Unrepentant - Chapter 3 - Lines and Labels
New case appears.
Marylebone Road is a blurred bundle of light trails, white and red lines of car lights passing by, lingering in Sherlock’s vision like on a time-lapse picture, splashed with red and green and orange fuzzy puddles of traffic lights and cabs. His eyes are burning by the time he rounds the corner to Baker Street and he realises he hasn’t blinked the entire way home. He doesn’t remember how many steps he took to get there; he might as well be floating. Mrs. Hudson is calling something after him but he doesn’t hear her. Everything is buzzing.
Step in. Let gravity take care of the coat. Tumble onto the sofa. Enter the door. The knocker is still hanging to the side. How long is it going to stay that way? Down the spiralling flights of stairs.
When he bursts through the door to the padded cell, the lights are already on. He’s been expected.
“You... never did feel... did you? How did you.... never feel?” He’s still breathing too fast, even though just stepping over the threshold of the cell has calmed him. Outside the cell, the corridors are still quaking and crackling with the tension of staving off a panic attack. Outside the Palace, everything is still buzzing, lighting up, too much.
Jim Moriarty huffs the hair off his face and gives him a sly grin. “Don’t you remember? It sort of comes with this place.”
Sherlock looks around. Yes, that’s why he chose this place for Moriarty, why he bound and chained him in here. This cell is an exact replica of the cell in that mental asylum near Warsaw. He let himself be locked away there for what should have been a few days while he investigated a local drug trafficking ring run by someone from the staff. He underestimated just how heavily they would sedate him. Some days he didn’t feel his own fingertips. Most of the time he didn’t feel a thing. One of Mycroft’s agents extricated him after two weeks, before they actually made a maniac out of him.
“You can always join me,” Jim teases. “No-one ever bothers you here.”
Sherlock’s very core hurts. The padded walls make it better, but only by postponing the pain.
“How could I have missed it? He told me I was his best friend and I never noticed.”
“Oh, dead easy,” drawls an amused voice behind him. The Woman enters the cell, sneaking behind his back and playfully twirling one of his curls with her fingers by way of a greeting. “Probably the same way he missed he was in love with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock scoffs at her. She steps over the length of Jim’s chain, briefly pats his head like one might pat a watch dog, and leans against the stained wall. She’s in full Dominatrix attire, wearing a see-through black dress and impeccable make-up. Not a single hair comes loose from her coiffure when she nods.
“Oh yes. Hopelessly. So deeply he didn’t even notice.”
“Stick to the riding crop. You trade in physical sensations. What do you know about... that?”
“About love?” She smiles wistfully. “Enough to envy it when I see it.”
“But now he hates you,” Jim sing-songs gleefully. “I should send him a formal invitation to the club.”
Sherlock pats his pockets. Something is prodding at him uncomfortably. When he finds it, it’s the scrunched up ball of a table mat torn in two. He stares at it for some time.
“I could have lost him.”
“You still don’t get it, Sherlock, do you? You already did!” Jim howls. “Because guess what? I won.”
“Yeah, you certainly look like a winner,” Irene rolls her eyes at him. “But he hates you now, that’s a fact,” she addresses Sherlock.
“But... why?”
“Everyone hates you, Sherlock.” Moriarty explains to him in a voice one might use to a five-year old. “Johnny boy simply fell out of love. Two years do that to a bloke.”
“He will forgive you, eventually,” Irene remarks.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sherlock replies mechanically.
“So you don’t want to be his ‘best friend’ any more?” Jim puts virtual air quotes around the words by waggling his eyebrows. “God, you’re so changeable. Even worse than me.”
Sherlock feels the fabric on the walls with his palm. This is the only place not bearing any trace of John. Everything else, the very architecture of his Mind Palace, has by now been reconstructed and redecorated after the influence of his friend. The corridors now imitate those in the building where he saved Sherlock’s life. John is ingrained here.
“No.” He shakes his head, surprised with this new discovery. “He’s everything to me. I want to be everything to him.”
Irene clicks her tongue. “Darling, if you want to be hurt so badly, why don’t you let me do it? I’d take good care of you.”
“Best friend would be more than you deserve,” Jim hisses from his spot on the floor.
“Good luck with that, darling. Honestly.” Irene walks over to Sherlock, touches his cheek with her fingertip. “You’ll need everything under the sun to make John Watson update that label he’s got for you now.”
“Best friend.” Those words feel hollow on Sherlock’s tongue.
“Who he hates,” Jim adds promptly. “What a neat little box. He thinks like that, you know. An ordinary man with his ordinary boxes. Friends, best friends, girlfriends... fiancées... and of course, he’s not gay. Poor John Watson. So determined to colour inside the lines.”
