Sherlock stepped out of the cab, paid the driver, and, as the car drove away, took a moment to survey and assess his surroundings. Nope, it hadn't improved. It was still like being transported to a place where all is lost - and not in a good way, not in an interesting way. He still found it barely comprehensible that John and Mary would choose to live here - after all, it was only a couple of garden gnomes and a few short miles from being the suburbs, for God's sake! How John and Mary could expect anyone they actually cared about to make the tedious trek to this godforsaken hinterland, Sherlock had no idea - and yet, here he was. Yet another sacrifice he was prepared to make for The Work.
Observing with a shudder the hanging basket outside the ground floor dwelling, Sherlock descended the short flight of steps down to John and Mary's basement flat, and rang the doorbell. It was answered surprisingly swiftly by John, who appeared to be in the process of putting on his coat. A good sign, at least.
"Ah, excellent! You're ready!" Sherlock said. "Why didn't you answer my texts?"
"Ahhh, we did," John replied, a strange sort of expression on his face. Although for John, confusion was sort of a default look, so Sherlock shrugged it off.
"Is that the milkman, John?" Mary's voice called from somewhere in the flat.
"Not in my experience, no," John replied, without turning around. "It's Sherlock."
Mary, already wearing her coat, appeared beside her fiancé; they were now all standing in the litter-tray-sized area that was John and Mary's entrance hall. Sherlock could feel John's ridiculous mid-life-crisis bicycle bumping up against his leg.
"Hiya!" Mary trilled. "Didn't you get John's texts? We're just off to look at a wedding venue."
Sherlock cast his mind back to the message that had come through in the cab on his way over.
"Oh, you were actually serious about that?" he queried. "I thought that was just..."
He waved his hand around vaguely, hoping they would understand his obvious assumption.
"Yeah, of course we were serious, Sherlock," Mary replied. "The wedding is only a few months off, and we kind of need somewhere to put people."
Sherlock frowned, concerned momentarily that he might be experiencing some sort of memory 'episode'; there was a definite familiarity about this conversation.
"I thought you'd already found somewhere?" he questioned.
"Yeah," John said, setting his jaw and keeping his eyes on Sherlock. "But apparently we don't like it anymore."
"This one has an orangery," Mary added, threading her arm through John's.
"Is that...a good thing?" Sherlock ventured. He was trying and failing to make the connection between the hollow and tedious ritual that was marriage, and the presence - or lack thereof - of an oversized, citrus-filled conservatory.
"Assuming it must be," John replied, with a tight smile. "It costs two grand more than the first place."
"Which we don't like," Mary put in, nudging her fiancé.
"Which we don't like," John dutifully affirmed.
"You know," Sherlock said in response - John's discomfort would be passably amusing if this whole scenario wasn't quite so inconvenient to his own schedule - "I'm sure you could probably strike a very good deal with Speedy's, particularly if you let Mrs Hudson do the negotiating - Mr Chatterjee still has a fair amount of making-up to do."
Sherlock suppressed his amusement as he watched John's slacken into an expression of dumb bewilderment, and Mary's twist into a sarcastic smile.
"Yeah, thanks, Sherlock," Mary said, patting him on the arm. "But I think we might need to do better than wedging our guests into wipe-clean booths and shoving a kebab in front of them."
Sherlock tilted his head to one side.
"To be honest, I was thinking about it more in terms of cutting down on my travel time," he admitted, prompting Mary to whack him with her gloves.
He couldn't help but notice that his hosts were both attempting to edge their way past him to the front door, with very little subtlety.
"So, you're- you're really not coming?" he asked.
"No," Mary replied brightly, looking over her shoulder as they stepped out into the winter sunshine. "But you can come with us, if you like?"
Sherlock immediately felt his face contort into something akin to a screwed-up piece of paper.
"Why would I do that?"
Mary shrugged, her hands stuffed deep into her coat pockets.
"How about because you love us," she said. "And because you want to give your Best Man role the effort and commitment that it deserves."
Sherlock offered her his most withering look, which seemed to do nothing to drive the irritatingly twinkly smile from Mary Morstan's face. Her one-woman crusade to put him in touch with the 'feelings' she was convinced that he had showed no sign of abating; not only was it utterly futile, but she went about it with all of the tact of a jackhammer.
