OH LORDY. I can't believe I left this barren for a year! It's odd, because all the ideas were swirling around in my brain. I wish I had a pitcher of creative juices that I could pour into my brain so that everything would come out, but at least I managed to do something!

Just as a warning, there is a graphic description of violence along with drug use. Read with caution.

This story is morphing more into Sherlock's interactions with people well known to the series. It will revolve around the tragedy, but will cover other themes.

Enjoy, let me know what you think, and I don't own anything!


Mary asked for a few minutes alone at the grave. John granted her that, and decided to see off the remaining mourners.

Once confident that she was unobserved, Mary reached into her purse to pull out a battered, charred USB stick. Her initials scrawled out in permanent marker were still visible somewhat, and the protective sealing had burst around the aluminium casing. Turning it over in her palm, she could tell the damage had completely corrupted the data. Unreadable. She was certain the reason she retrieved the stick from the ashes of the fireplace is because it had been a part of her, like an appendage. A blood-soaked, and by most accounts, ugly appendage, but it contained everything she used to be. Throughout her career, if she didn't have the flash drive on her person, it was locked away in a safety deposit box. Since the memory stick was rendered obsolete, her past was effectively erased. Yet she felt an urge to have it close even so. The only people privy to her previous life at present are Sherlock, John, and more than likely His Nibs Senior: Mycroft Holmes.

Mary proceeded to bury the stick in a shallow hole in the earth covering the grave. Though this was not the circumstance for which she imagined disposing of the stick, it was better than trusting that neither of Sherlock's parents would discover it in their grate. This was disgustingly symbolic in too many ways, but fitting.

Striding back over to John, both of them agreed to check on Sherlock now that the service was finished. After witnessing Sherlock's instance of self-medicating, John needed to be sure nothing of the sort was being resumed outside of their supervision. Mary suggested they start by monitoring him jointly, and she elected to take a turn.

"Make sure you've left anything potentially lethal on the doorstep before you see him. I'm sure he doesn't need the help." John nervily remarked.

"Knowing the sorts of meanies Sherlock attracts, you ought to be comforted that several of his loved ones are packing heat. I hope that statement was sarcastic rather than a hit below the belt, Doctor Watson." Mary's tone was playful, yet admonitory.

"Of course, Mrs. Watson." John countered. The humor exchanged between them felt lopsided in consideration of the current setting, but he tried not to think too much on it.

John only occasionally made references to Mary's former career, but they agreed to made light of it instead of him using it against her. Deep down, he knew he would forgive her, but it would be trying on his sanity to completely ignore that his wife used to kill people for money. It had gotten easier once Sherlock started cracking jokes about his shooting. If Sherlock could make jokes, John figured he might as well keep up. He left the car for Mary to drive to 221B and flagged down a taxi to head home.

Mary was curious to see how Sherlock was coping, considering what he put himself through in a matter of a day. He'd done superhuman amounts of cocaine, took enough sleeping pills to put down a small pony, he was subjected to smelling salts, he had downed a glass of gin and old tea, and buried a loved one in the space of so many hours. This was enough to drive anyone around the bend, so naturally she was filled with trepidation.

Ascending the stairs upon her arrival, before she had a chance to open the door to the flat, Sherlock called out:

"I can assure you I've not taken anything, even with the considerable window of opportunity I've had. If I'd wanted a spy, I'd expect my brother's people to have come round rather than you. Not your job description, I believe."

Mary always marveled Sherlock's exceptional hearing. It was heartening that his bender hadn't appeared to affect his performance.

"I've come over because I'm worried about you, not to spy on behalf of your brother or John for that matter, if that crossed your mind."

Sherlock was lying on the sofa, one arm draped over his head, the other dangling over the edge, hand brushing the floor. He'd changed into his pajamas and dressing gown.

"Tea?" she inquired. It apparently fixed everything, so she hoped the death of her baby wasn't too big a task for a cuppa to soothe. She decided on loose leaves for this instance.

"Please."

"No need to be polite for my grief." Mary quipped as she went along with the preparations.

"What if I feel like being kind today?" he gently retorted.

"Then by all means, go on. It's better than the cloying pity I've thus far received."

"I was keen to avoid all that and so left early, if you'll forgive the impropriety."

"I've noticed that habit. You left my wedding early, so I shouldn't expect much different for a funeral." She was a little taken aback at the blandness of her tone. The kettle clicked off and she filled the pot.