Sherlock looks at the Woman, for once a genuine question in his eyes. She smiles and leans up to whisper in his ear.
“You have to give him new lines.”
*
“That utter... cock, that - that - I can’t even-”
“Yeah, it’s a cold day in Hell when my big brother can’t come up with an appropriate swearword, I get it. No need to shout.”
Harry’s tired voice comes more faintly through the speaker. She probably moved the phone a bit away from her head when John worked himself up all over again.
“Sorry, but you’d be yelling too. He practically told me that it’s my fault he didn’t know I’d be grieving for him because I never bloody told him that he was important to me.”
“Good point.”
“What?” John puts the phone in his other hand and turns in the opposite direction on his circling path through the living room. “Nope. Not a good point. He didn’t have a point.”
"Oh I think he did. In a way. He’s Sherlock. Everything you told me about him-”
“Harry, you met him once and you hated him.”
“Well, he’s an arsehole, right, but look, John, you aren’t the most... outwardly affectionate of men. I mean. That dinner last month, for me to meet Mary. I know you love her, you goddamn proposed to her, but neither I nor anyone else in that restaurant would guess so by just observing the pair of you. And I’m not talking about silly PDA’s, God, no. Definitely not a Watson thing, that. You’d look wooden even if you were holding her hand on the street. It’s just how you are. Bottled up.”
“But he knew me! He used to read my bloody mind! Like my plans for the evening from observing which pair of shoes I picked up. All his little tricks.”
“Reading your mind is not the same as reading your heart, is it?”
“For God’s sake, Harry, I didn’t - we weren’t-”
“John, I think you’re grown up enough to know that you don’t need to want to shag someone to care about them. You lived with him; of course you cared about him.”
“Fine. That’s my point! How it is ‘of course I cared’ to you and ‘you never told me I meant anything to you’ to him?”
“Are you asking me? Bloody talk to him!”
“Oh great.” John stares at the phone screen showing the length of the now ended call. “So much for family.”
“I’m going to be your family,” Mary remarks, entering the living room with a stack of books in her arms. She looks expectantly at John where he stands still glowering at the phone, then she sighs and goes over to the bookcase, using her elbow to open the glass front.
“You know what it means?” John says to the air as if he hasn’t even noticed that his audience has changed. “He thought I’d be fine. It was the Work that mattered, the Game, his best coup, outsmarting Moriarty, taking down his empire. He didn’t care for collateral damage. And I was just a tool.”
He sits down heavily onto the sofa. “He gave each of us a role. Mycroft? The traitor. To think I yelled at him for giving Moriarty the information on Sherlock that was actually all made up! Me - guess what? The witness. I can just see the label he’s got for me in that bloody Palace of his. ‘Cares enough to grieve with credibility but his heart won’t be in it, no harm done.’ He used me. What kind of-” machine “- man uses his friend like that?”
“He always used people around him, if your blog is anything to go by,” Mary replies. “Perhaps he didn’t see where the limits were.”
John huffs. “Practically said I’m a heartless bastard because I didn’t cry my eyes out for my father. Where does he get off on judging people like that?”
“Wrong baseline,” Mary mutters.
“What?” John looks up. “Oh, d’you want help with that?”
“It’s fine, thanks.” There’s a slight smirk in her voice. “I said, he’s got a terrible baseline for extrapolation. With Mycroft for a brother? And a landlady who’s giving him a special deal for helping to execute her husband? Plus, you told me you’ve met his parents. With them still alive, he probably doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to lose someone.”
She sounds so cheerful when she says the last bit. It reminds John that Mary, though an orphan herself, never lets it dampen her mood. Probably cried out all her tears long ago. And yet she can relate to someone like Sherlock...
“You’re too sweet, Mary. You can’t excuse everyone.”
“I’m not excusing him.” She turns around and frowns. “He hurt you. I’m not excusing that.”
“But do you think it’s my fault, too?”
Mary sits down next to him and lays her head on his shoulder. “I think... that the one whose fault it is swallowed a bullet on that hospital roof. Moriarty - he was just a tad too clever for Sherlock, and he used you to make him jump, and now he’s dead and you can’t break his nose. That’s not fair, is it?”
John closes his eyes. Is he really in fact mad at Moriarty and only taking it out on Sherlock? “That’s rubbish psychology, Mary.”
“What are you gonna do when you stop being mad at Sherlock?” Mary asks quietly.
“Huh. I don’t know.” John thinks he shouldn’t ever stop being mad. He lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Probably make him the best man at our wedding.”
Mary leans away and looks at him, eyes wide with mock horror. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t know whose punishment would be worse.”
