Chapter 4: The Truth Is Laid Bare~
The car came shrieking to a stop in the lot of St. James. Sherlock came crashing through the doors, long dark coat caught up in a wind from behind, like the eagle's wings as he landed. Behind the darkness , stormed John's lightning bright light, so quickly he moved that his arms seemed to be generating electric currents in the air. There was a rabble of nurses and doctors, and offended clerics come to pray ,alarmed that the peace of the sick should be so disturbed.
"Police. EMERGENCY!" shouted Donovan as she streamed across the parking lot, like a comet closing in on both Daylight and Darkness. The doors closed behind them, the staff was left with an ominous cloud, and then suddenly deep silence ,deep waiting silence, as Sherlock, by his methods, located Greg's room, and burst through the door.
The Inspector sat upright in bed, looking tired and pale, and had an oxygen tube in his nose, but other than that he was alright. Meredith Lestrade stood at the foot of his bed, and she was holding a gun in a shaking hand.
Behind her stood Mary Morstan, and Irene Adler.
"Halt! I'll shoot!"Meredith yelled, pointing the pistol shakily at Sherlock.
"Oh,c'mon, you can't even shoot me! It'll be harder to kill him, considering that he's come back from the dead for the SECOND time in a row, just 2 weeks ago." Greg gasped, voice cracking at the strain of this absurd situation.
Sherlock grinned as if he was being celebrated, mouth turned sideways, teeth barring again like a clever young wolf come upon his prey, and he entered the room with a sweep of the long dark coat, that served as his ominous mantel.
"Is that so?" Irene said, looking actually a mixture of amazed and utterly terrified.
John stopped in his tracks. "No, wait. WAIT! YOU are supposed to be dead! I lied and told Sherlock that you were in America, but you were beheaded by radicals in Karachi!"
Sherlock blinked 3 times. "She was in America , John. Actually, we lied to you, by telling you the truth."
"Oh, I was. Because Sherlock, (with the help of his big brother ,of course) got me out of there, just in the nick of time."
Mycroft swept into the room then, like a phantom springing from a shadow's blood.
"What the HELL is going on? Sherlock?!" John swore, turning to his friend. Whose face had become a stone cold mask, that was chiseled with sorrow. More like the mournful face of a gravestone, than the terrible mask of Icarus.
"Meredith Lestrade. I would be delighted if you would shoot me. It would be easier ,anyway."
Mary smiled, sickly, "Oh, Sherlock...You knew...you weren't going to be able to hide from me."
"WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT IS GOING ON?!" John shouted at the top of his lungs.
"Yeah..and I would like to know why my wife... is trying to kill me?" Greg gasped, swallowing, as Meredith turned on him with the pistol.
"It's part of her initiation into the Pandora Pact. I suspected it the whole time, the nature of her disappearance alarmed me ,Mycroft." Sherlock muttered, speaking aside to his brother.
The elder Holmes hummed softly through his nose. "Seems Pandora sunk her teeth into yet another innocent victim..." he commented.
"Oh,Mycie, I was NEVER innocent..." Irene chuckled.
Mycroft ,for the first time that anyone who knew him could remember, was sudden hotly angry,
"THERE ARE NO WORDS FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE! WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE DONE! WHAT YOU WOULD HAVE MADE ME DO!"
"Ok, ok, please! Just,...Freak-SHERLOCK. What is ...happening?" Sally gasped, getting scared now herself.
"Yes, I see. Everyone's been dying to hear it , haven't they? The True Confessions of Sherlock Holmes. Might make a nice entry on John's blog, if he was still allowed to talk about me, seeing as, as far as the world is concerned, I'm six feet under ground, and have been for going on 2 years. Fine, what have I got to lose?! Yes. Yes, I saved Irene Adler from the radicals she crossed swords with in Karachi. But it wasn't for any silly fairy notions like love-" he said the last word so waspishly that everyone in the room flinched visibly,"So, if that's in your heads, you can all have it straight out of there. I did it ,first and foremost, because, Ms. Adler, I have always been trying to save you. Yes, I do admire you. Yes, I believe that you have potentials for the power of good. Somewhere inside of the whore that almost dissolved the United Kingdom with her ways, is my brother's personal assistant, with the promising career. And, if it hadn't have been for this Pandora, and her delusions, you might have Mycroft's job now, and he would have been elected Prime Minister, or so they all had hoped. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! I should know! I fell so hard I woke up in a body bag 1 day and 10 hours after the fact!" Suddenly, he had an utterly vicious smile on his face, and he was pacing around Irene, who swallowed, totally powerless to speak.
