Hello, all! Yes, this is the reason why Frailty hasn't been updated yet. Sorry. Hopefully this sort of makes up for it?
The title is taken very liberally from the song "The Crane Wife 3" by The Decemberists.
Also, please forgive me for not knowing major details in the wake of The Girl Who Played with Fire. I finished it and had this idea and started before I could get my overeager hands on a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest; therefore, from the end of TGWPwF, this is completely AU.
On her first night out since moving to London, walking back to her motel room, Salander was nearly attacked by a couple of thugs. She was annoyed, but by now not entirely surprised as she noted the two drunk men following her from the pub where she'd had her dinner. Just as short and skinny as ever, but Salander was still recovering from her stint in the hospital and knew that under these circumstances she would not be able to fight them off if they were coordinated through the stupor of alcohol. She herself had abstained from drink only because it would interfere with the pain medication she was still taking. It left her feeling slow and stupid, but she was still a freak with sharp senses and prompt wits. She closed thin fingers around the taser in the front pocket of her shoulder bag and waited as she walked.
A man across the street, shorter than the two following her but still well taller than her, glanced back at the drunk idiots, looked both ways, then briskly crossed the street. "Er, Mary, is that you?" he asked, false smile looking artificially stretched in the fading twilight. Salander stared at him and squeezed her taser's handle in anticipation, wondering what he was playing at.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded pointedly at the two drunk men who were now picking up speed. "It's me, John, remember?" he prompted.
As she eyed him suspiciously one of the men staggered forward. "Honey, is this bastard bothering you?" he slurred, reaching for her shoulder. The short man tried to intervene, like she was some helpless kid. She elbowed him in the sternum and jabbed the tall drunk in the neck with the taser. He screamed in pain and fell like a stone, but instead of retreating his companion came charging like a bull. The man Salander elbowed was still catching his breath, so she ducked the bull's outstretched arm and let the two collide in a groaning heap. The bull started to get up and she tased him when he was clear of the one she'd elbowed, not out of guilt or pity for the shorter man, but because she wanted as much voltage to go into the bull as possible rather than following the current of bodies into the ground. The bull collapsed on top of the short man, and as he fought to wriggle free Salander took off, tripping over the short man's fallen shoulder bag, and accidentally kicking a can of yellow spray-paint onto the pavement before she vanished from sight.
She ran all the way to her motel, then drew herself a hot bath and made a cup of tea - must get used to the local fares - before crawling into bed and falling almost instantly asleep.
It was another four days before Salander decided to look for a flat of her own. It wasn't as though she couldn't afford to live in the motel with what was left of Wennerström's billions, but she needed to lay low as best as possible, probably assume a new identity altogether since Irene Nesser was now useless. The wig, however, was still a good idea.
As she ate breakfast and searched the newspaper for open flats, she began building a new identity for herself. The man last night had called her Mary. It was a good name, and there was a woman in the motel with the name who looked similar to Irene Nesser. She would have to change the passport photograph if she kept the Nesser chain going any longer. After about ten minutes she found an ad for a basement flat on Baker Street, a good location according to the ad, but the flat itself had a mold problem. It was small, but furnished by the landlady. The perfect conditions for an average single woman.
She pulled on the Nesser wig and put on some carefully neutral makeup. She didn't want to look glamorous to see to an average-to-dumpy flat.
It was raining outside when she finished her makeup and pulled on a dark jacket. Before taking off she went down to the motel cafe and found Mary-who-looked-like-Nesser drinking a black Colombian coffee. Salander ordered a caffe latte and drank it two seats away at the bar. When Mary was pulling on her jacket to leave, Salander reached into her purse and pulled out her passport, sticking it up her sleeve just before Mary turned back around. She waited until Mary had gone back to her room before packing up and leaving the cafe for Baker Street. It wasn't far, so Salander walked and enjoyed the fresh air. On the way she saw a wall graffitied with the words "I BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK HOLMES." Even though she didn't care she remembered the message, another disadvantage of her defect.
The landlady was very kind and more than eager to show her the basement flat, gripping the riling tight to protect herself from falling on a bad hip. "Now, I put in the ad that there's a spot of mold, you know," she reminded Salander as she let her in. The flat was small, and dark, and smelled of mildew, but for Salander's purposes it was perfect.
"Who lives upstairs?" she asked in her Oxford accent, nodding at the ceiling.
Mrs. Hudson made a deploring face. "Well, I'm sure you've heard the story in the papers, dear, but I've been trying to keep it quiet. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson used to live up there."
She blinked, realizing that if she was to pretend to be an inhabitant of London she ought to know about this. "I'm afraid I've been out of the country for a while," she smoothly explained, "for my health. Could you explain?"
For a moment she thought the old woman was going to burst into tears right there, but instead the old woman invited Salander up into her flat and made tea before explaining Sherlock Holmes' rise to fame over the past year and a half, the accusations of fraud against him, and his subsequent suicide over two months ago. "Poor Doctor Watson just couldn't bear to live here any longer. He says he might still come back, it's all paid for by Sherlock's brother, but right now the memories are just too much, the poor dear."
Salander certainly had no interest in some middle-aged man crying over his dead boyfriend. She did, however, take the flat to maintain the idea that she needed a place very badly. And after a few minutes' careful evaluation she confessed to the wig but did not remove it. Let the old woman think what she wanted about what was underneath.
It took only a few hours to get all of Salander's few possessions from the motel to her new flat. She'd left Sweden in a rush, and was unable to bring anything that could possibly identify her, even if it was doubtful that anyone in London would be paying attention to the news from Stockholm. She stopped at a nearby Tesco to get food and toiletries, and then spent the rest of the day scraping mold off the bathroom walls as best she could with her limited strength. Salander was not supposed to be in London, especially not so soon after leaving the hospital. She was meant to be convalescing in the countryside, but the moment her guardian nurse had been sufficiently distracted it was like instinct took over and she ran. The nurse had been unbearable, all "Fröken Salander," this and that, when Salander knew what her innermost thoughts were of how to let Salander die without being accused of negligence. Were she in Sweden now, she would only be standing trial for three murders and manslaughter.