"I don't do well with large numbers of people. They tend to react the most violently to my observations when the emotions are intense. The happiness and misery associated with weddings and funerals respectively fall in that category."

"Understandable. I wish I'd had the luxury of leaving early. It seemed necessary for me to stay, but I was too absorbed in the moment to question what might have happened if I had left like you."

"Leaving the funeral early would have robbed you of the opportunity to dispose of your USB stick."

If Mary wasn't always firmly in control of her reactions, she might have scalded herself pouring the tea.

"How did you know?"

"You've been turning a small object around in your hand or from within a pocket for a couple weeks. You do it more often in a location you don't feel secure, which is anywhere you aren't home and alone, periodically checking that it is still on your person. Even after John chucked it in the fireplace at my parents' house, you still checked for it as you once did when the information was still readable once you'd retrieved it."

"How could you know it was destroyed in your fireplace, and more specifically that John did it? You didn't return to the house to find it."

"Before he and I left to meet Magnussen, I could smell it burning. The smell of electronics combusting is distinctively acrid. Since no one in my family had any business disposing of sensitive information in such a fashion, my deductions narrowed it down to you and John. Any sensitive information on you that you would want to be parted from was on the USB stick, which I knew you'd given to John. Since I would have detected a change in his demeanor had he read it, I deduced he'd chucked the USB stick into the fireplace at Christmas to make amends. He did it in front of you, otherwise you wouldn't have known where it was and wouldn't have been looking for it."

Mary set the tea on coffee table, musing over the deduction as she sat down on the portion of the sofa that had been previously occupied by Sherlock's outstretched legs. It never ceased to shock her how he could take nearly unrelated events and put together an accurate narrative. His skills would have been wasted in any other field of work.

"I'm surprised that you didn't see straight through me when we first met."

Sherlock sat up and chuckled wryly.

"Your cover was meticulously thought out and executed. The fact that you managed to only raise small suspicions for me to easily push aside is remarkable. I suppose sentiment had a play, too." He furrowed his brow before continuing.

"Before my hiatus, I would scare away John's girlfriends regularly with my deductions concerning them. It was mostly unintentional, despite what John believed. Out of respect to John and yourself, I kept my deductions to myself. Even from the moment I interrupted him proposing to you, I knew you two were committed."

"How noble of you." Mary knew there was a catch. She held Sherlock's gaze steadily even as she poured his tea, a challenging smile budding at the corners of her mouth. She offered a cup to him.

"John would have already been angry enough with me coming back from the dead without me deducing your life story, anyhow." He conceded, accepting the cup from Mary's outstretched hand. Taking a sip, he smiled.

"Tinderet? Surprising choice. I suppose you've had this before if you already know that it tastes best with milk."

"I've had it several times, so with your wide selection of teas, I thought I'd go with something decidedly not boring."

Sherlock held his cup aloft in a mock toast before curling up into his end of the couch. Mary did the same, and the pair lapsed into a comfortable silence.

"Mary Morstan was a stillborn." Mary Watson remarked quietly.

Sherlock's gaze shifted from his tea to scrutinize her.

"Yes."

"I know you say that the universe is rarely so lazy, but I initially felt as though it was a coincidence-"

"-when it is in fact a peculiarity at minimum. The fact that the infant whose identity you claimed in place of your own was a stillborn only to find yourself experiencing a stillbirth later in life is an anomalous occurrence at best." Sherlock reasoned.

"An anomaly it may be, but it feels like a punishment. Because I took Mary Morstan's name, my baby took my real name as recompense. Burying that bloody memory stick in the grave only served to drive the symbolism home, seeing as my initials were written on it."

Several beats passed before Sherlock replied.

"Do you set much store into symbolism?"

"Only when I seek to rationalize my horrid behaviors, it seems."

"I think it is far from horrid. More like you compartmentalised aspects of yourself. You did it to survive. It was a coping mechanism. Symbolically leaving the parts of yourself that would endanger yourself and others with the memory stick helped you to live while still remaining genuine."

Mary's breath hitched and her eyes started streaming. He was right, of course.

"It baffles me how understanding you are even having been on the receiving end of my bullet. You're rational as ever while I feel absolutely wicked for what I did. It was the one time I couldn't immediately justify my actions."

But for the cup of tea in Sherlock's hands, he might have formed them in his trademark steeple before speaking.

