Sherlock is discharged from hospital. It's earlier than normal, but since he will be living with a physician they move him up a bit. Reading between the lines, the man has been a monster to deal with since he started feeling better. The doctor (a tall, pretty woman with dark skin, curly hair, and big eyes) has that distinct "Sherlock" flare to her nostrils when she gives him the care instructions.

Carefully, John helps his friend up the stairs, ensconces him in his chair. He fetches tea and toast, Sherlock's laptop, the newspapers and magazines that have built up, and the remote control. Then he gradually proceeds to lose his mind. It's never been a walk in the park being Sherlock's flatmate, but when the detective is in pain, drying out, and can't take any cases to direct his nervous energy, it's sheer hell.

After a week, because there are people who do need Sherlock's services and because it would be wrong to suffocate the man with his own pillow, he buys himself a set of Google glasses and a Bluetooth earpiece. They are terribly expensive and make him look like a tit, but he brings them back to Baker Street and says that he will use them to be Sherlock's eyes and ears at whatever crime scenes are required. It'll certainly be more convenient than hauling his laptop around.

As he expects, the gift is a hit.

What he doesn't expect is the intense interest in the technology. Generally anything more complex than the lever as ruled as "not my problem" until and unless it fails to produce the required results… or is involved in some arcane sort of crime. But Sherlock spends hours setting up the glasses, linking them into the WiFi, and playing with them see what their limits are.

Eventually the glasses (eight hundred pounds, Christ) are hurled onto the table with the pronouncement, "Aaargh. I've been an idiot."

He doesn't ask.

It turns out to be really fun to be Sherlock Holmes out on a case. To just say "Miss Holder, you ARE the jewel thief" as though he was Anne Robinson is such a bloody-minded pleasure. It's strange to hear Sherlock's voice in his head, but Sherlock has somehow managed it, and unlike Sherlock he does have the ability to switch the voice off.

Sherlock is desperate for activity, and so even though there are no cases in the offing higher than a six, he's kept very busy.


She starts showing up in his dreams – well, his nightmares, really. If he ever has pleasant dreams he forgets them instantly upon waking. In his dream, she's a snake, and that doesn't seem strange at all, because by dream logic she's always been a snake. She's black and smooth and enormous and she wraps him in her coils and he's not sure whether he wants to escape but he knows it isn't possible. The heat of her scalds his skin as she twines around him, and he surges up towards her as she sinks her fangs into his chest.

He wakes up, panting, with a painfully hard erection. He's been taught how to deal with nightmares, and so he focuses on his breathing and mentally tries to relax each muscle group in turn.

The fear fades, but somehow Mary does not. He can't seem to stop seeing the bounce of her breasts, the intent expression on her face as she rides him, chasing her orgasm while he tries to hold back his own. He can't stop seeing the sweet way she looks when he makes her come.

Getting out of bed, he takes yesterday's undershirt from the hamper, lies down again. Wraps his hand around his shaft (the hand is too big and too coarse) and jerks off. It doesn't take long – it's been a while for him and he is doesn't want to try and prolong it. Just a few strokes, and he spends into the soft white cotton. He makes no sound when he comes, a lifetime of shared dormitories and barracks effortlessly sealing his lips.

The dirty shirt goes onto the floor and he laughs at himself, because it's still better than crying. Laughs at the idea of wanking to the thought of his wife, a woman who had willingly stood in front of a crowd and effectively promised to shag him until one of them was dead. A woman who is barely five miles away, wanting him to turn up.

He's always known there was a ridiculous man living in this flat.

It's just for the first time, he realizes that it's him.


Once he starts, he can't really stop thinking about it. Sex. It's like being a teenager again, except that now it's a question of real experiences instead of blurry hypotheses.

It was something they'd always been good at. They weren't all that skilled at talking about feelings (him) or telling the fucking truth (her) or figuring out how to split the finances (either of them) but sex was one of the things that had never been a problem. When they'd begun their relationship, he hadn't been thinking of marrying her. He hadn't been really thinking of her at all, except as something to do. He'd approached her because it was obviously preferable to be shagging a pretty nurse than not to be shagging a pretty nurse.

Even back then their sex life had been lovely. They were both experienced, and it just took demonstrating specific preferences for it to be very good indeed. Then she somehow infiltrated his exhausted mind and battered heart and it had, beyond all expectation, gotten better.

After a long and complicated history with women, Mary had been like a glass of water to a man lost in the desert. She liked sex. She liked ordinary Tuesday-night sex, and she liked more elaborate variations. Most of all, she liked sex with him.

