Nothing Moves Me Anymore

Nothing Moves Me Anymore

‘You will never return to the place you call home.  After all these years you still call it home and not here Lucas. Harry Pearce won’t save you! No one will save you. Harry Pearce, your precious boss, after all these years has not come looking for you once. He has probably got through a few replacements for you and has not even remembered your name. So why then, Lucas do you remain loyal to him? If you meant so much to him then he would be here already fighting like hellfire to get you out of here’

I awoke shaking. I was back in England I knew that. I had only been here for a few months and if I was honest I was struggling, I was finding it hard to be the person that they think I should be. Maybe I could never be able to be the person that people think I was. I may have lost it all. My one saving grace at the moment was I was able to throw myself into work. MI5 had allowed me to come back. I could bring myself to work and do my job but it was when I was home that I couldn’t cope. In the darkness it consumed me. I couldn’t cope. The nightmares and the flashbacks were the worse nothing could pull me from them. No matter how many times I fought to gain some control in my life I could not get my head to come back until I got to the point when my chest felt as if it was getting squashed and I sat up gasping for air. I was sure if people on the Grid knew how damaged I really was they wouldn’t employ me. I wouldn’t employ me either. I couldn’t help the way I was it was a miracle I had heard someone on the Grid. Connie James, the infamous woman who had described herself as stuff or nightmares when I said she was stuff of legend. I wondered what she meant by that I often wondered about some of the strange things that she would say and wondered if I was just being paranoid that she didn’t trust me. The look in her eye sometimes would cause me to look again, the steeliness of I shouldn’t be here, that I didn’t belong would catch me but every time I looked again it was gone causing me to think I was again imagining it.

The grid the place where I didn’t or I hadn’t found my place yet which I know to some would seem ridiculous- I had worked there longer in section D than most of the team put together, yet so much had changed around the place. I was an old face in a new world and not just at work. The world had kept turning in the eight years I had seen four walls, with very little contact of the outside world. I was getting used to the new mobile phones that were now touch screen and could send a number of data around, what happened to just sending a simple text? I now knew what it was like to feel old. God how pathetic does that sound from a man in his 30’s I was no more the young man I was when I went to Russia. I was learning about all the things I had missed in eight years.

My thoughts went to my ex wife, Elizabeta who was now married and with a child, we had divorced before I had gone to Russia but in my heart I hoped that she would feel something still when I had returned. She didn’t. I don’t know what I was expecting to be honest. I never stopped loving my Russian beauty that never really knew me, never knew who I was. That was the nail in our coffin she though me to having an affair when really I was working to protect the country. But like her – as I know knew she had lied to me too, she was always loyal to the people that I had been captured by she worked for the FSB. Seeing her again in the park I knew I still loved her. I always would and when I saw her lifting up the little boy- her son, I felt my heart suddenly break into a million pieces. That was meant to be what I had. I was meant to have a family, Children and a love of a woman that I didn’t have to lie to.  Maybe I could never get that maybe that ship had sailed. I was too damaged to love myself let alone anyone else.

LNLNLN

I rubbed my face and took myself to the bathroom of the flat that I had only been in over the last few weeks. It was better than the safe house that I was in to begin with when MI5 were still trying to suss me out. I still can feel the boards of the floor where my first night back I had pulled the cover around me and rested on the floor. I had been getting better I could now sleep in a bed. I looked in the mirror as I turned the tap on running the water I splashed some on my face. My reflection was one I did not recognise. I looked down at my stomach I could see my hip bone the years of not being fed feeling so hungry that you would eat the little food you did get too quickly sometimes causing you to throw the contents back up. I have to remind myself now that the food I eat is not going to be taken from me so that I talk my time in eating it. The Tattoo’s were the mark difference on my skin, when I left to go to Russia I had none and now my body was covered, battle scars of my time in a prison  in a culture where you did it or got killed. It was part of fitting in. So I fitted mostly to keep my head down. My first Tattoo Gnothi Seauton was the most painful, you seem to get used to the needle after the first one is over. One on the inmates asked my once why I had picked this saying. I replied so I never forget who I am or who I was. I know myself even if the capturers don’t or they seem to think they do.

Closing my eyes as the memory burned into my mind, I needed to shut this off. I needed to find a way of closing my mind so that the horrors were not going to harm me again. To protect what little sanity I, Lucas North still possessed. Which to many people would not be a lot! But I hoped that one day this nightmare would leave me and allow me to move forward into my life. At the moment I could not seem to think that I could find anything to move me again. What exactly was I living for? But to be swept into the nightmares and feeling that I was drowning in the memories that would not allow me to move on. I had no one that would really miss me if I was to vanish, maybe it would have been better for me to have died in Russia at least then I would have perhaps have found some peace.

‘Stop it Lucas you are wallowing again’ I shouted at my reflection, ‘If I had died I would have allowed them to win’

I was then on the floor pressing my face to the coolness of the bath tub, tears flowing in my eyes. I was a broken man, could I not have one night when I would close my eyes and I would not be hounded. I would be allowed to sleep. Sleep it was such a novel concept to me. I could not tell you the last time I had enjoyed a night of uninterrupted sleep. I was frustrated that I had allowed myself to become so weak I was supposed to be the best Spy that ever worked under the great Harry Pearce and I could not even face the darkness of the night who could not listen to the rain tapping on the window without thinking of a time when I was water boarded. Is this what I had become a man that was only moved to feel emotion when it was in his memories who at work could not allow himself to remove a mask that I had placed so firmly so the cracks in my mind did not show.

I shook my head, this was the moment I made a promise I would not allow myself to become this man, one day I would find something that would move me again. I would be able to love again to feel from not the past but to my future. One day I was going to be Lucas North, the man who was no longer broken but a fighter. I had fought for this one there was no way I could let myself give up now.