Fic: Nothing to Remember (2/10) [Sherlock/Dollhouse crossover]
Title: Nothing to Remember
Author: arwen_kenobi
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: For Sherlock: through series 2. For Dollhouse: None
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~2 800 for this part. Entire fic will be ~ 35 000
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain but this incarnation belongs to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC. Dollhouse belongs to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy
Summary: Eighteen months after faking his own death Sherlock Holmes returns to London only to discover that John has sought refuge across the Atlantic and away from himself.
Author’s Notes: I realise that it says crossover with Dollhouse up above here but no knowledge of Dollhouse is required. I’m really using the concept and some of the characters and that’s all explained within. So if that’s the only thing holding you back from reading this do press on; I’d rather you stop reading because you don’t like it and not because you’re not familiar with Dollhouse. If you really would prefer a bit of a primer the Wikipedia article should serve you well. Enjoy! :)
Part One
The Diogenes Club does have its appeal. Sherlock is not a member himself, all the tradition and all the pomp and circumstance involved in a club of unclubbable men is too tedious for his taste, but there was something to be said for sitting in a room where uttering a single word merited eviction from the building. It was a rare occasion that he took advantage of his brother’s status as a senior member but he has spent a mildly pleasant afternoon in utter silence on one or two occasions. He has not set foot in the Diogenes Club since John had psychosomatically limped into his life and he plans to never set foot in it again after this meeting with Mycroft has concluded. He may not know what has happened, Mycroft may not have known what has happened until very recently, but it already is not good. Say what he will about Mycroft’s methods and Mycroft’s security but it was very, very seldom fooled by people that were not directly related to Mycroft Holmes.
Sherlock has been sitting in the Stranger’s Room for three and a half minutes when Mycroft walks in. He sits down without preamble and hands a file to Sherlock. “Have you ever heard of the Rossum Corporation?”
A few days ago Sherlock truthfully could have said he had never heard of it. His brain buzzes at him and pulls up a mental image of John’s email account and the emails about hospital equipment. The sender had been that company name. He exchanges a look with Mycroft and Mycroft merely urges Sherlock to open the file. When Sherlock does nothing Mycroft eventually starts speaking.
“You mustn’t blame yourself for ignoring the emails. To the best of my knowledge John was still a practicing doctor.”
A doctor, yes, but not one specializing in ordering new MRI machines for a job he did not have, says Sherlock, with some vitriol, to Mycroft. His brother ignores him and continues. “That is its public face,” he allows, which sends Sherlock back to a time when Mycroft had been his tutor and it does nothing to inspire any confidence. “For some time there have been some whispers about another service it provides. A highly questionable one if not an explicitly illegal one.”
Sherlock opens the file at this point and waves a hand to silence Mycroft. He skips the reports about Rossum’s MRI business and other drug and pharmaceutical dealings and cuts right into a few lawsuits and complaints of irregular or unwarranted brain scans. Following that are incidents involving disappearances of key stakeholders, protestors, and strange medical experiments.
John does not own stock in anything let alone a medical company. If he had recently decided to do so, Sherlock had left him his trust in the will after all, Mycroft would have included it in the file. John also does not frequently prescribe or submit himself to brain scans.
“Keep reading,” Mycroft orders softly.
“What happened to your security?” he asks snidely as he flips through some more missing persons reports.
“They are not security agents. One is a car salesman and the other one is a bartender, not that they know or remember that of course.”
Just as Sherlock is about to put the folder down he finds two missing persons reports who have been flagged in Anthea’s precise handwriting. One is the bartender and one is the car salesman. Both are from America and both have been missing persons for nearly five years.
“This did not come up in the background checks?” Aside from being missing persons neither of these people have the correct qualifications, psychological or otherwise, to have even been recruited by Mycroft’s people. The following pages present the same two people with radically different reports, everything from their names to their brain scans are completely different.
“I’m afraid not,” Mycroft admits. “Their references were excellent and their qualifications suburb. They have served me admirably, or at least they did until I sent them to watch John. Then they were reporting to someone else. To Rossum in fact.”
“What does Rossum have to do with John?”
“What makes a car salesman and a bartender pass an intensive and invasive process to become one of my ‘minions’ as you so call them.”
“Nothing,” Sherlock answers. “There is nothing drawing them to this type of work and no potential way they would be able to make it past the first interview unless - “
“Unless there is an extremely talented forgery and infiltration involved, in which case there certainly is and it is swiftly being dealt with, and these people believe what they are and in fact are what they are.”
