A.N: The Penultimate Chapter! I'm so sorry for the delay on this. But when I think about how I've moved my family across the globe three times since beginning to write it, I think I'm entitled to a little bit a leeway - maybe? Let me know what you think my beloved Sherlollians!
Chapter 10
"We need you to investigate something."
They weren't exactly Mary's first words upon setting eyes on Sherlock for the first time in months - but they just as well ought to have been. Her request came after the perfunctory greetings - hers an "I'm glad you're back" and a "thanks for keeping me in the loop" from John. Hers said sincerely; his, stern and solemn, a nod to the last time Sherlock went AWOL on his friend. But as soon as these formalities were dealt with, Mary's request, prefaced by a deep breath, was rushed out before Sherlock could even settle into the Watsons' vintage chambray settee or take a sip from the offered cup of Irish Breakfast Tea.
Sherlock's eyes narrowed, surveying the pair.
Mary's urgency and the slightly clipped way she spoke showed she thought it was important. Highly. So the invitation to tea was just a pretence then. Something they wanted to talk about with him in person.
It wasn't Mycroft. God knows his brother had had his hands full of late, tying up the loose ends of their not-too-successful operation in Los Vegas, as well as dealing with Sherlock's added "complications". Complications which had cost him not one but two visits to rehab. On two different continents, no less. Not that he wanted to think about that now.
Not Mycroft. And even if it was, Sherlock was none too keen to be drawn into another one of his charades – or to see the people he loved involved again.
When did Molly Hooper become one of those? Certainly before Vegas. Definitely before Moriarty's return and subsequent second-death.
Of course Sherlock had long been aware of how completely she controlled his Mind Palace. She was of course the one who guided him though those seemingly-infinite seconds when he was on the verge of death. Sherlock rubbed his chest absently, remembering how it was not that long ago when it was pierced by a bullet from an assassin who now sat next to him on the settee offering Scones and Biscuits.
At the time, and in the months that followed, it never occurred to Sherlock in investigate himself, to find out how Molly had became the controlling and calming figure for him - nor had he ever told her that she saved his life.
Or later, when in order to discover Moriarty's plan, Sherlock took a drug-fuelled journey back to the 1900s, he never thought to question why the ringleader in his imagined syndicate of scorned suffragists was a version of Molly. A version whose cross-dressing alter-ego treated Sherlock's period persona with nothing but scorn. Certainly a far cry from the quiet unassuming pathologist he'd overlooked for so long.
In every version of his memories, she was there. Guiding, teaching, making him a better person. How long had it been since she had taken up residence in his mind so completely?
Perhaps while he was undercover in Eastern Europe. Some nights hiding out in damp, rat-infested dens he would keep himself sane by recreating the myriad tests the two of them had performed together at Barts. The lab recreated in minute detail and Molly reconstructed down to the last patterned cardigan covering a mis-matched shirt.
And if he did embellish his memories from time to time, it was certainly nothing he would admit come morning. As comforting as he found the images of Molly's eyes wide, breath ragged and lips kiss-stung during in the long nights alone he would always make sure they would soon be deleted - evaporating with the morning dew in the sun's harsh light.
He shook his head vigorously, as if brushing away the thought like one would an errant ant at a picnic.
John's tight lips showed concern, not only with the issue but with how to raise it with Sherlock. So it was somebody they knew.
Gavin's been cat-fished again. No. Sherlock had installed key logging software on all of the DI's computers as well as his phone, with sometimes amusing results and other times puzzling results. It seems someone was highly interested in something called the Game of Thrones – discussing at length something about R + L = J, a formula Sherlock had not yet been able to decode, but honestly wasn't all too concerned about.
So not Gavin then.
He was fast running out of options. Certainly not Anderson? Or Donovan? Or Anderson with Donovan?
Sherlock hadn't yet responded to Mary's request, and in the silence he caught something shared between the Watsons, part of that secret language of eye contact that is foreign to all outside the married couple.