"And secondly, I needed to keep you alive-to keep playing the bloody GAME!"
Irene flinched at how that last word cracked like Odin's thunder-whip into the room.
"Because you had fallen into the wrong hands, and we couldn't allow that to happen, no, you must fall into the hands that will rectify your wrongs, and if you will bleed, it will be by the sword of justice. We saved you, Mycroft and I, to show the world that we still had power in the Game. That Moriarty's Network best beware, because the Woman thought to play us, and we played her instead. And if we had the Queen teetering on the edge of the board, the King was soon to follow.
"And thirdly," and at this he turned to Mary, who smiled with a gleam in her eyes like a starving viper. John felt his heart grow cold. "It is the nature of our Service, of our particular line of work,...to be married to our Work...wouldn't you say so,..Pandora ,dear?"
"Oh, yeah! I'd also say that you have a vow you need to renew...Do you remember the bargain you made with me?...A soul for a soul ,as promised...C'mon Sherlock, forget the protocol. Play the Game..."
Suddenly, Mycroft shut and locked the door, and signaled his SWAT team to close in on the hospital, via a microphone at his wrist.
" I should forewarn the lot of you that what you are hearing is of confidence of national security, and if you so much as think about what you are going to hear in the next 30 seconds, you will be charged with high treason, condemned to capital punishment, sentence carried out by firing squad, effective as soon as you can step outside, and no exceptions." he looked at John apologetically, and the young doctor felt his heart twist.
"Yes, no exceptions...which is why I never breathed a word in his hearing. Because he had psychogenic amnesia, and couldn't remember that I was in Afghanistan with him, and even when he recalled me, he had no recollection of you." Sherlock was saying, talking about John, to Mary. Mycroft cut his brother off, feeling a need to explain:
"To clarify, before my brother was your consultant, Inspector Lestrade, and after his fall from grace, he was my personal consultant, and worked for a special division of the Secret Intelligence Services. And ,once upon a time, Irene Adler, under another name, was my P.A., and yes...my friend... After her glorious betrayal, the job was given to the woman you lot know as "Anthea". This particular division of Secret Intelligence, sometimes refered to as "Unique Careers", has a protocol that surpasses all other protocol of Secret Intelligence. Operatives within the machine of this division, are not only sworn to secrecy, they are trained in a field of mental exercises , which you have heard Sherlock causally refer to as his "Mind Palace" on one occasion, but is far more complex than that, that will give them the ability to eliminate certain information from their minds, that could be potentially betrayed confidence of the state. After Adler's betrayal, and the night of Morstan's attempted assassination of my brother, he was, by protocol, obliged to mentally delete their very existence from his memory. This was the reason that the mention of their names was forbidden, and one of my superior medical officers surnamed it, "manic episode" trigger. There is a place in Sherlock's mind, he affectionately calls "the Box", where all the secret things ,that even he doesn't know that he knows it himself, are stored. Sort of like a recycling feature on a PC system. And so ,in the case which Doctor Watson dubbed "Scandal in Belgravia" , I could safely entrust my brother with the case, or so I thought, being that he had very successfully liberated himself of all memory of the Woman..."
"But then I started playing the Game with him, didn't I? Naughty girl that I am...I began to seduce your baby brother, like I did the other one..."Irene purred.