John narrows his eyes as if he is seriously considering it. “Oh, he would be lovely. Imagine all the insults.”
Mary laughs, the joke in her voice so light that it almost sounds like no joke at all. “Nope. No. John Watson, you’re not going to spoil my wedding day.”
*
Sherlock lies on the sofa and his hands twitch. The lamp on the desk is on, chasing all sorts of minute shadows around the flat. There’s a smell of cold tea somewhere in the room. That’s strange: Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t bring him cold tea. When was it, the whiff of flour and a little sour hint of a spliff? - oh yes, more than half of a wing of maintenance ago.
Sherlock has now almost finished the maintenance of the North and West wings of his Palace. The South wing seems to be in relative order and can go without his touch for another few weeks. The East wing he never enters.
Last rooms of the West wing: events of the last couple of weeks. Haphazardly stacked facts, observations, experiences, realisations. Only so much his short-term memory can handle. The rooms smell of burning wood and singed leather. Note: buy a new pair of gloves.
Amazing how fire exposes our priorities.
It still bothers him that he doesn’t know who abducted John, put him in the middle of a bonfire, and then timed all those texts to Mary so they could save him. Would John have died if they hadn’t made it in time? What would be the point?
Flames. John’s dazed eyes. Sherlock shakes his head: wrong. Try again. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Someone had to be there, watching the bonfire. Listening to John’s muffled shouting. To that little girl screaming. Watching among the people standing there freezing their arses off and taking pictures of their children gawping at the bonfire...
Sherlock’s eyes snap open.
The scene of the bonfire rotates before his eyes like a still miniature of a landscape inside a snowglobe.
There. Got you.
*
“Hello, brother dear. How fast can you get me the CCTV footage from every camera in the vicinity of St James The Less church from the night of the fourth of November?”
“Are you certain there would be anything of relevance?”
One of the few blessed things about Mycroft -in Sherlock’s opinion - is that he never asks for an explanation. It is also one of the most vexing traits about him but right now Sherlock is not complaining.
“Quite certain. There was a woman at the bonfire taking footage of the whole incident.”
“A lot of mothers take photographs of their children on such occasions.”
“I’ve spent two years avoiding security all around Europe, Mycroft. I can tell when there’s a camera pointed at me.”
The whole scene keeps replaying at the back of Sherlock’s mind. He and Mary dropping the motorbike, rushing through the confused and horrified crowd. Yes, one or two people quick-witted enough to raise their phones when something interesting started to happen. But only one person, a tall woman bundled up in a large knitted scarf, standing quietly a short distance away from the chaos with a little camera in her hands. No child in front of her. She was already there when Sherlock rounded the motorbike into the park, and when he later looked up from John’s face to ask someone to call an ambulance, she wasn’t there any more.
*
Sherlock’s excitement is somewhat dampened when Mycroft delivers the records in person.
“Don’t fret, brother mine. I am entitled to be interested in a case where my own brother was targeted.”
“John was targeted,” Sherlock mechanically corrects and scowls at his brother taking a seat in John’s chair. Damn, he should move it.
Mycroft lifts one eyebrow. “You shouldn’t have spent the previous eighteen months of your cohabitation wandering around London practically joined at the hip if you didn’t want anyone to get ideas. If John was put into the fire, why does your coat smell of smoke?”
Sherlock is saved from the answer by Mrs. Hudson entering the living room with a tea tray. And a plate of muffins. Chocolate muffins. If Sherlock had any doubts about the brilliance of his landlady, he doesn’t have them now. The slight wink she gives him as she leaves confirms that the extent of her own genius hasn’t escaped her. Sherlock puts the plate in a strategically chosen position between Mycroft and his laptop and retreats behind his desk to look over the footage. For the next couple of minutes, the room is filled only with the smouldering silence of self-restraint.
“Here she is.” Sherlock turns the laptop around after a while, tilting the screen so that Mycroft can see. It shows a woman hailing a cab on a busy street near the park. She cuts a fine figure, tall on her high heeled shoes, and her face, framed with waves of dark hair, is pretty even in the poor resolution of the image.
Half an hour - and a minute of Mycroft pretending not to notice Sherlock hacking into the register database - later, Sherlock announces:
“Miss Janine Hawkins. Ring any bells?”
“I’m afraid it does,” Mycroft replies gravely. “She works as a secretary for one Charles Augustus Magnussen.”
Oh yes, Sherlock has come across that name in the past. More than once. His lips curl in disgust.
“Why would he want to put John in danger? Why is he testing me? I doubt that my personal disregard for his methods, even though I’ve made it no secret, poses a serious problem for him. I’ve never had any reason to investigate him, so why would he have an interest in me?”
