It wasn't as though Mary had never craved food before, but it had always been a slow process. She'd feel a bit hungry. Then she'd think that something sweet… or salty, or sour… would really hit the spot. Then the craving would narrow down over the course of an hour or so until she realized what she wanted. And then she'd either have that food, or not, and either way it would go away.
Pregnancy cravings weren't like that. Mary found this out when she woke up at three in the morning, ten weeks in, with a perfectly-articulated desire screaming out "Green bean casserole." She stared into the dark, and the thought came to her, "With extra crispy onions."
It did not go away. Not at all. So once it was close enough to dawn to satisfy a sane person she got up, had her morning vomit, booted her laptop, and did a Google search.
The so-called "American Food Store" that she found was in fact a newsagents with a single wall dedicated to prepackaged goodies from the colonies. She got the canned Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and the French-fried onions there. Sainsbury's sold the green beans, and she had soy sauce in the refrigerator at home already.
Mary mixed the ingredients into a glutinous grey-green mass, baked it, and then ate a quarter of it in a single sitting. So that was sorted.
Until two days later, when she was at her book club with Janine and the thought "Deviled eggs with paprika" appeared, fully formed, in her brain.
After that it was on. She became grateful for her Amazon prime membership which allowed her to waive shipping on all of the salty, fatty, high-fructose-corn-syrupy monstrosities that she required. Five years of vegetarianism and fifteen years of generalized food snobbery came to an end with a Big Mac, fries, and a large Sprite… which was just as awful and wonderful as she remembered it being.
There were failures. After multiple attempts, she resigned herself to the fact that you couldn't get decent Mexican food in England. Oh, sure, if you were willing to drop twenty-five pounds a plate you could get exquisite authentic stuff made with genuine imported ingredients… but she wanted American Mexican food. The delicious cheap sort of stuff available on every corner in Denver, deep fried and smothered in green chili and orange cheese, with shredded iceberg lettuce and a dollop of oddly liquid sour cream. That simply didn't exist in London. They couldn't get the spices right.
Or so she thought, until week sixteen, when Sherlock Holmes appeared at her door one bright Saturday afternoon.
"Get your shoes," he said, by way of greeting, "I'm taking you to lunch."
Sherlock was wearing his oversized black coat despite the late-summer heat. He was even paler and thinner than usual, which she wouldn't have believed possible, barring tuberculosis or vampirism. His blue-green shirt actually fit properly instead of straining at the chest.
That was on her. One time, in a life lived by the gun, she'd pulled the trigger and felt sorry to have done it. And because of that she obeyed, slipped into her shoes, and followed him.
They took a cab (a black cab, of course, because one could clearly not ride in an Uber or minicab when one rode with Sherlock Holmes) to a tiny little restaurant in a basement in Limehouse, where Sherlock directed her to a corner table and passed her a laminated menu. Mary scanned over the list of chiles relleno and chimichangas and smiled.
"So they were your people following me. I'd been wondering."
Sherlock frowned. "You spotted them?"
"Mmm. Three of them, at least. Were there more?"
"There weren't three. Describe."
"Two men, middle-aged, rather scruffy, I'd say homeless network. And a woman in a suit."
He rolled his eyes. "Brunette, very pretty, much too young for him?"
"Yes on the first two, but too young for whom?"
"Mycroft," he muttered, "It's fine."
Mary took a sip of her water. "So MI-6 isn't going to try and disappear me, then?"
"Try?"
"I hate to tell this to an Englishman but, yes, actually, try. Everybody knows they aren't proper spies."
This was braggadocio. Yes, most MI-6 agents were crap, overbred rich boys with a James Bond fetish, but the exceptions tended to be terrifying. Much like James Bond, actually. Sherlock, bless him, realized this, and replied, "That's what I always say. But to be on the safe side I've squared it with my brother."
"How difficult was that?"
"Very, in fact. I'm subbing for him at Miss Saigon and a revival of Godspell."
She raised an eyebrow.
"That can't possibly be all."
Sherlock hesitated, then replied, "No, it probably won't be. However while Mycroft is… ruthless, he's a ruthless pragmatist, not much inclined to casual revenge. And I did live, after all. So I suspect you two will get along famously, and if he offers you money to spy on me I want half, plus editorial approval."
"That's… good," Mary said, "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
Mary sighed a bit, and then asked, "So what are you having?"
"I'm not actually hungry," Sherlock replied.
She thought that this was a lie, although Sherlock was good enough that it was always difficult to tell. But he had a lean and wolfish look to him, and she knew that he secretly had the palate of a toddler and disliked anything unfamiliar. She scanned the menu and said, "We'll get you the pollo con crema." This, being basically chicken in cream sauce, should be friendly enough in taste and texture that he would at least try it.
He tutted at her. But after a tentative first bite, he ate all his meal. And for the first time Mary thought she might actually be rather good at that whole "parenting" thing.
At eighteen weeks she was taking one of her increasingly frequent bathroom breaks when she realized she desperately wanted carrot-raisin salad, which was objectively disgusting but at least would be easy to throw together once she'd got home. Mary then came back into her obstetrician's waiting room to find Sherlock sitting on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs and glaring at his mobile. Texting.