He used to take Saturday morning shifts at the clinic where they worked. She did not, and she liked to sleep in, when she could. But on those mornings, when he'd get out of the shower and walk to the dresser to put on his pants, if he looked over to their bed, he would see Mary watching him get dressed. If he made eye contact, she'd smile, her eyes alight with lust, and beckon him over. Sometimes he would go back to bed with her and sometimes he would kiss her goodbye and leave, since he did have work to do. But he had had found it strangely healing to know that this woman simply wanted him, wanted his body, wanted what his body could do to her body.

Of course, back then, like an idiot, he'd been under the impression that Mary was an unusually honest person. Not like Sherlock, who used the truth as a sword to keep people at a distance. Just someone who said what she thought and didn't bother with evasions. It had always made her kindness more remarkable.

She's lied about everything else. Has she lied about that?

It's not exactly a foreign concept to him that women do sometimes fake orgasms, fake interest, in order to get what they want. And certainly he'd never been quite clear on what she saw in him: he isn't tall, handsome, or successful. Everything she'd screamed at him in their fight was true.

He's a thug. He's an uninvolved and inattentive husband with a fetish for violence.

Maybe he's a disappointing lay as well?

A cup of tea sits cooling in his hands, and he looks at the Guardian on his knee without reading it. Mary has a secret, nameless spot that's not quite her bum and not quite her back… well, not nameless, it's the lumbrosacral region, but in these contexts medical terminology is unappealing. He can brush his thumb over it and she'll shiver. One time, he'd spent a bare five minutes working there with his lips and tongue until she was reduced to a jelly and begged, literally begged, for him to fuck her.

Feigned shivers? Feigned-

"Oh, for the love of God. Shut up shut up SHUT UP!"

He's jolted out of his thoughts by Sherlock, who has thrown his own newspaper (The Daily Mail) onto the floor in high dudgeon.

"Didn't technically say anything," he replies, mildly.

"You could at least have the courtesy not to think so loudly on such dull subjects."

"You do realize that's not actually a thing that people can do?"

"Any personal relationships involve significant risk for someone attempting to maintain a false identity. A relationship with you – and thus a relationship with me – was not only a risk but an actively stupid decision on her part. And while one can make many legitimate complaints about Mrs. Watson-"

"Oh, you admit that, do you? She'll be so disappointed you're giving up the presidency of her fan club."

"One cannot call her a stupid woman. Therefore presumably she stuck with you because she likes you quite a lot." The last words are in a mocking high-pitched sing-song. "Though God knows why. Do you have any idea how difficult you are to live with?"

"I sit, silently, for twenty minutes, and all of a sudden I'm the one who's difficult to live with?"

"Yes!"

With that, Sherlock flounces off to his room and slams the door – at least, that's clearly the effect he's going for. The flounce is really more of a shuffle, though it's still an improvement since he manages it by himself. The slam is as good as it's ever been.

He's irritated, now, and tense, and without really thinking about it he throws on his jacket and walks out the front door – which he does not slam, since he's a bloody adult.

He goes for a walk without any particular destination in mind. If he thought about it, it would sort of make sense that he boards the Jubilee line north and gets off at West Hampstead. People in grief flock to Mary like birds to a lighthouse. The day she shot Sherlock was far from the first time he'd seen one of her friends come to her with problems to solve. Even when she is his trouble, the urge to seek her help still drives his feet.

Although he still has his key, he rings the bell, some residual self-preservation instinct telling him not to surprise her. She comes to the door, immediately followed by a wave of baking scents, wearing ratty old clothes. It's Sunday, which is when she makes bread, just like always. Mary has a smut of flour on her cheek and says "Oh!" when she sees him and it makes his chest ache.

He wants to rest his head in her lap and go to sleep. He wants to strangle her with his bare hands. Poised on this precarious equilibrium point, he can't quite manage either to step forward or to turn around and go away. Then Mary, who for better or for worse always knocks him off balance, grabs the lapels of his coat and pulls him to her so hard that their teeth clack when they kiss.

"Bad idea, bad idea" his superego says while he kicks the door shut behind him and presses her up against the bannister of the stair and she scrabbles his jacket off his shoulders. "Very bad idea" when they stumble into the lounge like a pair of drunks. "Really, just about the worst thing for you to do at this point," it echoes when he pulls her t-shirt over her head and leaves her flushed and gasping. Then it's struck dumb when she reaches behind her back to unhook her bra (new, blue, plain). She always used to have a slim build but pregnancy (Jesus Christ, what the fuck is he going to do about that?) has changed her, made her voluptuous.

For the first time since he's seen them, Mary's breasts are not just nice but incredible.

"Yeah, all right then, but you're going to regret it," the superego says. Then it gratefully shuts up, and he buries his face in her throat. She smells of shampoo and chlorhexidine and bread, and she moans when he nips at the tender skin where her neck meets her shoulder.