“It’s his MO. The one you despise so eloquently. Finding people’s pressure points. You care about John? As long as he has means to harm John, he practically owns you.”
Sherlock’s skin prickles at the implication. “But why me? Our paths have never crossed, and our circles do not overlap.”
Mycroft clears his throat. Sherlock stares at him for some time, a little sick feeling of déjà vu growing in him.
“Oh no. You? For me? That much?”
“To quote your surprisingly clever landlady,” Mycroft sighs as he eyes the untouched plate of muffins, “family is all we have in the end.”
The silence stretches some more but this time, Sherlock feels it biting at his neck.
“What are we going to do about him?” he asks at last.
“The use of we noted and appreciated.” Mycroft taps his fingers on the armrest. “At the moment - nothing. He’s still useful to me.”
Sherlock smirks. “Especially now that you are aware he’s planning to have a go at you?”
“Exactly.”
Sherlock rises and begins to pace the length of the room. “You have to keep John out of this. Don’t make him a pawn in your power plays.”
“Far it be from me to play with your toys, Sherlock. You’re more than capable of breaking them yourself.”
Sherlock stops abruptly in front of the mantelpiece and holds his brother’s gaze in the reflection of the mirror. “I mean it. He’s had enough of it.”
“I see.”
No, you don’t, thinks Sherlock.
“I wonder, though.” Mycroft continues. “Kidnappings, hostages, bodily harm... those aren’t Magnussen’s usual methods. He prefers subtler ways. Blackmail. It’s important to find out what exactly he plans to use as leverage. Has John any dirty secrets...?”
Sherlock ignores the amused drawl in the last words and counters with a question.
“What if he’s not the last piece of the chain?”
“Hm.” Mycroft cocks his head to the side, considering the possibility. “Someone for whom John Watson would do anything? Not many people in this world, I should think.”
Sherlock closes his eyes against his own reflection. “And one less than you would think.”
“Hm.” That contemplating sound again, designed to grate at Sherlock’s nerves. He knows that Mycroft doesn’t need to hum, his brain is capable of finding, exploring and cataloguing every angle to a given problem in under a second.
“That leaves his sister, his soon-to-be wife, that nurse that allegedly saved his life - Bill Murray - and presumably his former commanding officer as well.”
Sherlock does his best to keep the surprise from his tone. “He never mentioned his previous commander.”
“I think you’ve already realised that John doesn’t mention many things.”
Sherlock thinks that he would prefer Mycroft watching him getting beaten to a pulp again rather than this gentle, equally reproaching and pitying tone.
“I suggest - in order to deny Magnussen the ammunition he wants - that you keep your distance from John, for the present at least.”
Sherlock finds the amendment a tad excessive. As if John would let him close ever again.
“That won’t be a problem.” It sounds more bitter than he intended.
Mycroft gets up and comes to stand next to him. When he speaks again, it’s in a low voice, but no less pointed and resolute. “Where is it, Sherlock?”
“What do you mean?” Sherlock asks even though he knows. Mycroft looks at him almost sadly.
“You’re clearly not all right. Don’t make me search the flat.” It’s more a plea than a threat and that’s so disconcerting that Sherlock snipes out of sheer instinct.
“What’s this? Brotherly concern? Finally found something you’re not excellent at?”
Mycroft sighs again. “The repercussions were to be expected, brother.”
Sherlock thinks about the recent nights at Baker Street, so quiet that he can almost hear the calling of his old days. He wonders if Mycroft can tell that Sherlock never turns off the lights at night. He probably can - Sherlock realises he forgot to wipe the dust from the lamp switch. He thinks about Moriarty, chained in the padded cell at the bottom of his Mind Palace, he thinks about giving him back his Westwood suit, slicking the unruly hair back off his forehead, thinks about freeing him, giving him a roof instead of a cell.
You’re me.
The roof would be a complete circle, an endless length of an edge. Moriarty would be waiting.
I told you how this ends. Off you pop.
“I could use an assistant,” Sherlock blurts out. “A live-in one,” he adds a moment later.
Mycroft’s eyebrows rise to unheard-of heights.
Give him new lines, Sherlock hears the Woman’s voice in his head and he tumbles down the new path even though he has no idea where it will lead him.
“My minder from that mission in Poland. He was marginally less obnoxious than the others. He’ll do.”
Mycroft stares at him for some time. Then he nods.
“Mr. Fairchild, of course. One of the rare kind who didn’t ask for a pay rise after working with you.He’ll be here in two days. Can you last that long?”
“Yes.”