He nodded abstractedly at her when she sat next to him. Mary asked, sotto voce, "What are you doing here?"
Sherlock rolled his eyes but didn't look up from his phone. "Oh, you know, it's been a few years so I'm past due for my Pap smear. Don't ask obvious questions."
She was opening her mouth to politely tell him to piss off, when Barbara came into the waiting area and called, "Mary?" And then Barbara, who was a lovely, motherly, sixty-something midwife, saw Sherlock and her face absolutely lit up. Women did that around him... at least until they'd gotten to know him.
"Oh, hallo," Barbara practically purred, "You must be Mr. Watson! Here for the sonogram?"
Sherlock, damn him, smiled widely and replied, "Please, just call me John. Mr. Watson's my father."
With that he stood up, extended a hand to help Mary out of the uncomfortable chair, and followed Barbara into the depths of the clinic. Mary fumed. He did this so often, just pulling the most outrageous bullshit and absolutely getting away with it because he knew people couldn't comment on it without causing a scene.
Much in the same way that she was totally going to let him get away with it because she really didn't want to discuss her complete trainwreck of a personal life with the clinic staff, wasn't she?
It seemed that she was.
Barbara made reassuring clucking noises as she took the pictures, and described the baby as having a "beautiful spine" which gave Mary a totally undeserved feeling of smugness for taking her vile folate supplements even though they made her nauseated. Then she swiveled the monitor screen around and said, "Everything looks lovely! Heart, head circumference, nuchal fold, belly, everything. Can't get a good look at the bum so I don't think we'll be able to tell you the sex today, but everything else is perfect. Care for a look?"
Mary and Sherlock chorused a "yes," and then Mary was simultaneously touched and horrified to find him taking her hand. It was probably part of his disguise, she rationalized, before her eyes were dragged to the screen to see…
A baby. With a perfect curve of skull and a tiny fist just in front of its face and a blinking pixellated heart.
Her lips trembled, as she looked at the… well, the little human being who was inside her, who would be her baby in five months or thereabouts, and she felt the tears spring to her eyes.
Sherlock, meanwhile, frowned and said, "It looks like a seahorse. But this is normal?"
It really, really did look exactly like a seahorse and Mary sighed because now she'd never be able to unsee it.
Barbara gave Mary a CD-ROM with the video of the ultrasound. She gave Sherlock, after a very brief flirtation, a printout of the best picture, the side view. Sherlock folded this into thirds, tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat, and said, "I'll just take this to show to… people. At the… GP's surgery at which I work."
Since she hadn't made a fuss, he obviously turned up at all her appointments after that. There were a lot of them, because as the awful teenaged midwife Lisette said, "Well, you're really very old to be doing this for the first time. We need to keep an eye on you!" At each subsequent appointment, he wore, for his "John" disguise, a series of increasingly horrible jumpers, which he clearly thought was hilarious. Mary drew the line at letting him be in the room on the occasion she received a pelvic exam, though. There were limits.
At 28 weeks, she swilled a syrupy Tang-like concoction, gallantly refrained from vomiting for three hours, and then shortly thereafter was tested for gestational diabetes. She flunked this test.
Not just flunked. Gloriously flunked.
The awful teenaged midwife Lisette popped her gum, said, "Yeah, it's more common in older mums," and gave Mary a diet sheet and a finger-stick blood sugar monitor. Mary did not throttle her with her elderly decrepit hands, though it took some effort. And so after her appointment, Mary found herself manically cleaning all the carbs out of her kitchen.
Sherlock had been with her, as was now his habit, and after having a legitimate freakout in the cab home ("Mary, you will need to be very rigorous about managing your glucose levels. If you cannot manage it you are at risk of the baby becoming macrosomic and necessitating an instrumental or surgical delivery, to say nothing of the elevated odds of jaundice and respiratory distress!") calmed himself down enough to help.
At least, that's how he described his sitting at her table and eating everything sugary, because he really did have the palate of a toddler. She didn't mind. Sherlock needed the calories.
He was addressing himself to a bowl of canned fruit cocktail, shredded dessicated coconut, and miniature marshmallows. She was purging out the potato bin (happily they'd all sprouted so they would have been wasted anyway). At that moment she had one of those unpleasant realizations that she had been avoiding for some time.
Looking at the heap of miscellaneous food, it didn't take a genius to realize that, as her old nursing-school preceptor used to delicately say, "This patient probably has some psychology going on." She was in control of all the other hormonal urges. She'd handily been able to ignore the times the baby would ask for a bourbon on the rocks or a Parliament light, and the unsettlingly frequent occasions when it whispered, "Hey, someone vaguely presentable who probably has a penis. You should climb him!"