"Or maybe just because the big, brooding consulting detective gets a bit lonely sometimes, and wants some company?" Mary added airily, releasing a hand so she could thread her arm through John's.
Sherlock snorted.
"Now you really are being ridiculous," he said. "John, you do realise that the woman you're planning to marry may well be a very dangerous fantasist? Probably best you learn about this sort of thing now, before it's too late."
"Hm?"
John briefly glanced up from where he had been engaged for the past two minutes in angrily trying to navigate the minicab app on his phone. Mary grinned at Sherlock, only one step shy of actually sticking out her tongue at him. He was now starting to accept that his best laid plans were rapidly disintegrating on the pavement of this tree-lined, provincial purgatory; it was, he feared, time to exercise a little honesty.
"Look, I'll admit I don't have anything very obviously brilliant lined up - perhaps a six at the most - but one or two things look fairly promising, including something that looks like an attempted extortion…"
"Hm, funny," John replied, nodding. "Because I'm fairly sure that's what's going to happen to us this morning, too."
Mary gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs.
"Actually, now that I think of it," Sherlock said, now firmly in the mindset of preparing to cut his losses. "I could probably get by with just you, Mary."
"Oh, cheers," John mumbled, craning his neck for a better view down the road. As though he could actually see over the top of parked cars.
"Ahhh, I'm touched, Sherlock," Mary smiled. "I mean, massively suspicious, obviously, but touched all the same."
"It's just that it could be useful to have a wife-slash-girlfriend figure on hand, in case the need should arise," Sherlock replied, with a vague gesture.
John gave a dramatic eye-roll, at the same time as Mary gave a brief snort of laughter.
"For a second I thought you were going to say something nice about my value solving cases," she said.
"Well, that, too, obviously..." Sherlock said, unsure whether, at this stage, it was worth even trying to salvage the situation through flattery.
"Sherlock, we would make a crap couple," Mary said. "I mean, totally unconvincing. And I'm not even sure I could keep a straight face."
"Okay, forget that, I merely-"
"You should ask Molly."
At Mary's words, spoken so casually, Sherlock instantly forgot how he'd been planning to conclude the sentence he'd started. Simultaneously, something inside him seemed to spontaneously leap, and then plummet hard, immediately turning him into a sort of human test-your-strength machine. In that moment, he wouldn't have been particularly surprised if a loud bell had clanged somewhere above his head, and a large man - probably in a vest and flat cap - had handed him a cheap teddy bear.
"I thought you said it went well last time?" Mary continued, slightly raising one eyebrow.
Sherlock was fairly sure he hadn't said that. That it went well, at any rate. He wouldn't have used those words, not to Mary, who couldn't be trusted to take anything he said at face-value - particularly, it seemed, when it related to Molly Hooper. It was deeply unsettling, and Sherlock got the distinct impression that Mary enjoyed seeing him unsettled.
"It was...fine," he said, eventually. "Productive."
"So, what's different now?" Mary probed.
Well, for one thing, Sherlock reflected, it had been a bad idea even when The Fiancé only existed as a nebulous, vaguely man-shaped entity in his imagination. But once he clapped eyes on the man, then it became a whole new level of not-good. As Sherlock had taken in the spectacle that was The Fiancé, it was as though someone had been given a physical description of Sherlock Holmes and instructed to produce a sketch. Albeit someone with limited imagination or artistic talent.
And it complicated everything. But mostly it complicated his...thinking. All these weeks later, Sherlock still couldn't decide whether Molly's boyfriend's physical resemblance to him was a good thing or a bad thing - he knew he should consider it a bad thing, because it confused and muddled everything, and left too many questions unasked and unanswered. But apparently, his brain wasn't entirely happy with that rationalisation. Or maybe it was because his brain wasn't entirely in control of this particular conundrum…
"Nothing," he lied (fairly convincingly, to his ears). "But it was hardly a sustainable arrangement. Molly and I both agreed on that. After all, she has other...commitments."
"Greg said you were acting weird that day," John put in, slightly distractedly, while looking accusingly at his phone.