Mycroft stands, takes the file back and passes Sherlock his mobile. There’s a video cued up of one of the men. He is sitting in a chair looking rather comfortable considering the state of his head and the location he is in. He plays it and a voice off camera asks the man his name. “Kilo” he says serenely. “Did I fall asleep?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“A room.”
“Do you know who Sheldon Jones is?”
“No.”
“That’s your name.”
“My name is Kilo.”
It goes on in a similar vein for a few more minutes before Mycroft takes the phone away. Questions are asked and the man in chair might as well be a child for all the help he is. It is not faked and it is not a disguise, or if it is it is the best that Sherlock has ever seen. The vacancy in the eyes however is something that cannot be fully simulated. The man is either brain dead or brain washed, and that’s underneath whatever had been done previously to get him past Mycroft. The car salesman’s name is Sheldon Jones, the name he worked under as Mycroft’s men on John Watson watch was Kevin Houston, and all this man is answering to is a code name. Kilo.
“What did the other answer to?” Sherlock scoffs. “Lima? Or perhaps Juliet?”
“Victor, actually.” Mycroft corrects. “They both have since vanished. I do not expect to see either of them again in any persona.”
“Persona?”
Mycroft sighs. “It has been brought to our attention that Rossum has a secret business endeavour. One involving programmable human beings; people whose original personalities are removed and their bodies are given different, customizable ones for short periods of time for whatever the buyer of this service has planned.”
Sherlock does not believe it. He cannot believe it. Not because it is impossible, but because they are discussing a mind wiping process backed by a corporation that John received several emails from. John has been missing for a year now.
“What would Rossum want with John?” He hates asking his brother for anything, especially an opinion on something as important as this but it seems that he has missed several things with respect to his friend. Mycroft, as much as Sherlock is loath to admit, has the unbiased eye in this situation.
“I don’t think that is the question that you should be asking, brother.”
“John would not work for Rossum. Not in this sort of endeavour if it exists.” Sherlock will not believe this exists. He cannot do it.
“I do not think John is - “
“Stop!” Sherlock’s yell is so loud that the man outside the door to the Stranger’s Room sticks his head in and glowers at them. Mycroft gives him a nod of apology and the head disappears. “They’ve done something -”
“Yes they have. They helped him to clear your name.”
=====================================================================================
It is very easy for Sherlock to forget that Jim Moriarty had had more enemies than himself. Sherlock was easily the most fascinating and most important to him but there were other people he actively worked to anger. The Rossum Corporation appeared to be another one of those. Another file of Mycroft had outlined in great detail Rossum’s war with Moriarty. With every level of Rossum, too. He threatened the MRI business, the drugs business, and the Dollhouse business.
Dollhouse. That was what these places were being called in whispers and in dark alleys. These places that erased minds and hired out bodies. A part of Sherlock is genuinely curious about the technology and the idea but the rest of him sharply reminds him that John has been blackmailed into working for them or is a prisoner or worse.
He doesn’t think about what ‘worse’ could mean. Mycroft cannot track how or when Rossum first contacted John but they had helped with wiping away all that remained of Richard Brook when they became aware of what John was trying to do. Sherlock had thought Mycroft had helped John more with that aspect but Mycroft had denied it. “He wanted nothing to do with me. In his eyes I was just as responsible for your death as Moriarty was.”
I asked him to do it, John. It was all part of the plan.
How was John to know that though? There was no reason for John to see a plan. That had been the point and it had worked perfectly. Sherlock doesn’t think he has ever been this annoyed, this disappointed, that a plan worked precisely as well as he’d designed.
Mycroft traced the two operatives, Sherlock refused to call them Dolls, to an establishment in Los Angeles. Of course they would take John across the Atlantic and away from anyone who recognized him. John would write emails to Lestrade to show that he was alive and well, or as well as one could be when one was pretending to be in Eastbourne, when really he was doing who knew what to pay for clearing Sherlock’s name.
“I don’t think that is all,” Mycroft had warned him before he’d boarded the plane. “Clearing your name he could have done alone. It would have taken longer but he could have done it and he knew it. That should be troubling to you since it certainly is to me. There’s something else he’s protecting here.”
Whatever it was he could stop protecting it. Whatever arrangement that the Dollhouse had made with John was over. He would steal John away from there if he had to and they would deal with whatever fallout happened together. This was all of course assuming John would speak to him after all this.