Instead, she had mindlessly acquired and consumed a lot of old-fashioned 1970's church picnic chow… certainly nothing she'd ever liked to eat as an adult. The only cravings she'd allowed herself to indulge were for the sort of food she'd enjoyed as a child, back when she was innocent. Not anything she would have liked when she was AGRA, who'd spent a decade contentedly serving as the hatchet man for a series of corrupt and venal governments. Nor as Mary Watson, who'd irretrievably wrecked her extremely short marriage and shot one of her closest friends.
And probably nothing she'd want to eat as… whoever the next version of herself was.
She realized, then, that it was past time to figure out who that woman would be.
"Stop it," Sherlock said.
"Stop what?" Mary replied, distractedly. Maybe it'd be nice to live someplace that was... warm and dry? The endless chilly sog of England had always gotten her down a bit.
"You're planning to run away from your problems. I am reliably informed that that doesn't work. Though frankly the time I faked my death it I thought it went fine."
"Oh, Sherlock," she sighed, because "Oh my God, it is creepy when you deduce people's thoughts" probably wouldn't be productive, "My not running away from my problems ended up with me shooting you. And I'm not going to fake my death. John…"
She hesitated, not having had her husband's name in her mouth for months.
"Estranged husbands always attract the attention of the police when a woman disappears, and it'd only be worse for him if I was thought to be dead. I'll try and minimize that, when I go. Be obviously seen boarding a plane of my own free will… all that sort of thing."
She smiled.
"I'll wear my red coat. It's the loudest thing I own. You'll help, won't you? Have him be on camera someplace else at the time?" He would, she knew. There was very little he wouldn't do for John Watson.
"It honestly seems like a lot of effort, and why should we do it at all?"
"Sherlock," Mary explained, "I have done, in my life, terrible things. You are just the latest example on a very long list. What did you think Magnussen wants from me, money? No. He has money. He wants me because I can do that sort of thing, and I won't. Not anymore."
She'd made up her mind about that five years ago.
"He'll eventually publish. I assume he's only still holding back because he thinks now he can get something out of you… or more likely your brother. And when he does, I need to be gone, because otherwise I will be killed, which would probably be all right if it happened after I give birth, or locked up, which will not be all right. The people who I'm hiding from are not nice. I'd hoped John would-"
Well, she'd hoped that he would come with her, honestly. That was the only reason she hadn't been out of the country the morning after shooting Sherlock. But some hopes were futile.
"Anyway he'll probably be okay. He's... fairly able to look after himself, and my leaving might be enough to convince people that I'm not particularly attached to him. Marriages end all the time. But nobody would believe that they couldn't hurt me by hurting my baby. And that will never, never happen."
Mary rubbed her jaw, which ached because she always found herself gritting her teeth when she had this particular thought pattern.
"You're right," Sherlock said, "And you're wrong. Magnussen does want my brother. But he's held back… because he's getting him. At Christmas. At least as far as he's concerned. I'm sorry, I thought you'd have figured that out by now."
Mary closed her mouth. Then she opened it, to ask, "-what?"
"I met with him a few months ago and negotiated an exchange, Mycroft's laptop for your papers. Obviously I've got a trick up my sleeve but- have you actually been sitting around just waiting for the axe to fall this entire time? That's an absurd level of fondness for John."
Mary sat down at the table because her legs seemed wobbly for some reason.
"Why-" she asked, and swallowed to get some moisture back in her mouth, "Why would you do something like that? Why are you doing any of this?"
"Because John is, eventually, going to get past it and when he does he would never forgive himself if you were hurt or lost to him. And-" Sherlock hesitated, "And I've found that there was a missing piece in my life, before you came along."
He watched her with his sharp, bright eyes, and then tugged awkwardly at his collar and said, "Please stop crying, it makes me extremely uncomfortable. It's a purely unsentimental action on my part. Neither John nor I know how to disarm bombs, for example, and you do, which may well come in handy again in the future."
Mary sniffled and wiped her eyes on a paper napkin.
"I suppose I do. But, oh, Sherlock… I don't deserve a friend like you."
He raised his eyebrows at her.
"Certainly you don't. But imagine if we all got what we deserved... I get punched in the face quite enough, thank you. And I already know how you can pay me back."
Mary tilted her head in inquiry, and he reached out and patted the round orb of her belly.
"The name "Sherlock" has rather a nice ring to it, don't you think?"
"Absolutely not."
"Modern yet classic, suitable for a child of either sex-" he said enticingly.
"And unfair to inflict on someone too little to fight back."
He laughed, and the deep sound made the little seahorse jump, and Mary rather thought Sherlock felt it under his hand because his eyes widened for an instant. He cleared his throat, and said, "Yes, well. I'll talk you round later."
Sherlock made to pull his hand back, but Mary captured it in her own and gave it a quick squeeze instead.
"Thank you," she said, quietly, "For everything."
"It's nothing. After all, what would I do without my Watsons?"
This was originally a chapter from "Love in Wartime" which I cut out ages ago because I decided I wanted to go another direction, then repolished into a one-shot. There are little flecks of the other story still in it, in case you were wondering why it felt a bit derivative of that one. I just now finally finished it because the scenes we've been getting have given me all the Marylock brotp feels.
The title is from Tom Petty's song "Time to Move On."