He trails his way down her chest, alternating between kisses that make her sigh and bites that make her gasp. Dropping to his knees like a supplicant at the altar, he slips the waist of her shorts down and away. At some point she makes a weak sound of protest which he ignores entirely, planting a kiss squarely front and center on her knickers.

They're quite simple. Black, cotton, elderly, with the elastic popping out- in normal circumstances they would signal "not interested just now." But circumstances haven't been normal for months, and when he slips his fingers under the seam where her thigh becomes her crotch she is slippery and hot and ready for him. He pulls the pants down to her ankles and kisses her where he now is very confident that she wants him, while she twines her fingers in his hair and leans back against the wall.

He can tell she's getting close – she tends to hold her breath just beforehand- when she comes to her senses and pushes away his head.

"Bed?" she proposes.

"Sofa," he replies.

"Right," she says.

Then she drags him up and pushes him backwards until the couch hits the backs of his knees. Mary yanks his trousers and pants down to his ankles, a cascade of pocket change announcing their fall, shoves him into a seated position, and sinks onto him… and God, but she feels good. When she begins to move he cries out, as though he can't help it (he could, he really could, if he wanted to).

She's undoing the buttons of his shirt with her clever fingers and it seems too much, too intimate. So he lifts her and pushes her down into the carpet, knowing that he will regret this the next day, since his back is not what it was. He pins her arms above her head, which isn't normally something he likes to do, because it makes him feel like a rapist. But she angles her hips to receive him and he can thrust hard into her and make her scream.

She does. He may make a sound… again, not his habit during orgasm, but it's not out of the question.

And then they are panting and covered in sweat and he pulls out of her and rests at her side. There's a peaceful, hazy moment, which is broken when Mary props herself on her elbows. In her hand is the little grey thumb drive marked A.G.R.A., and she says, hesitantly, "I think you dropped this."

All of a sudden he becomes aware that he is still sort of wearing most of his clothes. She is entirely naked, and it makes her look small and vulnerable. He lets out a breath that he wasn't aware of holding, and plucks it from her fingers.

"Must have done. Thank you."

Then he tucks his dick back into his pants and leaves. He does this in such a hurry that he doesn't realize that he's left his belt behind until he's back on the Tube.


The superego was right, he does regret it. He's solved one of the issues that preoccupies him, though all that's turned up to replace it is a feeling of being ashamed of himself.

It doesn't stop him from going back. From going back four more times, in fact.

The fifth visit he makes is very late at night. It's frosty out, and their bedroom is pitch black. When he climbs into their bed and puts his arms around her she shivers, not from desire, but from the chill of his skin.

The short English summer is over, and when he puts his cold hands on her belly he realizes that the time he can playact like she's just gained weight is over too. This is not fat, it's the firm bump of a second-trimester pregnancy. For a moment he rests his hands over her pubic bones and tries to remember how many finger-widths of fundal height McDonald's rule says correspond to which weeks.

It's not as though he has to. On their wedding night they'd sat with the smartphone app Mary used to track that sort of thing and come up with at least an approximate date of conception. The due date they'd estimated is January 25th which he can't forget any more than he can forget his own birthday.

He kisses her, just between her shoulder blades, and he can feel her melt in his arms.

This time it's tender, if slightly awkward. Her new shape means that the angles between them have to change a bit. When he slips into her he thinks, as he sometimes does, how basically bizarre and unique sex is… putting part of yourself inside someone else, and how much stranger it must be for a woman, to have someone inside of you. To let someone share your body for a while. Maybe it doesn't seem that weird to them, since most of them will actually let someone else do it for nine months at a stretch.

Then Mary nips at his jaw and presses her hands into his arse to urge him deeper. He stops thinking again for a blissful few minutes.

When they've finished, he rests, balanced on his elbows so as not to crush her (them) with his weight. She runs her hands up from his hips, along the sensitive sides of his chest, and snakes them free under his arms. He holds his breath as she brushes her fingertips along his face, tracing the ridges of his brows, the bridge of his nose, running her thumbs across the light stubble on his cheeks.

He wonders how a killer can be quite so gentle.

"No," she says, firmly. She writhes in an odd but effective way, since clearly what she wants is to get him out and off of her. "No. I can't stand this anymore."

Mary throws her legs over the side of the bed and there's the subtle noises that say she's putting her feet into her slippers. He can tell that's she's trying to force her voice to stay cool and calm when she says, "I can't stand this. Sex - and not talking – and I'm sorry but I can't deal with it. I can't go on like this. Please… unless you want to actually work this out and stay I'd rather you didn't come back."

He wonders if this is how she sounds before she pulls the trigger. He should ask Sherlock.

The bathroom door closes behind her and he can hear the shower running.

He does want to stay. But he doesn't come back.