"What you did was instinct and quick thinking. The difference is that I lived to be able to reason it out. Even in the split second before you shot me, I knew you didn't want to do it. Since killing me wasn't an option, you wounded me. All assassins kill, some with more bloodshed than others, but I find the mark of an exceptional one is good judgment rather than body count. Since you had the skill to incapacitate me instead of simply tying me up as a loose end, I had time to think. It wasn't something that required forgiveness in the first place."

"You are the last person I would expect to compliment me on my marksmanship." Mary said with a watery chuckle.

"Compared with what I've seen of others, your work is the cleanest I've seen and I'm lucky I get to admire it." Sherlock reached over to pour more tea for both of them.

"Seen many assassins on the job, then?" Mary said without a trace of irony.

"A few, but the majority I've witnessed were cold-blooded executioners. One in particular sticks out in the mind."

"Regale me."

Sherlock mindfully took a sip from his cup before continuing.

"Moriarty had fingers in many pies, even the ones that didn't seem important in the grand scheme of his network. My undercover work led me to a human trafficking ring in Brazil, run by a man called Adriano Vihaio. He was ruthless and was less than conscientious, and I would label him a butcher rather than an assassin. Vihaio was the kind of self-serving scum who treated his "stock" of women as expendable. Chivalry and respect need not apply in this trade, but he was particularly nasty. Operating primarily in the slums gave him the advantage of women coming to him to earn money as servants abroad in hope of better money, and they would summarily be entrapped into what is essentially domestic slavery. The rest earned a pittance working as prostitutes, though many never saw a single 'real'* for their suffering. There were girls as young as 10 selling themselves.

"It was my mission to kill Vihaio and make it look like an accident. Over the course of 3 months, I infiltrated his ranks posing as one of the clients. I became a "regular" to Vihaio, but I had a different reputation with the women and girls. To them I was the "cliente repousante", or "restful client" because I wouldn't do anything with them. I wanted to give as many of them as possible a guarantee of safety, giving them the means to leave. I wouldn't offer it until they'd "seen" me several times. All the while, Vihaio would drop hints here and there about his employment by Moriarty. The idiot even gave me ideas as to where I would be headed next.
Vihaio was never blessed with intelligence, but being a paranoid drug addict only amplified his significant stupidity. Providing him with cocaine through my brother's men was in part how I gained his confidence and paid for my visits.

"That combination very nearly destroyed everything I worked for when he eventually suspected that he had a mole within his ranks. He gathered a couple of his friends of whom he was suspicious, at least 15 of his girls, and myself into a room and started shouting about there being a mole. Half of the girls knew it was me and kept their silence; the others were unaware. When he was met with silence, Vihaio began to slaughter the girls one by one in a sadistic attempt to get someone to come forward. He wasn't neat about it. He stabbed them in their necks multiple times and tossed them aside. Ten of them were dead by the time he was finished.

"As much as I wanted to expunge him right there, blowing my cover would have wasted the lives he'd taken and endangered the surviving girls.

"Staying cool until I could set a trap for Vihaio later in the night was a monumental feat of will power, waiting all through the night during one of his drug parties. Finding a moment to excuse myself, I lay in wait in his bedroom for his return. I choked him out and tied him to his bed. Interrogating him was easy and the coward gave me everything I needed before I injected him with a lethal dose of cocaine. I got rid of the bonds and I left without a trace. I could have imagined far more colorful ways to end him, but interrogation and extermination were my only orders."

Mary had never heard Sherlock go in depth about any of his experiences during his two years spent "deceased". She suspected this was something that John had never heard before. She didn't need to speculate why she was being privileged with this information for long.

"I've told you this to impress upon you that I understand in part what you have gone through in your life before now. The choices involved in voluntarily taking lives are much more complex than any non-assassin would ever consider. I know you have at some point seen as much or more bloodshed not by your hands as myself. The cries and death rattles of those murdered girls still ring in my ears, and I am sure you have more demons than what have been uncovered. I don't need to forgive you for shooting me because of all the options you had, you chose the one that had the best eventual outcome. You are far from the wicked woman you think you are, and it is illogical and ludicrous that you deserve to have your baby taken from you because of who you were."

Sherlock looked at his tea, and set it aside with a distasteful glance. Telling that story had left a bad taste in his mouth.

This matter-of-fact conversation had turned into a very personal discussion, and oddly enough, it lifted Mary's spirits. Sherlock was making a point of not speaking anymore by curling up into the sofa with his face against the cushions. Mary settled herself down more into her seat, content in a way that superseded even this recent tragedy, down to her core. Things were far from okay, but she felt like the burden of surviving had been lifted somewhat.


*real (rey-all)= official currency of Brazil