It’s not a promise. Merely a statement. There is a case now.
Marylebone Road is a blurred bundle of light trails, white and red lines of car lights passing by, lingering in Sherlock’s vision like on a time-lapse picture, splashed with red and green and orange fuzzy puddles of traffic lights and cabs. His eyes are burning by the time he rounds the corner to Baker Street and he realises he hasn’t blinked the entire way home. He doesn’t remember how many steps he took to get there; he might as well be floating. Mrs. Hudson is calling something after him but he doesn’t hear her. Everything is buzzing.
Step in. Let gravity take care of the coat. Tumble onto the sofa. Enter the door. The knocker is still hanging to the side. How long is it going to stay that way? Down the spiralling flights of stairs.
When he bursts through the door to the padded cell, the lights are already on. He’s been expected.
“You... never did feel... did you? How did you.... never feel?” He’s still breathing too fast, even though just stepping over the threshold of the cell has calmed him. Outside the cell, the corridors are still quaking and crackling with the tension of staving off a panic attack. Outside the Palace, everything is still buzzing, lighting up, too much.
Jim Moriarty huffs the hair off his face and gives him a sly grin. “Don’t you remember? It sort of comes with this place.”
Sherlock looks around. Yes, that’s why he chose this place for Moriarty, why he bound and chained him in here. This cell is an exact replica of the cell in that mental asylum near Warsaw. He let himself be locked away there for what should have been a few days while he investigated a local drug trafficking ring run by someone from the staff. He underestimated just how heavily they would sedate him. Some days he didn’t feel his own fingertips. Most of the time he didn’t feel a thing. One of Mycroft’s agents extricated him after two weeks, before they actually made a maniac out of him.
“You can always join me,” Jim teases. “No-one ever bothers you here.”
Sherlock’s very core hurts. The padded walls make it better, but only by postponing the pain.
“How could I have missed it? He told me I was his best friend and I never noticed.”
“Oh, dead easy,” drawls an amused voice behind him. The Woman enters the cell, sneaking behind his back and playfully twirling one of his curls with her fingers by way of a greeting. “Probably the same way he missed he was in love with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock scoffs at her. She steps over the length of Jim’s chain, briefly pats his head like one might pat a watch dog, and leans against the stained wall. She’s in full Dominatrix attire, wearing a see-through black dress and impeccable make-up. Not a single hair comes loose from her coiffure when she nods.
“Oh yes. Hopelessly. So deeply he didn’t even notice.”
“Stick to the riding crop. You trade in physical sensations. What do you know about... that?”
“About love?” She smiles wistfully. “Enough to envy it when I see it.”
“But now he hates you,” Jim sing-songs gleefully. “I should send him a formal invitation to the club.”
Sherlock pats his pockets. Something is prodding at him uncomfortably. When he finds it, it’s the scrunched up ball of a table mat torn in two. He stares at it for some time.
“I could have lost him.”
“You still don’t get it, Sherlock, do you? You already did!” Jim howls. “Because guess what? I won.”
“Yeah, you certainly look like a winner,” Irene rolls her eyes at him. “But he hates you now, that’s a fact,” she addresses Sherlock.
“But... why?”
“Everyone hates you, Sherlock.” Moriarty explains to him in a voice one might use to a five-year old. “Johnny boy simply fell out of love. Two years do that to a bloke.”
“He will forgive you, eventually,” Irene remarks.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sherlock replies mechanically.
“So you don’t want to be his ‘best friend’ any more?” Jim puts virtual air quotes around the words by waggling his eyebrows. “God, you’re so changeable. Even worse than me.”
Sherlock feels the fabric on the walls with his palm. This is the only place not bearing any trace of John. Everything else, the very architecture of his Mind Palace, has by now been reconstructed and redecorated after the influence of his friend. The corridors now imitate those in the building where he saved Sherlock’s life. John is ingrained here.
“No.” He shakes his head, surprised with this new discovery. “He’s everything to me. I want to be everything to him.”
Irene clicks her tongue. “Darling, if you want to be hurt so badly, why don’t you let me do it? I’d take good care of you.”
“Best friend would be more than you deserve,” Jim hisses from his spot on the floor.
“Good luck with that, darling. Honestly.” Irene walks over to Sherlock, touches his cheek with her fingertip. “You’ll need everything under the sun to make John Watson update that label he’s got for you now.”
“Best friend.” Those words feel hollow on Sherlock’s tongue.
“Who he hates,” Jim adds promptly. “What a neat little box. He thinks like that, you know. An ordinary man with his ordinary boxes. Friends, best friends, girlfriends... fiancées... and of course, he’s not gay. Poor John Watson. So determined to colour inside the lines.”