They were worried. Not just about the person, but about how he would react to their request.
It could only be one person then.
"Mate, it's Molly."
John's tone was grave. It caused a vibration down Sherlock's vertebrae that he told himself wasn't anything other than his limbic system's response to the memory of their confrontation with Henderson. Definitely not. And definitely not the events which preceded it. Not the feel of her lips on his or her body as his wrapped his own around it or the warmth of her as his frantically claimed her as his own.
Definitely not that.
Sherlock took a slow breath as he did whenever his emotions threatened to derail his mind and leak through his façade of control and reason.
He didn't dare picture her small form in the Vegas hospital room, or the way he fought with all his strength when Mycroft's men were dragging him away. No. He'd left all those memories back in Vegas. Not that they were his to begin with. They were part of a cover, an act. The reaction in the hospital was only because the case hadn't been debriefed yet. His cover hadn't yet been entirely erased. He was still Bill, and Bill wasn't ready to see Cindy fighting for her life. It was Bill who gave Mycroft's man a black eye because he was being forcibly separated from his lover.
Or so Sherlock told himself.
John cleared his throat, bring Sherlock back into the moment.
"Is she ok?" The words came out more slowly than he would have liked. His voice wavered on the last. He took another deep breath, fighting the urge to grab his coat and fly out the door like the "drama queen" John had so often accused him of being. He paused for a moment before adding in the most casual tone he could manage, "I mean, she's not ill or injured?"
In a moment, his mind raced through all of the possibilities for post-surgery complications. Imagining them all in minute detail as he waited for the Watsons to respond.
John's nervous smile gave Sherlock instant relief.
"No, it's nothing like that. She's just-" he paused, thinking, before trying again like a man in fear of his first ten metre jump of the diving board. "She's…" he trailed off, losing his nerve at the last minute and looking at his wife to help him finish the sentence.
"She's just…" Mary, too, was struggling, staring up at the ceiling as if the answer lay in the cornices and lighting sconces. "…happy." Mary concluded, although the look on her face told Sherlock she was none too pleased with the word choice.
Sherlock couldn't stop the laugh, although he wouldn't admit that it came from the nervous energy of relief rather than of scorn for his friends' concocted issues.
He could tell his laughter was a tad too drawn out by the way John and Mary exchanged worried glances. There was much the two had perfected in the art of silent communication over the course of their marriage.
"Sorry," Sherlock began once composed again, "but you want me to investigate Molly Hooper because she's happy?"
"Well, yes, but in another way, no," Mary explained none too helpfully.
"So you don't need me to investigate Molly?" Each word was clipped, precise. His patience with the Watsons was beginning to wear thin.
John turned to Mary, "I told you this was a bad idea," said with the tone of a husband who had lost his latest in a series of marital arguments.
Mary ignored her husband's protests. She reached out, touching Sherlock on the hand as if trying to communicate where words had been failing her.
"You have to trust me, Sherlock. Molly may seem as happy as usual, maybe even happier, but I can tell something's wrong."
Sherlock began to scoff at Mary's assertion, but stopped when he felt Mrs Watson's hand tighten powerfully around his.
"Remember, Sherlock, I was a spy, I've been undercover before. I know what an act looks like, no matter how well-practiced. And I know what real emotions look like, too, no matter how hard we to hide them."
Sherlock turned, meeting Mary's piercing blue gaze. She was talking about Molly, wasn't she?
"Please mate, just see what you can find out." John added. "We know she took a month off work a little while back, and she hasn't been herself since. She'll come and visit us and play with Isabelle, but there's something…" John paused, searching for the right way to describe it. "Something missing."
Mary nodded in agreement. "She does a good show of pretending, but we really do think something happened while she was away. We just want to make sure that you've done all you can to find out what it is – and if there's anything that can be done to bring our Molly back."
Sherlock agreed, taking his leave of the Watsons, he decided to walk across town back to Baker Street.