The old lady invited Mary Morstan upstairs for tea. She declined. Then the old lady invited Mary upstairs for dinner. She declined that also. Even the most minor of niceties no longer interested her.
By the time her flat was arranged as best it could be with only one room and a bathroom, Salander was more exhausted than she'd ever felt before. She stripped off her clothes and, as custom every night since she was able, stood in front of the mirror. She still looked anorexic, though it was even worse than it had been and she had lost significant muscle-mass in the hospital. Her breasts were still intact only because they were implants. Her hair was the shortest it had ever been, only three-quarters of an inch in places, and had returned to its original color of rust-red, which it hadn't been since Salander was fifteen and dyed it black for the first time. She looked like she had cancer. Her skin was dull and yellowish with fever from antibiotics that still came and went. The scars on her shoulder and hip were an ugly bright red. The Chinese character tattoo had been destroyed. All of her piercings had been removed and were healing over. She looked ordinary. Sick and ordinary. She drank a cup of hot black tea before crawling into bed, and fell asleep as soon as the lamp was out.
Two weeks passed and Salander picked up a routine of sorts. Every morning she woke up and had coffee, filling the whole flat with the aroma, and ate her breakfast to the sounds of the old lady's television. Then she ate a few pills and went back to bed until the afternoon. She didn't want to sleep so much, but her pills made her tired and she was still recovering from fucking Zalachenko trying to kill her and couldn't help it when the fatigue rolled in. The old lady probably thought she was some lazy idiot by now, and was worrying about rent. But Salander still had plenty of money, even if she now had to use a dealer to get her pain medication because Mary Morstan obviously didn't have a bullet hole in her head. She woke up sometime in the early afternoon and made an appearance for the landlady's sake before going for a walk or getting something to eat at a cafe, then went back to her flat and worked on her new laptop computer. She ate more pills before dinner, took a bath, and then went to sleep. It was a mindless way to live, but at least she was alive.
Salander had nightmares about Zalachenko and Niedermann. Always, Niedermann was an indestructible robot and Zalachenko was shooting her again and again but she wouldn't die. She woke up screaming more than once, only to make her head hurt so much she was blinded.
After two weeks and four days she overheard the old lady on the phone with her old tenant, Doctor Watson. She wanted him to come by and meet Mary, and try to see if she was anorexic. The old woman was worried about her. Salander had not expected to feel guilt for causing concern, but her new landlady was kind and left her alone when she wanted to be by herself, yet still somehow leaving the offer of tea and company open.
It should not have been a surprise when Salander picked up her drugs from a seedy man in a seedy pub that they were laced with something stronger and more dangerous, but Salander was not exactly in her full faculties. Instead she went home, ate three pills with her antibiotics, and crawled into bed. When she woke up the next morning it was as though she had been shot all over again. She couldn't coordinate, couldn't think or plan beyond the next four seconds, and every muscle screamed in protest when she moved. She didn't even know what had woken her until she heard the old lady knocking on the door and calling for Mary. The clock said it was past eleven in the morning. Salander rolled and fell out of bed, letting out a stifled moan when she landed on her bad hip.
"Mary, are you all right down there?" the old lady called.
Salander tried to shout up the stairs for her to go away, that she was fine, but all the came out of her mouth was a strangled yell. There were two loud bangs and then her door crashed open. She tried to cover herself up, she was only in her underwear and her scars were hideous, but she couldn't see the blankets or grip them in her shaking hands. Heavier footfalls than the old lady's were coming down the stairs, and too late Salander realized that it was probably that Doctor Watson the old lady was going on about.
"Take it easy," a voice said above her, echoing painfully around her fractured skull as calloused hands gently took her shoulders. "I'm going to get you back up into bed, okay Mary? My name's John, I'm a doctor."
She wanted to yell at him to just get on with it, but he obviously didn't know any better as he helped her up onto her bed and then took her pulse. Her vision finally focused and she could observe that he was not, in fact, looking at her body. Of course, she didn't know why he would when she was so hideous. He was, however, the same John whom she had elbowed in the sternum two weeks before. He probably didn't recognize her, but the possibility was enough to make Salander's heart race. Watson's eyes flickered down to her, and she realized he was still checking her pulse.
After another moment he gently pulled up the top lid of each of her eyes and peered into them, looking for a reaction without a suitable light to shine in. "Just a bit hungover?" he asked sympathetically. He kept his eyes trained on her face, didn't look at her body, didn't see the scars. She nodded, waiting for the catch. "What did you take?" She stared at him long and hard, trying to muster up a menacing glare of the same calibre as before Zalachenko tried to kill her. The new skeletal structure of her face probably contributed, because Watson leaned coolly away. "Fine. I can't look through your things without asking you to call Scotland Yard on me, but let me tell you something: that woman upstairs does not deserve any more grief in her life. I'm not coming back to live here for a good long while, if at all, but I'll be coming by to check in on you from time to time. I want you cleaned up, and if you don't get your act together I have a few friends at the Yard who will be interested in your case, understood?"
It was just like Teleborian all over again. Just another fucking do-gooder like Blomkvist and Armansky trying to control her. She didn't give him the satisfaction, and instead stared with such hatred shining from her eyes that he seemed to get the message. He left, not with his tail between his legs but close, and Salander stared enraged at the door long after he had gone. That night Salander granted her dealer a visit and procured unlaced pain medication.