Sherlock looks at the Woman, for once a genuine question in his eyes. She smiles and leans up to whisper in his ear.
“You have to give him new lines.”
*
“That utter... cock, that - that - I can’t even-”
“Yeah, it’s a cold day in Hell when my big brother can’t come up with an appropriate swearword, I get it. No need to shout.”
Harry’s tired voice comes more faintly through the speaker. She probably moved the phone a bit away from her head when John worked himself up all over again.
“Sorry, but you’d be yelling too. He practically told me that it’s my fault he didn’t know I’d be grieving for him because I never bloody told him that he was important to me.”
“Good point.”
“What?” John puts the phone in his other hand and turns in the opposite direction on his circling path through the living room. “Nope. Not a good point. He didn’t have a point.”
"Oh I think he did. In a way. He’s Sherlock. Everything you told me about him-”
“Harry, you met him once and you hated him.”
“Well, he’s an arsehole, right, but look, John, you aren’t the most... outwardly affectionate of men. I mean. That dinner last month, for me to meet Mary. I know you love her, you goddamn proposed to her, but neither I nor anyone else in that restaurant would guess so by just observing the pair of you. And I’m not talking about silly PDA’s, God, no. Definitely not a Watson thing, that. You’d look wooden even if you were holding her hand on the street. It’s just how you are. Bottled up.”
“But he knew me! He used to read my bloody mind! Like my plans for the evening from observing which pair of shoes I picked up. All his little tricks.”
“Reading your mind is not the same as reading your heart, is it?”
“For God’s sake, Harry, I didn’t - we weren’t-”
“John, I think you’re grown up enough to know that you don’t need to want to shag someone to care about them. You lived with him; of course you cared about him.”
“Fine. That’s my point! How it is ‘of course I cared’ to you and ‘you never told me I meant anything to you’ to him?”
“Are you asking me? Bloody talk to him!”
“Oh great.” John stares at the phone screen showing the length of the now ended call. “So much for family.”
“I’m going to be your family,” Mary remarks, entering the living room with a stack of books in her arms. She looks expectantly at John where he stands still glowering at the phone, then she sighs and goes over to the bookcase, using her elbow to open the glass front.
“You know what it means?” John says to the air as if he hasn’t even noticed that his audience has changed. “He thought I’d be fine. It was the Work that mattered, the Game, his best coup, outsmarting Moriarty, taking down his empire. He didn’t care for collateral damage. And I was just a tool.”
He sits down heavily onto the sofa. “He gave each of us a role. Mycroft? The traitor. To think I yelled at him for giving Moriarty the information on Sherlock that was actually all made up! Me - guess what? The witness. I can just see the label he’s got for me in that bloody Palace of his. ‘Cares enough to grieve with credibility but his heart won’t be in it, no harm done.’ He used me. What kind of-” machine “- man uses his friend like that?”
“He always used people around him, if your blog is anything to go by,” Mary replies. “Perhaps he didn’t see where the limits were.”
John huffs. “Practically said I’m a heartless bastard because I didn’t cry my eyes out for my father. Where does he get off on judging people like that?”
“Wrong baseline,” Mary mutters.
“What?” John looks up. “Oh, d’you want help with that?”
“It’s fine, thanks.” There’s a slight smirk in her voice. “I said, he’s got a terrible baseline for extrapolation. With Mycroft for a brother? And a landlady who’s giving him a special deal for helping to execute her husband? Plus, you told me you’ve met his parents. With them still alive, he probably doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to lose someone.”
She sounds so cheerful when she says the last bit. It reminds John that Mary, though an orphan herself, never lets it dampen her mood. Probably cried out all her tears long ago. And yet she can relate to someone like Sherlock...
“You’re too sweet, Mary. You can’t excuse everyone.”
“I’m not excusing him.” She turns around and frowns. “He hurt you. I’m not excusing that.”
“But do you think it’s my fault, too?”
Mary sits down next to him and lays her head on his shoulder. “I think... that the one whose fault it is swallowed a bullet on that hospital roof. Moriarty - he was just a tad too clever for Sherlock, and he used you to make him jump, and now he’s dead and you can’t break his nose. That’s not fair, is it?”
John closes his eyes. Is he really in fact mad at Moriarty and only taking it out on Sherlock? “That’s rubbish psychology, Mary.”
“What are you gonna do when you stop being mad at Sherlock?” Mary asks quietly.
“Huh. I don’t know.” John thinks he shouldn’t ever stop being mad. He lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Probably make him the best man at our wedding.”
Mary leans away and looks at him, eyes wide with mock horror. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t know whose punishment would be worse.”
