Fandom: SPOOKS (MI-5)
Pairing: Adam Carter / Fiona Carter and Adam Carter / Ros Myers
Length: one shot, 1600 words
Author on LJ: not that I know of
Author Website: none known
Why this must be read:

This story weaves together two relationships -- Adam/Fiona and Adam/Ros -- into a portrait of Adam Carter, a man full of contradictions, completely at home with lies and spying, but so often at a loss in real life.

Like the ee cummings poem from which the story takes its name, Zai’s writing is wonderfully evocative and sensual, rendering Adam and Fiona’s Damascus affair in sparse, poetic details. Adam and Ros’ present day liason is drawn just as strongly, but with a sense of loss and confusion that gives Adam’s character more depth than the show’s writers were, perhaps, willing to explore on screen.

Afterwards, they'd had fifteen minutes to lie beside each other. They fit these things into impossible windows of time. He'd lain beside her with her pulled back against him, blindfolded, blind, with his nose pressed against the back of her hair, and he whispered to her what they were going to do about her husband, his hand finding the curve of her breast while they talked, while he talked, and she listened, and, dimly, later, he remembered thinking that he didn't know which one of them was Orpheus, and who was leading who out of hell.

snow carefully everywhere descending