"Yes, but you seem to forget ,there is a reason why the King referred to Sherlock as "The Virgin". Your seduction...ritualistic as it was...it did not work. And thank God it did not...for I would hate to have hand-dug the grave of another of my brothers...It nearly broke my heart, if we are laying the truth totally bare now, how Sherlock almost despised me after the sentence was carried out."
"Sentence...other brother?" John asked, feeling he was skating on thin ice just broaching the question.
"Ah, yes, Sherrinford. The third brother of the Holmes boys trio. And the one that everyone in the world was obliged to forget because of protocol."Sherlock hissed, and then smiled. "He himself was a master assassin, and was Mary's teacher...And of the three brothers, he was the most unlike our kind...and here you probably thought that I was the black sheep of the Holmes family, didn't you?
But,alas, not. I am only Icarus, the Fallen One. No, Sherrinford was the one they called the Black Sheep. And he was good too, there was never a better...But Sherrinford had a problem that his brothers were blessed not to have. Like Samson's great strength was tamed by Delilah...Sherrinford lost his soul...to a Woman...A particular woman...that we know by the name of Irene Adler..."
Irene smiled sickly.."Naughty girl, wasn't I?"
"Oh ,yes..."Mycroft said coldly, " Naughty and foolish. You couldn't be content to be the book-keeper. You just had to open those books. And by so doing, you opened yourself up to Pandora. Only to learn, that the golden child of their order, had climbed her way up the ranks, to being my brother's star-pupil..."
Mary smiled, "You flatter me."
"And she promised you a place in their Kingdom ,didn't she?...She lead you to loving her...in the way that you claim to love her...She seduced you and used you, the same as you seduce and use men yourself. To be initiated into the Pandora Pact, that you had only discovered by naughtily reading the case files that were confident between my child-brother and I, she instructed you to sacrifice a man...a man that you loved. But you were torn. You had developed a sickened attraction to all 3 of the Holmes sons...You believed that if you sacrificed not 1, not 2, but 3 young men to your mistresses, then you would be very great in their order ,didn't you? And so, under your teacher's watchful eye, you seduced the first of the brothers... and gained information of confidence from his lips to betray to your mistresses, and the confidence he had leaked was a capital offense, so I was forced to authorize his execution...or otherwise give him up to greater torments or "examinations" as the Darker Powers of our Work call them, screens for what he knew, and what he told. And, at the same time, possibly risk the lives of the rest of my family.
You turned my only surviving brother against me...and yet I was unaware...of course, silly me!, no one ever suspects their innocent ,attractive young book-keeper!, that it was you to whom the information was betrayed. For you were the one that had reported the breach! And then you assumed the supportive ,potential lover role. You tried to conjure feelings from my ice-cold heart that I do not have. And when the confusion became too much to bear,...I sent you to work for my brother, in hopes that you could be a mediator between us, and end our feud in a more democratic way...But alas, it only fanned the flames, for you set your vicious fangs for my brother, still only a boy. And you didn't cloak yourself to him, you knew that his eyes of all were sharpest, and he would see right through you. So you acted like a blatant whore to him, you made all sorts of lewd suggestions. But, if any of the Holmes brothers could possibly be swayed by your erotic notions, the youngest of us, the one with the purest heart, despite his shadow, (and apply named "The Virgin", for Moriarty, in the end, seems to have understood the complex creation that is Sherlock Holmes best) would not be the one. It only alarmed him, confused him, irked him, and ultimately caused him to despise you, despite the attraction. So despising you, he saw through your mask, he saw straight to the heart of the web you were weaving, where sat the true spider...And his heart ,being pure, whether he believes it or not, despite that he hated you, he made it his sworn duty to save you from her. It seems he has failed..."
Irene looked stricken, as Mycroft's speech ended.
And then from the corner of the room, Mary began to chuckle.
"Oh yeah...he failed ,alright...Rather miserably , I'm afraid. And now seeing as the truth is laid bare...I think its time you paid me what you owe me...Sherlock..."
"What is she talking about...Sherlock?" John asked, feeling like he already knew.
"Pandora...wants her Box..."Sherlock replied.
The room grew cold with silence.