As he walked he found his mind was running, outpacing the leisurely pace with which he wandered the London streetscapes. He loved being back home, but for some reason not even the comforting surroundings of London could calm him.
Despite the fact Molly's mood was a mystery to the Watsons, there was no such puzzle for Sherlock to solve. He knew exactly what had happened to Molly while she was away from London. He knew it all, could see it in ultra-high definition, playing on constant loop in his mind-palace in the middle of the night when in the silence of solitude didn't allow him the luxury of forgetting.
It was the image of her in hospital that haunted him during his first (swiftly-aborted) stay in rehab. It was the need to know and the worry about her health that drove him to escape in the pre-dawn hours while the changeover shift was starting and one exhausted crew was swapped for one not yet settled to begin their patrols of the hopelessly addicted and chronically relapsed.
He considered himself neither an addict nor a junkie in relapse as he confidently escaped the clinic and on his way to the Nevada hospital where he last saw Molly unconscious and in intensive care, covered by too many tubes and bruised and beaten beyond what he would ever want to remember.
Punching a window on the driver's side of a jet-black SAAB gave more relief than he'd expected. He expertly hotwired the engine to start, sending a thanks to Wiggins for those much-needed lessons, and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of speed as he rushed down the dusty highway at nearly 100 miles an hour.
He had meant to go straight to her. He wanted to be there when she woke up. Wanted to see for himself that she would be fine, that for all that had happened between them, their operation in Vegas would not cost her life or cause her any further harms.
He had planned it. Thought he'd executed it pretty well, too. Until he found himself driving not to the hospital, but to the dark, forgotten alleyways away from the famous Vegas strip. Weaving through building, warehouses and whorehouses - where tourists would fear to tread.
He didn't consciously get out of the car. He didn't mean to say the password at the back dock of a vitamin warehouse. He didn't plan to ask for a 1k stake, or to stay beyond the first few wins. He didn't even realise he'd done the line of coke until the blessed stimulant lit up his system, making his heart pump harder in his chest and bringing a focus he hadn't felt for days – not since the moment his lips captured hers in that hotel room.
But in that moment, he wasn't Sherlock worried about Molly, not a man haunted by memories of his lover's her sighs and her moans and his pleasure in burying himself in her. He was an addict, a gambler, a man in blissed denial that someone he cared about was in a nearby hospital.
No. He wasn't Sherlock. He wasn't Bill either. In that moment, his whole world was reduced to a series of colours red and black, shapes of diamonds and hearts and numbers, Jacks and Aces.
The universe of the deck was far more simple than the world of work, or the mess of his mind-palace which Molly had somehow come in and overtaken – piece by piece, until there was nothing inside his mind that she did not know, no secret that she didn't have access to, nothing she did not guide him through.
The next line of coke didn't hit him like it usually did, but instead struck him with the unpleasant and vivid memory of Molly's hand slapping his face – one, two, three times in quick succession.
He had already come to his senses when Mycroft and his men busted down the door.
What he hadn't realised was that he had been playing cards in that room for over three days.
What troubled him the most wasn't the loss of time, nor the relapse, nor the thousands of dollars he left on the table. It was the first words he said to Mycroft.
"Where's Cindy?"
He didn't need Mycroft to tell him. The look on his face was more than enough.
"Where's Molly?" he replied, pretending he hadn't for a moment forgotten the line between himself and Bill. And Molly and Cindy.
Sherlock didn't remember being dragged from the poker table and into the back of Mycroft's awaiting black limousine. But he did remember his brother's first words to him.
"We need to debrief you, little brother," said sternly, factually as the limousine winded its the way to one of his brother's State-side offices. The official American home of his unofficial British Government.
"Wonderful! More mind-fuckery, I suppose?" His eyes narrowed, but his brother's reaction was imperceptible, "Don't you think you've done enough already?" He knew his mood would be considered by Mycroft as part of his comedown from the high of the drugs and the adrenaline of the cards, but he was wrong. The memory of Molly slapping him made him feel more sober than he'd been in months.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," came Mycroft's indignant response.