The seatbelt light flashes on and the pilot announces that they are flying through turbulence. They are six hours from LAX and this was the fastest flight that Mycroft could secure. No flight can possibly be fast enough but Sherlock is ready for whatever he faces. He will get John out and get them home. There will be no negotiation; he will be taking what is his and that is that. It does not quiet the sick feeling in his stomach that things are not going to be that easy.
The flight lands on schedule. Sherlock likes to think that is because of his entire brain power being fixated on urging it to be so but he knows he has Mycroft to thank for that. Aside from Mycroft’s usual efficiency in such matters he gathers that some less than subtle threatening has gone on as well as a touch of equivocation about what precisely the reason for this private jet, and the need for haste, is.
Unfortunately finding himself eight hours behind what he conceives as normal does his head in. Normally jumping in between time zones does little to him, much to John’s annoyance on the few international cases they’d taken together. On little jaunts John was perfectly fine with but anything beyond three hours did John’s head in as bad as Sherlock’s was now. John’s remedy to fix that was to sleep until time made sense again. Sherlock was loathe to waste time on something like sleep but he has to admit, as he stumbles into the exorbitant hotel room not far from the Dollhouse’s location dictated by Mycroft’s intelligence and cross checked at least five times by Anthea and the others, he needs it. He needs it almost more than he had when he’d stepped off the train in Eastbourne three days ago.
Had it really only been three days since everything had gone to shit? That is the last thought he has before sleep claims him.
When he rises two in the afternoon has just gone and he exits the building with all haste. He reminds himself that he will not regain the time that he has lost to sleep by running faster. What he will do is be sloppy and sloppiness is something he cannot afford.
He sets himself up at a Starbucks where he can see cars vanishing into a tunnel. American money is frustrating to contend with but he manages to procure coffee and a sandwich of some sort as he sits down and spies on the road from behind the newspaper. Not one of his more inventive tactics but it serves its purpose. The road is not his best choice, the building above it however seems to be. The building which is a regional office for the Rossum Corporation. It is glaring oblivious and highly unimaginative but there is a reason that the best place to hide is often in plain sight.
He drains his coffee, leaves the newspaper on the table and leaves Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective and genius, in the cafe. It is Sherlock Holmes the confused and lost tourist who exits the cafe. Adopting another personality is almost a relief.
==============================================================================
Getting into the building proves disturbingly elementary. It is incredibly easy to infiltrate an environment as long as you project confidence and look like you know what you’re doing there and where you’re going.
Sherlock begins to wonder if it had been a good idea to refuse the gun that Mycroft had tried to get onto his person. There is most certainly one smuggled into his luggage but that is of no help to him now. He’s been in this service lift for ten minutes attempting to find the correct way to swipe his pilfered key card to gain access to the basement. Eventually he forgoes the keycard in favour of blocking the doors and manually making the lift take him to the basement. No alarms go off and no one is waiting for him down there when the doors open. There is just yet another service elevator. This one opens without him doing anything and sends him down even deeper underground.
He straightens his jacket and stands at the ready in front of the lift doors. He may not have a gun on him but he is far from unarmed. He has a mission and he will succeed in it.
If you kill yourself trying to liberate me I am not going to be impressed.
He can almost see John standing next to him, in the reflection of the lift doors. Calm and ready to fight but still taking the time to offer either useless or irrelevant advice. Of course John would not be impressed with him if he died. He has no intention of dying. He is not that cruel.
The evidence would suggest otherwise. I mean thanks for keeping me alive and all but a postcard would have been lovely. You could have managed something and I would have understood the message eventually. I’m not stupid.
He shuts the gates of his Mind Palace and hopes John will stay in there. He has enjoyed John’s company in this way over the while. It was an indulgence that he rarely allowed himself but an indulgence he needed and craved as badly as he had cases in the old days, but there is no place for him here.
The lift doors open and he steps into a lobby of sorts. There is a reception, front desk like thing there and a girl who is typing furiously behind it. “Miss DeWitt is expecting you, Mr. Holmes.”
Sherlock almost lets the lift doors close again but he throws out a hand at the last moment to keep it open. He steps off and cautiously approaches the desk. “Excuse me?”
“Right that way, sir.” The girl does not even look away from her computer. “Miss DeWitt does not value delay.”
If they wanted you dead they would have done it by now. They obviously know you’re here.
