered the possibility that you might want him, too."

"What?"

"PC Hollander brought Andy's car over from Thorpburgh and left it outside for you," Wield added. "G'night, sir."

There was a clink as the car keys were set down on the grimy top of the canteen folding table, but Peter barely noticed, staring after Wieldy in stunned silence and finally, belatedly, mumbling to himself, "Night, Ed."


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


He picked his way through the litany of incoming patients in the crowded waiting room, some of them bleeding and battered, some of them threatening to get violent, but mostly slumped sideways and smelling like a brewery. For almost all of them, this would be a simple pit stop on their way to spend the night in a cell before being charged with drunk and disorderly conduct, breach of the peace, or any one of a dozen other charges, and he nodded briefly at several of the uniformed officers as he passed. One exhausted but sober young man in a leather jacket sat at the end of one of the rows of hard, uncomfortable plastic chairs, a sleeping child wrapped up in a blanket beside him. How many times had that been Peter and Ellie? The first six months after Rosie was born, every cold and every virus was like the end of the world, and at two in the morning there was nowhere else to go, so they had ended up here. 

Peter gave them another long glance, making a mental note to find time to phone Florida tomorrow and talk to his daughter, before disappearing through a door to where he had left Andy nearly an hour and a half earlier. He heard him before he saw him.

"The heart's fine, and if you would let me have a glass of water and a couple of aspirin, there'd be nowt wrong with the head either. Look, it's not that I don't appreciate this, but…" The curtains rattled and Andy trailed off, eyes turning to Peter. "Sunshine."

"Andy."

"Thought you'd gone."

He shook his head. "Told Wieldy to push off home, though."

"Mr…"

"Peter." 

The nurse Andy'd been arguing with when he came in wasn't the same one who had been there when he left, and normally he would have made a semi-genuine offer to step outside, or at the very least introduced himself more formally. It wasn't like they hadn't been here more times than he could count, from both sides, and it wasn't like the words hadn't fallen from his lips without him even thinking about it. "DI Pascoe. He's my boss." Enough times before that that it had been DS Pascoe, and, although he couldn't personally remember on account of having been unconscious at the time, he knew there was at least one occasion that Andy would have said, "He's my constable." This time, he let it go, not knowing how to introduce himself. Whatever they might or might not be, boss and subordinate didn't come close to covering the complexities of their relationship, and hadn't for years.

Damn Wieldy and his bloody theories.

"He needs to have that gash sutured," she said. "There's quite a few patients, and the doctor will be a while, but if you'd like to wait outside, I'm sure somebody will come and tell you how long it's likely to be."

"He's all right, love."

She looked at them doubtfully, but, finally, left without any further protest. People – at any rate, people who weren't Peter or Ellie or Wieldy – tended to not argue with Andy; it was one of the reasons Gus D'Amato had rattled the two of them as much as he did.

Some of the grumpiness faded from his features. "Saving my life again, Peter?"

"Not me. Not this time."

"Oh, aye?"

"Wieldy was the one who saw you pelting out of the car park like a bat out of hell. Figured out D'Amato wouldn't have wanted to leave any loose ends."

"I didn't want to waste any time."

"So you went and nearly got yourself killed."

Andy winced. "Did you talk to him?"

"It'll keep until the morning. Not sure the ACC's going to want me doing the interview on this one, anyway." Peter's jaw moved as he visibly worked up his nerve, hand fluttering nervously before coming to rest on the back of Andy's neck. "I get worked up when people try to murder you. Send me in there, it'd be like you letting me loose on someone who'd gone after Rosie."

"I'm not your family, Peter."

"Yes, you are." Once upon a time, he had kept his mouth shut on that particular subject, but now there was just a quiet denial. "Sometimes I think you're the only family I've got left."

"That what this is about?"

"I thought I'd made it clear what this was about. Budge over."

"There's a chair, Sunbeam."

"I've sat on those things before."

"And once more's going to kill you, is it?"

"It might." Peter eyed Andy mutinously, and, grumbling, the big man cleared a couple of inches of space on the hospital trolley, allowing Peter to perch on the edge. He took a deep breath. Having Andy incapable of going anywhere, at least for the time being, meant that this was the best and quite probably the only opportunity he would get. "Anyone else would have realized what this was about ten days ago, but I suppose I should have remembered that you're not everyone else. It's being hypothesised by certain interested parties that your problem is you're scared of your fantasies turning into reality."

Andy's eyebrows practically disappeared into his hair. "Interested parties?"

"Wieldy," Peter admitted.

And Wieldy, these days, meant Wieldy and Edwin.

"They do, do he?"

"That's what he said."

"While he's off playing psychologist, did he happen to have a guess at what my fantasies were?"

And there would have been any number of better ways for Andy to have phrased that, but he had asked and appearances would indicate that they had gone past the point of no return, and, even if they both 
hadn't already known the answer, Peter wouldn't have had any choice but to tell the truth.

"Me."


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Dawn was starting to break when two men, walking close enough for their shoulders to bump together with each step, stepped out into the almost-deserted car park. 

Almost 4am.

The first man, tie abandoned altogether now and dangling loosely from his fingertips, gave a visible shiver in the early morning air, while the other, pristine white dressings covering part of his forehead and both sets of knuckles, rubbed his eyes. Stillness hung over a sky just beginning to turn pink and yellow at the edges, and the silence was absolute, neither of them in a hurry to break it as they walked slowly to the car. It was nothing new to them. Yorkshire slept while, together, they kept it safe. The way things always were and the way they were meant to be.

Long, angular fingers wrapped around the gearstick as they moved to put the car into gear, but paused when they were covered by bigger ones.

Nobody watching the two men could have said who initiated the kiss. Perhaps neither did. They moved at the same time and met in the middle. A dance that spoke of a decade of rehearsal, years in the making. It wasn't sex, although that would come, nor was it desire, which had been there almost forever, and it wasn't erotic, not yet. It was friendship and affection and love, and it was something more than all of those things, greater than the sum of its parts. 

They broke apart but they stayed close, foreheads touching, expelled air intermingling.

A hand, a bare tremor of hesitation running through it, touched a cheek, avoiding the bruise that was already beginning to form. 

"Let's go home, Andy."