John narrows his eyes as if he is seriously considering it. “Oh, he would be lovely. Imagine all the insults.”
Mary laughs, the joke in her voice so light that it almost sounds like no joke at all. “Nope. No. John Watson, you’re not going to spoil my wedding day.”
*
Sherlock lies on the sofa and his hands twitch. The lamp on the desk is on, chasing all sorts of minute shadows around the flat. There’s a smell of cold tea somewhere in the room. That’s strange: Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t bring him cold tea. When was it, the whiff of flour and a little sour hint of a spliff? - oh yes, more than half of a wing of maintenance ago.
Sherlock has now almost finished the maintenance of the North and West wings of his Palace. The South wing seems to be in relative order and can go without his touch for another few weeks. The East wing he never enters.
Last rooms of the West wing: events of the last couple of weeks. Haphazardly stacked facts, observations, experiences, realisations. Only so much his short-term memory can handle. The rooms smell of burning wood and singed leather. Note: buy a new pair of gloves.
Amazing how fire exposes our priorities.
It still bothers him that he doesn’t know who abducted John, put him in the middle of a bonfire, and then timed all those texts to Mary so they could save him. Would John have died if they hadn’t made it in time? What would be the point?
Flames. John’s dazed eyes. Sherlock shakes his head: wrong. Try again. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Someone had to be there, watching the bonfire. Listening to John’s muffled shouting. To that little girl screaming. Watching among the people standing there freezing their arses off and taking pictures of their children gawping at the bonfire...
Sherlock’s eyes snap open.
The scene of the bonfire rotates before his eyes like a still miniature of a landscape inside a snowglobe.
There. Got you.
*
“Hello, brother dear. How fast can you get me the CCTV footage from every camera in the vicinity of St James The Less church from the night of the fourth of November?”
“Are you certain there would be anything of relevance?”
One of the few blessed things about Mycroft -in Sherlock’s opinion - is that he never asks for an explanation. It is also one of the most vexing traits about him but right now Sherlock is not complaining.
“Quite certain. There was a woman at the bonfire taking footage of the whole incident.”
“A lot of mothers take photographs of their children on such occasions.”
“I’ve spent two years avoiding security all around Europe, Mycroft. I can tell when there’s a camera pointed at me.”
The whole scene keeps replaying at the back of Sherlock’s mind. He and Mary dropping the motorbike, rushing through the confused and horrified crowd. Yes, one or two people quick-witted enough to raise their phones when something interesting started to happen. But only one person, a tall woman bundled up in a large knitted scarf, standing quietly a short distance away from the chaos with a little camera in her hands. No child in front of her. She was already there when Sherlock rounded the motorbike into the park, and when he later looked up from John’s face to ask someone to call an ambulance, she wasn’t there any more.
*
Sherlock’s excitement is somewhat dampened when Mycroft delivers the records in person.
“Don’t fret, brother mine. I am entitled to be interested in a case where my own brother was targeted.”
“John was targeted,” Sherlock mechanically corrects and scowls at his brother taking a seat in John’s chair. Damn, he should move it.
Mycroft lifts one eyebrow. “You shouldn’t have spent the previous eighteen months of your cohabitation wandering around London practically joined at the hip if you didn’t want anyone to get ideas. If John was put into the fire, why does your coat smell of smoke?”
Sherlock is saved from the answer by Mrs. Hudson entering the living room with a tea tray. And a plate of muffins. Chocolate muffins. If Sherlock had any doubts about the brilliance of his landlady, he doesn’t have them now. The slight wink she gives him as she leaves confirms that the extent of her own genius hasn’t escaped her. Sherlock puts the plate in a strategically chosen position between Mycroft and his laptop and retreats behind his desk to look over the footage. For the next couple of minutes, the room is filled only with the smouldering silence of self-restraint.
“Here she is.” Sherlock turns the laptop around after a while, tilting the screen so that Mycroft can see. It shows a woman hailing a cab on a busy street near the park. She cuts a fine figure, tall on her high heeled shoes, and her face, framed with waves of dark hair, is pretty even in the poor resolution of the image.
Half an hour - and a minute of Mycroft pretending not to notice Sherlock hacking into the register database - later, Sherlock announces:
“Miss Janine Hawkins. Ring any bells?”
“I’m afraid it does,” Mycroft replies gravely. “She works as a secretary for one Charles Augustus Magnussen.”
Oh yes, Sherlock has come across that name in the past. More than once. His lips curl in disgust.
“Why would he want to put John in danger? Why is he testing me? I doubt that my personal disregard for his methods, even though I’ve made it no secret, poses a serious problem for him. I’ve never had any reason to investigate him, so why would he have an interest in me?”