“Shut up.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Just this way then?” He takes a deep breath and walks in.
Part Three
Author: arwen_kenobi
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: For Sherlock: through series 2. For Dollhouse: None
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~2 800 for this part. Entire fic will be ~ 35 000
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain but this incarnation belongs to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC. Dollhouse belongs to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy
Summary: Eighteen months after faking his own death Sherlock Holmes returns to London only to discover that John has sought refuge across the Atlantic and away from himself.
Author’s Notes: I realise that it says crossover with Dollhouse up above here but no knowledge of Dollhouse is required. I’m really using the concept and some of the characters and that’s all explained within. So if that’s the only thing holding you back from reading this do press on; I’d rather you stop reading because you don’t like it and not because you’re not familiar with Dollhouse. If you really would prefer a bit of a primer the Wikipedia article should serve you well. Enjoy! :)
Part One
The Diogenes Club does have its appeal. Sherlock is not a member himself, all the tradition and all the pomp and circumstance involved in a club of unclubbable men is too tedious for his taste, but there was something to be said for sitting in a room where uttering a single word merited eviction from the building. It was a rare occasion that he took advantage of his brother’s status as a senior member but he has spent a mildly pleasant afternoon in utter silence on one or two occasions. He has not set foot in the Diogenes Club since John had psychosomatically limped into his life and he plans to never set foot in it again after this meeting with Mycroft has concluded. He may not know what has happened, Mycroft may not have known what has happened until very recently, but it already is not good. Say what he will about Mycroft’s methods and Mycroft’s security but it was very, very seldom fooled by people that were not directly related to Mycroft Holmes.
Sherlock has been sitting in the Stranger’s Room for three and a half minutes when Mycroft walks in. He sits down without preamble and hands a file to Sherlock. “Have you ever heard of the Rossum Corporation?”
A few days ago Sherlock truthfully could have said he had never heard of it. His brain buzzes at him and pulls up a mental image of John’s email account and the emails about hospital equipment. The sender had been that company name. He exchanges a look with Mycroft and Mycroft merely urges Sherlock to open the file. When Sherlock does nothing Mycroft eventually starts speaking.
“You mustn’t blame yourself for ignoring the emails. To the best of my knowledge John was still a practicing doctor.”
A doctor, yes, but not one specializing in ordering new MRI machines for a job he did not have, says Sherlock, with some vitriol, to Mycroft. His brother ignores him and continues. “That is its public face,” he allows, which sends Sherlock back to a time when Mycroft had been his tutor and it does nothing to inspire any confidence. “For some time there have been some whispers about another service it provides. A highly questionable one if not an explicitly illegal one.”
Sherlock opens the file at this point and waves a hand to silence Mycroft. He skips the reports about Rossum’s MRI business and other drug and pharmaceutical dealings and cuts right into a few lawsuits and complaints of irregular or unwarranted brain scans. Following that are incidents involving disappearances of key stakeholders, protestors, and strange medical experiments.
John does not own stock in anything let alone a medical company. If he had recently decided to do so, Sherlock had left him his trust in the will after all, Mycroft would have included it in the file. John also does not frequently prescribe or submit himself to brain scans.
“Keep reading,” Mycroft orders softly.
“What happened to your security?” he asks snidely as he flips through some more missing persons reports.
“They are not security agents. One is a car salesman and the other one is a bartender, not that they know or remember that of course.”
Just as Sherlock is about to put the folder down he finds two missing persons reports who have been flagged in Anthea’s precise handwriting. One is the bartender and one is the car salesman. Both are from America and both have been missing persons for nearly five years.
“This did not come up in the background checks?” Aside from being missing persons neither of these people have the correct qualifications, psychological or otherwise, to have even been recruited by Mycroft’s people. The following pages present the same two people with radically different reports, everything from their names to their brain scans are completely different.
“I’m afraid not,” Mycroft admits. “Their references were excellent and their qualifications suburb. They have served me admirably, or at least they did until I sent them to watch John. Then they were reporting to someone else. To Rossum in fact.”
“What does Rossum have to do with John?”
“What makes a car salesman and a bartender pass an intensive and invasive process to become one of my ‘minions’ as you so call them.”
“Nothing,” Sherlock answers. “There is nothing drawing them to this type of work and no potential way they would be able to make it past the first interview unless - “
“Unless there is an extremely talented forgery and infiltration involved, in which case there certainly is and it is swiftly being dealt with, and these people believe what they are and in fact are what they are.”
