A/N: Written as a birthday present for my sister, who loves the "Mary and Sherlock BFF" ship.
Continuity note: Set about ten months after "His Last Vow." I'm not going to address The Return of Moriarty, because I have no idea what that's all about, so we're just going to assume it all got sorted out, and things are back to normal. Or as normal as things can be when your best friend is Sherlock Holmes...
Enjoy! I love reviews, so let me know what you think! (And apologies to everyone in the UK, I've never been to London and Google maps can only take you so far, so...this is probably riddled with inaccuracies.) Longer chapters coming soon!
Disclaimer: I do not own the original show characters; all rights belong to the BBC and the creators.
Mary Watson jolted awake at 3 am on a Tuesday, certain of danger.
At first she thought something as wrong with the baby, but the monitor's screen showed baby Shirley sleeping soundly in the next room, just as she'd left her a few hours ago.
Then the noise that had awakened her came again; the sound of John's phone vibrating on the nightstand. An unknown number flashed on the screen.
"John's phone, this is Mary," she answered, sitting up.
"Whyyyyy...izznit John?" Sherlock Holmes's voice slurred over the line.
"John's at a geriatrics conference in Falkirk; he told you at Sunday dinner, Sherlock. And he packed the wrong phone." She switched on the light and began fumbling into her robe and slippers. "Where are you, why do you sound like that?"
"Drugged. Kensington-ish. I rang you with my toes." He sounded quite pleased with himself.
"Are you tied up?"
There was a pause. "I do not currently have the use of my hands," Sherlock said carefully.
"I'm going to need more than 'Kensington' to go on."
"Mmmm, dead people. And, and, and, footballers. Yes."
"Brompton Cemetery, then," she said promptly. "What's going on?"
"Essshplain when you get here."
"I'll have to bring the baby," she warned.
"Yes, all right. Oooh, and bring a gun."
The gates of Brompton Cemetery were closed. The arched stone entrance lurked in the shadows between two modern buildings, a dark wound on the otherwise well-lit street, breathing cold air out from inside.
Mary parked in the side lot of the Tesco's across the street. She settled Shirley into her navy blue baby sling, armed herself with a pocket torch and a .22, and set off down the street.
At the far end of the street, the lights of the stadium still blazed against the sky, illuminating the low-lying clouds. Straggling lines of drunken football fans wandered by, randomly hollering. Mary waited for a lull in the crowd, then crossed the street and ducked into the doorway of the building next door to the cemetery.
Two minutes later, she had the lock picked and was slipping inside. When no alarm sounded, she headed for the second story, thanking her lucky stars as she walked that she and John had such a quiet and agreeable baby. It made sneaking around with Shirley in tow so much easier.
She searched the offices along the exterior walls. Third from the front corner, she found what she needed.
"Mummy's going to be very acrobatic now," she said quietly, adjusting Shirley's sling. "Hold on, there's a good girl."
She opened the window and lowered herself carefully out backwards, letting her weight down slowly until her feet touched the top of the stone wall of the cemetery where it abutted the office building. She closed the window again from the outside and shuffled around to face front and survey the grounds below her.
Brompton Cemetery was not lit at night. Light from the city filtered in, but for the most part it lay in shadow below her. She could make out the round basilica of the overdone cemetery chapel, standing guard at the entrance to the colonnade walk. That was where she needed to be. She had managed to get another word out of Sherlock before he conked out on the line, and that word had been "colander."
Under the circumstances, she assumed he meant "colonnade."
A small stone mausoleum stood a few yards to her left. Mary edged along the wall, squatted down, and then lowered herself onto the roof of this, and from there to the ground. She checked Shirley once more, pulled out her gun and torch, and set off for the colonnade walk in the center of the grounds.
Graves and mausoleums lined the pathway several layers deep, interspersed with stunted, leafless trees. Beyond the graves an arched stone colonnade cut through, wide at the beginning of the path and narrowing farther along fronting a long mausoleum wall of bronze plaques.
Mary paused under cover of a tree, suddenly a bit nervous. She had rushed into the with less than her usual caution. Sherlock had not said his captors were still with him (they would hardly have let him make a phone call if they were), but that didn't mean they weren't stationed elsewhere on the grounds.
A groan came from her left. She swung round, gun and torch crossed and in front.
The light slashed across the pillars of the colonnade and showed a man, tied to a chair, gagged and blinking stupidly in the light.
The man was not Sherlock. Another man, similarly bound, sat next to him. Mary stepped closer and swung the light down the line. In every archway of the colonnade, a man sat bound to a chair, drugged and lolling and definitely not Sherlock.
"Bloody hell," she said, and started forward.