Sherlock scoffed, just as he had when they were children, when fights were small and petty and didn't come with death tolls or grave injuries.
"What I'm talking about, brother, is the reason why on earth was I sent in there in the first place? Why use me when you had Smith at the centre of the whole operation? Any why drag Molly half way across the globe if not to mess with me?"
"You think too highly of yourself, little brother," Mycroft scoffed.
"Then why?" Sherlock persisted. He held Mycroft's gaze, daring him to waver, to look away. Sherlock would never blink, never waiver. It was always the one thing he would have over his brother.
"Smith is CIA, his passport – if we were to have one – would read as a veritable map of national and international hotspots over the last two decades. But since he joined Henderson's operation five years ago, his allegiances have not been so clear. We didn't know if we could trust him."
Mycroft's words made the mysteries of the last few months fall away, finally, Sherlock has the Rosetta stone he needed to translate the code.
"I wasn't playing Henderson. I was playing Smith."
Mycroft's lips turning into a mockery of a grin. "I thought that was obvious. The world is indeed full of goldfish, isn't it?"
The car slowed, turning towards a tall, nondescript office tower. The kind used by accountancy firms, or lawyers. There was no way of knowing from the outside that the Western world could be brought to its knees from a small corner office inside.
Mycroft made no show of moving once the limousine stopped. The door opened, and Anthea appeared, ready to escort Sherlock.
Sherlock made to leave, before pausing to ask Mycroft one more question.
"But Molly? Why her?"
Mycroft paused thoughtfully, a small sign of compassion crossing his face, an emotion almost imperceptible if not for Sherlock's awareness of the oddity.
"As for Miss Hooper," Mycroft shared a glance with Anthea before continuing. "Well, I think I'll leave you to your own deductions."
Sherlock's reward for toeing the line throughout Mycroft's 20 hour debriefing was a blessed reprieve from the harsh light of America. There was only one further condition placed on him: he had to agree to one further, stay in rehab – this time on English soil.
Between landing at Heathrow and boarding a train to the clinic in the Cotswolds, Sherlock found himself with a few hours spare. He had planned to head to Baker Street, to pick up his violin and a few books to stave off boredom – something in the realm of 19th century phrenology or investigative uses of lead in health treatment – books which predated findings which discredited both practices.
Sometimes the discredited sciences gave him confidence in that which can be proven, that which he knew as fact.
But instead of arriving at Baker Street, Sherlock found himself in his "home from home" as Mycroft had once called it. Bart's.
His phone rang as he headed down the hallway towards the Morgue – it was Mycroft.
"I trust you are on-route to the Cotswolds, little brother?"
Sherlock rolled his eyes, forgetting for a moment there was no-one to share his frustration with. "Of course. I just had some errands to run."
"Interesting terminology you use," came Mycroft's reply, clearly revealing the elder Holmes' knowledge of the younger Holmes' current whereabouts. Sherlock was about to make a snide remark befitting a younger-brother when caught out by the elder, but Mycroft cut him off.
"Whatever you have planed with your errand" he stressed the word sarcastically, "it is essential you check in at the clinic by 8pm this evening."
"Yes. Fine." And he hung up. He hadn't even pocketed his phone before he heard slight footsteps that could only belong to a women of five feet two inches, one who had definitely heard his voice and, from the speed of her gait was almost certainly speeding away in the opposite direction.
Molly wasn't ready to see Sherlock.
Sherlock wasn't even sure how he was ready to be himself again.
He left Bart's and headed straight to rehab where he stayed his allotted 40 days and nights.
If Bart's was his first port of call before rehab, it was fitting that it was also where he found himself again that afternoon just hours after his meeting with the Watsons. Walking down the hallway with a mind full of questions and the hope that one woman was able to answer them.
A/N - One more chapter to go! It's only a short one. Shouldn't take too long to write - as long as I can stay in the same hemisphere for long enough to get it written!