Mycroft stands, takes the file back and passes Sherlock his mobile. There’s a video cued up of one of the men. He is sitting in a chair looking rather comfortable considering the state of his head and the location he is in. He plays it and a voice off camera asks the man his name. “Kilo” he says serenely. “Did I fall asleep?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“A room.”
“Do you know who Sheldon Jones is?”
“No.”
“That’s your name.”
“My name is Kilo.”
It goes on in a similar vein for a few more minutes before Mycroft takes the phone away. Questions are asked and the man in chair might as well be a child for all the help he is. It is not faked and it is not a disguise, or if it is it is the best that Sherlock has ever seen. The vacancy in the eyes however is something that cannot be fully simulated. The man is either brain dead or brain washed, and that’s underneath whatever had been done previously to get him past Mycroft. The car salesman’s name is Sheldon Jones, the name he worked under as Mycroft’s men on John Watson watch was Kevin Houston, and all this man is answering to is a code name. Kilo.
“What did the other answer to?” Sherlock scoffs. “Lima? Or perhaps Juliet?”
“Victor, actually.” Mycroft corrects. “They both have since vanished. I do not expect to see either of them again in any persona.”
“Persona?”
Mycroft sighs. “It has been brought to our attention that Rossum has a secret business endeavour. One involving programmable human beings; people whose original personalities are removed and their bodies are given different, customizable ones for short periods of time for whatever the buyer of this service has planned.”
Sherlock does not believe it. He cannot believe it. Not because it is impossible, but because they are discussing a mind wiping process backed by a corporation that John received several emails from. John has been missing for a year now.
“What would Rossum want with John?” He hates asking his brother for anything, especially an opinion on something as important as this but it seems that he has missed several things with respect to his friend. Mycroft, as much as Sherlock is loath to admit, has the unbiased eye in this situation.
“I don’t think that is the question that you should be asking, brother.”
“John would not work for Rossum. Not in this sort of endeavour if it exists.” Sherlock will not believe this exists. He cannot do it.
“I do not think John is - “
“Stop!” Sherlock’s yell is so loud that the man outside the door to the Stranger’s Room sticks his head in and glowers at them. Mycroft gives him a nod of apology and the head disappears. “They’ve done something -”
“Yes they have. They helped him to clear your name.”
=====================================================================================
It is very easy for Sherlock to forget that Jim Moriarty had had more enemies than himself. Sherlock was easily the most fascinating and most important to him but there were other people he actively worked to anger. The Rossum Corporation appeared to be another one of those. Another file of Mycroft had outlined in great detail Rossum’s war with Moriarty. With every level of Rossum, too. He threatened the MRI business, the drugs business, and the Dollhouse business.
Dollhouse. That was what these places were being called in whispers and in dark alleys. These places that erased minds and hired out bodies. A part of Sherlock is genuinely curious about the technology and the idea but the rest of him sharply reminds him that John has been blackmailed into working for them or is a prisoner or worse.
He doesn’t think about what ‘worse’ could mean. Mycroft cannot track how or when Rossum first contacted John but they had helped with wiping away all that remained of Richard Brook when they became aware of what John was trying to do. Sherlock had thought Mycroft had helped John more with that aspect but Mycroft had denied it. “He wanted nothing to do with me. In his eyes I was just as responsible for your death as Moriarty was.”
I asked him to do it, John. It was all part of the plan.
How was John to know that though? There was no reason for John to see a plan. That had been the point and it had worked perfectly. Sherlock doesn’t think he has ever been this annoyed, this disappointed, that a plan worked precisely as well as he’d designed.
Mycroft traced the two operatives, Sherlock refused to call them Dolls, to an establishment in Los Angeles. Of course they would take John across the Atlantic and away from anyone who recognized him. John would write emails to Lestrade to show that he was alive and well, or as well as one could be when one was pretending to be in Eastbourne, when really he was doing who knew what to pay for clearing Sherlock’s name.
“I don’t think that is all,” Mycroft had warned him before he’d boarded the plane. “Clearing your name he could have done alone. It would have taken longer but he could have done it and he knew it. That should be troubling to you since it certainly is to me. There’s something else he’s protecting here.”
Whatever it was he could stop protecting it. Whatever arrangement that the Dollhouse had made with John was over. He would steal John away from there if he had to and they would deal with whatever fallout happened together. This was all of course assuming John would speak to him after all this.