"I was doing nothing of the sort," Sherlock snapped back. "If there was anything unusual in my conduct it was simply a result of adjusting to a new...dynamic. It might have taken a little longer than usual for me to...hit my stride."
"Yeah, well, if you hadn't been so busy trying to show off to Molly," John continued. "Then you might have solved that Moran case before I ended up doing a Guy Fawkes impression."
Sherlock gaped at him. Showing off? He was not going to let that stand (Lestrade would have to be dealt with later).
"If you hadn't been such a child about the whole 'back from the dead' thing, then you would have been with me that day, and not wandering aimlessly around London, making yourself easy prey for kidnappers."
"Wandering aimlessly? I was outside your house when that happened, you git; I was coming to see you!"
"Well, your willingness to look at things in their proper perspective, and apologise, speaks well of you, John."
"I wasn't coming to apologise, Sherlock, I was-"
"Molly's happy to go with you."
Sherlock's head seemed to swivel quickly and involuntarily in the direction of the words. When he did so, he found Mary looking at him, beatifically.
"What?"
"Just texted her," Mary replied, phone in hand. "While you two were squabbling. She's free all day, and she's going to come with you."
Sherlock glanced between Mary and the offending device in her hand, so many competing thoughts rushing to escape him that they all seemed to reach a bottleneck before any of them could quite leave his mouth.
"There you go - problem solved," John said, as though it actually was. "Where the bloody hell is this taxi?"
"She's just out with Rufus, but she says she won't be long," Mary continued, reading from her phone.
"Who's Rufus?" Sherlock heard himself asking, perhaps a little too quickly and insistently. The name of The Fiancé seemed to have taken on a peculiar, viscous quality in his mind, making it almost impossible to keep nailed down - that said, Rufus didn't sound right at all.
Mary eyed him, a hint of amusement on her lips.
"The dog," she said, in a tone suggesting that she was stating the obvious. "Tom's dog. Their dog."
Tom! There it was (for what it was worth). Sherlock generally tried not to think about the existence of the dog - in particular the implication that it was a shared dog. And especially if it was a good one, like an Irish setter or a bloodhound. He instead liked to think of it as some sort of ridiculous, decorative non-dog, like a tzu or a poodle - or even better, a cockapoo. A dog that wore jumpers and had to be carried in a handbag; a dog that Molly couldn't possibly be attached to.
"Well, anyway, you're going to have to un-ask her," Sherlock said, aiming for casual indifference. He fixed his gaze somewhere up the road, aware of how risky it would be to meet Mary's eye at this moment.
"Why?" Mary demanded. "You claim you need someone to come with you today, and I've found you the one person who can actually tolerate you for more than ten minutes. And who won't put up with any of your crap. And knows more about science than you do."
Out of sheer desperation, Sherlock looked to John, clinging on to the small hope that his friend might intervene. Instead, John just gave a traitorous shrug, absolving himself of all responsibility.
"Text back and say you got it wrong," Sherlock insisted. "Spectacularly, extraordinarily wrong. That won't be hard for Molly to believe."
"Just so you know, insulting me isn't going to help, Sherlock," Mary grinned. "Oh look, Molly's replied! She wants to know where she should meet you."
He arranged his features into a reproachful stare, made all the more difficult by the sudden and troubling spike in his heart rate. At any rate, Mary seemed entirely immune to it.
"Go on then - text her," she urged, with a gleeful smile. "Don't keep a girl waiting."
To Sherlock's relief, rather than respond, he was able to step out into the road, arm outstretched, and hail a passing cab. It screamed to a halt several inches from where they were standing and sat there, engine gunning; John and Mary both turned to look at him.
"How did you-?" John started. "We don't even get black cabs around here!"
"Off you go," Sherlock replied, with a shoo-ing motion. "Enjoy your menagerie."
"Orangery," Mary corrected, as she followed John into the taxi. "Have fun - and say hi to Molly for us!"
Within seconds, the car was disappearing around the corner at the end of the street. Sherlock watched it for a moment, then slowly removed his phone from his pocket, scrolling through his contacts until he saw Molly's name appear. He paused, thumb poised above the winking cursor, his pulse suddenly racing. With an intake of breath, he set off briskly in the direction of the main road, composing a message as he went.