“It’s his MO. The one you despise so eloquently. Finding people’s pressure points. You care about John? As long as he has means to harm John, he practically owns you.”
Sherlock’s skin prickles at the implication. “But why me? Our paths have never crossed, and our circles do not overlap.”
Mycroft clears his throat. Sherlock stares at him for some time, a little sick feeling of déjà vu growing in him.
“Oh no. You? For me? That much?”
“To quote your surprisingly clever landlady,” Mycroft sighs as he eyes the untouched plate of muffins, “family is all we have in the end.”
The silence stretches some more but this time, Sherlock feels it biting at his neck.
“What are we going to do about him?” he asks at last.
“The use of we noted and appreciated.” Mycroft taps his fingers on the armrest. “At the moment - nothing. He’s still useful to me.”
Sherlock smirks. “Especially now that you are aware he’s planning to have a go at you?”
“Exactly.”
Sherlock rises and begins to pace the length of the room. “You have to keep John out of this. Don’t make him a pawn in your power plays.”
“Far it be from me to play with your toys, Sherlock. You’re more than capable of breaking them yourself.”
Sherlock stops abruptly in front of the mantelpiece and holds his brother’s gaze in the reflection of the mirror. “I mean it. He’s had enough of it.”
“I see.”
No, you don’t, thinks Sherlock.
“I wonder, though.” Mycroft continues. “Kidnappings, hostages, bodily harm... those aren’t Magnussen’s usual methods. He prefers subtler ways. Blackmail. It’s important to find out what exactly he plans to use as leverage. Has John any dirty secrets...?”
Sherlock ignores the amused drawl in the last words and counters with a question.
“What if he’s not the last piece of the chain?”
“Hm.” Mycroft cocks his head to the side, considering the possibility. “Someone for whom John Watson would do anything? Not many people in this world, I should think.”
Sherlock closes his eyes against his own reflection. “And one less than you would think.”
“Hm.” That contemplating sound again, designed to grate at Sherlock’s nerves. He knows that Mycroft doesn’t need to hum, his brain is capable of finding, exploring and cataloguing every angle to a given problem in under a second.
“That leaves his sister, his soon-to-be wife, that nurse that allegedly saved his life - Bill Murray - and presumably his former commanding officer as well.”
Sherlock does his best to keep the surprise from his tone. “He never mentioned his previous commander.”
“I think you’ve already realised that John doesn’t mention many things.”
Sherlock thinks that he would prefer Mycroft watching him getting beaten to a pulp again rather than this gentle, equally reproaching and pitying tone.
“I suggest - in order to deny Magnussen the ammunition he wants - that you keep your distance from John, for the present at least.”
Sherlock finds the amendment a tad excessive. As if John would let him close ever again.
“That won’t be a problem.” It sounds more bitter than he intended.
Mycroft gets up and comes to stand next to him. When he speaks again, it’s in a low voice, but no less pointed and resolute. “Where is it, Sherlock?”
“What do you mean?” Sherlock asks even though he knows. Mycroft looks at him almost sadly.
“You’re clearly not all right. Don’t make me search the flat.” It’s more a plea than a threat and that’s so disconcerting that Sherlock snipes out of sheer instinct.
“What’s this? Brotherly concern? Finally found something you’re not excellent at?”
Mycroft sighs again. “The repercussions were to be expected, brother.”
Sherlock thinks about the recent nights at Baker Street, so quiet that he can almost hear the calling of his old days. He wonders if Mycroft can tell that Sherlock never turns off the lights at night. He probably can - Sherlock realises he forgot to wipe the dust from the lamp switch. He thinks about Moriarty, chained in the padded cell at the bottom of his Mind Palace, he thinks about giving him back his Westwood suit, slicking the unruly hair back off his forehead, thinks about freeing him, giving him a roof instead of a cell.
You’re me.
The roof would be a complete circle, an endless length of an edge. Moriarty would be waiting.
I told you how this ends. Off you pop.
“I could use an assistant,” Sherlock blurts out. “A live-in one,” he adds a moment later.
Mycroft’s eyebrows rise to unheard-of heights.
Give him new lines, Sherlock hears the Woman’s voice in his head and he tumbles down the new path even though he has no idea where it will lead him.
“My minder from that mission in Poland. He was marginally less obnoxious than the others. He’ll do.”
Mycroft stares at him for some time. Then he nods.
“Mr. Fairchild, of course. One of the rare kind who didn’t ask for a pay rise after working with you.He’ll be here in two days. Can you last that long?”
“Yes.”
It’s not a promise. Merely a statement. There is a case now.