The seatbelt light flashes on and the pilot announces that they are flying through turbulence. They are six hours from LAX and this was the fastest flight that Mycroft could secure. No flight can possibly be fast enough but Sherlock is ready for whatever he faces. He will get John out and get them home. There will be no negotiation; he will be taking what is his and that is that. It does not quiet the sick feeling in his stomach that things are not going to be that easy.
The flight lands on schedule. Sherlock likes to think that is because of his entire brain power being fixated on urging it to be so but he knows he has Mycroft to thank for that. Aside from Mycroft’s usual efficiency in such matters he gathers that some less than subtle threatening has gone on as well as a touch of equivocation about what precisely the reason for this private jet, and the need for haste, is.
Unfortunately finding himself eight hours behind what he conceives as normal does his head in. Normally jumping in between time zones does little to him, much to John’s annoyance on the few international cases they’d taken together. On little jaunts John was perfectly fine with but anything beyond three hours did John’s head in as bad as Sherlock’s was now. John’s remedy to fix that was to sleep until time made sense again. Sherlock was loathe to waste time on something like sleep but he has to admit, as he stumbles into the exorbitant hotel room not far from the Dollhouse’s location dictated by Mycroft’s intelligence and cross checked at least five times by Anthea and the others, he needs it. He needs it almost more than he had when he’d stepped off the train in Eastbourne three days ago.
Had it really only been three days since everything had gone to shit? That is the last thought he has before sleep claims him.
When he rises two in the afternoon has just gone and he exits the building with all haste. He reminds himself that he will not regain the time that he has lost to sleep by running faster. What he will do is be sloppy and sloppiness is something he cannot afford.
He sets himself up at a Starbucks where he can see cars vanishing into a tunnel. American money is frustrating to contend with but he manages to procure coffee and a sandwich of some sort as he sits down and spies on the road from behind the newspaper. Not one of his more inventive tactics but it serves its purpose. The road is not his best choice, the building above it however seems to be. The building which is a regional office for the Rossum Corporation. It is glaring oblivious and highly unimaginative but there is a reason that the best place to hide is often in plain sight.
He drains his coffee, leaves the newspaper on the table and leaves Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective and genius, in the cafe. It is Sherlock Holmes the confused and lost tourist who exits the cafe. Adopting another personality is almost a relief.
==============================================================================
Getting into the building proves disturbingly elementary. It is incredibly easy to infiltrate an environment as long as you project confidence and look like you know what you’re doing there and where you’re going.
Sherlock begins to wonder if it had been a good idea to refuse the gun that Mycroft had tried to get onto his person. There is most certainly one smuggled into his luggage but that is of no help to him now. He’s been in this service lift for ten minutes attempting to find the correct way to swipe his pilfered key card to gain access to the basement. Eventually he forgoes the keycard in favour of blocking the doors and manually making the lift take him to the basement. No alarms go off and no one is waiting for him down there when the doors open. There is just yet another service elevator. This one opens without him doing anything and sends him down even deeper underground.
He straightens his jacket and stands at the ready in front of the lift doors. He may not have a gun on him but he is far from unarmed. He has a mission and he will succeed in it.
If you kill yourself trying to liberate me I am not going to be impressed.
He can almost see John standing next to him, in the reflection of the lift doors. Calm and ready to fight but still taking the time to offer either useless or irrelevant advice. Of course John would not be impressed with him if he died. He has no intention of dying. He is not that cruel.
The evidence would suggest otherwise. I mean thanks for keeping me alive and all but a postcard would have been lovely. You could have managed something and I would have understood the message eventually. I’m not stupid.
He shuts the gates of his Mind Palace and hopes John will stay in there. He has enjoyed John’s company in this way over the while. It was an indulgence that he rarely allowed himself but an indulgence he needed and craved as badly as he had cases in the old days, but there is no place for him here.
The lift doors open and he steps into a lobby of sorts. There is a reception, front desk like thing there and a girl who is typing furiously behind it. “Miss DeWitt is expecting you, Mr. Holmes.”
Sherlock almost lets the lift doors close again but he throws out a hand at the last moment to keep it open. He steps off and cautiously approaches the desk. “Excuse me?”
“Right that way, sir.” The girl does not even look away from her computer. “Miss DeWitt does not value delay.”
If they wanted you dead they would have done it by now. They obviously know you’re here.
“Shut up.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Just this way then?” He takes a deep breath and walks in.
Part Three