Disclaimer: Not mine.
Remus burst from the cab and ran into the nearer of the two buildings, not stopping even to consciously decide which one he would search first. He flung open the door and sprinted down the corridor in front of him, gun at the ready and wand poking into his forearm inside his sleeve. His limp was long forgotten; the International Statute of Secrecy, while still in mind, was prepared to be ignored. All that mattered was finding Sherlock and rescuing him from this bloody stupid situation he'd flung himself into.
Remus checked the doors and glanced through windows as he careened down the hall, but he was alone. He pounded up the stairs and renewed his search on the second floor, more wary now, but everything was dark and seemed to be actually deserted. He wasn't running now; he tried each door and poked his head into each room, careful never to put his gun in a position where it couldn't be used. Still, halfway down the hall, there was no one—and no light or sound to give anyone away.
Then he saw it. Damn! He'd picked the wrong building. Across from him, through two sets of windows, Remus could see Sherlock and the cabbie. The cabbie? What? Ohhhhhhhh . . .
Remus nearly gave himself away by yelling when he saw Sherlock holding up a bottle with a pill. No! He couldn't lose Sherlock, not now, not when he had just started thinking that maybe he'd finally found someone who would accept him and make him feel like he'd found the Marauders again.
For a minute, Remus was tempted to pull out his wand and use a Summoning Spell on the pill bottle, but already he could tell that Sherlock was not the type of Muggle to take kindly to having objects zoom out of his hand. All right then. There was one other way . . .
Remus pulled the trigger and saw the cabbie fall, almost instantaneously. Sherlock dropped the pill bottle, and for a second Remus felt actual happiness, just a confused bit of it that had somehow wandered into his brain on its way somewhere else. Just as quickly, Remus stopped knowing what to feel. It had been awhile since he'd killed anyone, and the cabbie had (to his knowledge) been neither a Death Eater nor a terrorist. It was strange to have shot him. For a moment, Remus just stood in the empty room, staring at the gun in his hand.
Luckily, Remus functioned on more than just emotion. Robotically, he locked his gun and put it in his waistband, where no one would see it under his jumper. Then he made his way back downstairs and out of the building, just as the police were arriving.
Sergeant Donovan was standing just inside the police tape, looking around and not seeming to have anything in particular to do. Remus considered attempting to slink away but decided she was the sort who would be less suspicious if he talked to her than if he tried to avoid her. He sidled up next to her and said, "Hey. What happened?"
Sergeant Donovan whipped her head around, having clearly not noticed Remus until he spoke. Poor reflexes, he noted involuntarily. It was the sort of thing he'd learned to notice in the Order of the Phoenix, and then again in the army. "You're here?" Donovan asked.
"Can't let Sherlock run off without me."
Donovan narrowed her eyes. "Are you that attached? Already?"
"He's the reason we've got a discount on our flat. I can't just let him die. Anyway, what's going on?"
"It was the cabbie. He was tricking people. He had two pills—one safe and one poisonous. He'd challenge people to pick one pill to take, and he'd take the other. They'd accept, but he'd always get the safe one and get away from the scene of the crime. Lucky for Sherlock that someone shot the guy before he could take a pill. I think our resident 'genius' just might have bit it this time."
Remus remembered to act surprised. "What? Was Sherlock going to take one of those pills?"
Donovan's look was pitying. "He can't resist a challenge. Even if it'll cost him his life."
Remus caught Sherlock's eye just then, across the parking lot, and he could read on Sherlock's face that he had just worked something out. Before his own face could give anything away, Remus looked back at Donovan. "Then it's good the cabbie died before Sherlock could take the pill, I suppose."
"If you want him alive, then definitely."
Just then, Sherlock joined them, wrapped in a shock blanket. Remus shot him a look, begging him to play dumb as he had begged the other Marauders so many times before. "Sergeant Donovan was just explaining everything. Two pills. It's a dreadful business, isn't it? Just dreadful."
Meanwhile, Donovan started to wander away. Perhaps there was more significance in the glances Sherlock and Remus had shared than Donovan wanted to see. Whatever the reason, Sherlock took advantage of the absence to whisper, "Good shot."
There were still too many police around for Remus to be comfortable discussing the matter openly, so he replied, "Yes, yes. Must have been, from that window."
"You'd know," Sherlock retorted. "Need to get the powder burns out of your hands. I don't suppose you'd serve time for this, but let's avoid the court case. Are you all right?"
Remus was startled by the question. Sherlock cared? No one had asked him that since Dumbledore. "Yes, of course I'm all right." It was the safest answer.
"Well, you have just killed a man."
"Yes, I know," Remus replied. He thought about it. There had been so many before, but this occasion was slightly different. He allowed himself to process aloud. "Yes, that's true, isn't it? But he wasn't a very nice man."
"No." Sherlock said it like he hadn't thought of it before. "No, he wasn't, was he?"
As a Marauder, Remus understood the value of keeping things light, so he decided to avoid any discussion of morality by saying, "And frankly a bloody awful cabbie."
"That's true. He was a bad cabbie. You should have seen the route he took to get us here."
The two looked at each other, and suddenly everything was funny. They started chuckling, both trying ineffectually to hide it, almost like teenaged girls. "Stop. We can't giggle! It's a crime scene. Stop it!" Remus protested.
"You're the one who shot him," Sherlock shot back.
Remus felt the need to defend his action—killing someone was, after all, rather drastic—so he retorted, "You were going to take that damned pill, weren't you?"
"Of course I wasn't. Biding my time. I knew you'd turn up," Sherlock said, and Remus had to wonder how much he had already guessed.
"No you didn't," he retorted, in part because he wanted it to be true. "That's how you get your kicks, isn't it? You risk your life to prove you're clever." Just like Sirius. Risked his life to prove he was better than Snape. Just like Sirius.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because you're an idiot." As a stock response, it had always worked with the other Marauders.
The "idiot" in question looked somewhat offended, but the bustling arrival of the mysterious dark-haired man who had kidnapped John earlier precluded Sherlock from responding. "So," said the man, "another case cracked. How very public-spirited. Though that's never really your motivation, is it." It was not a question.
"What are you doing here?" Sherlock demanded, and this was not the confident enmity he had displayed when ridiculing Anderson. There was fear here; it was like watching Sirius confront a real Death Eater. (Had he been a Death Eater all along?) Memories flooded Remus, drowning the doubts, taking him back to the time when Sirius had run into his family during a battle between the Order of the Phoenix and a clump of Death Eaters. It was perhaps the first time Remus had seen Sirius actually afraid, and facets of Sirius's personality had suddenly made sense after that run-in. There was hatred there, stretched over pain as if to hide it, but that night nothing had been hidden. (At lest, it seemed that way.)
When Remus forced himself out of his memory and started focusing on the conversation again, he heard the mysterious man saying, "We have more in common than you like to believe. This petty feud between us is simply childish. People will suffer. And you know how it always upset Mummy."
"I upset her? Me? It wasn't me that upset her, Mycroft!"
As Sherlock retorted, Remus was processing. As soon as his flatmate's retort was finished, he gave voice to his thoughts. "No. No, wait. 'Mummy.' Who's 'Mummy'?"
"Mother. Our mother. This is my brother, Mycroft." It was Sirius's tone from when he pointed out Regulus, when the Marauders were twelve and Regulus was a first year in Slytherin. It was the tone he used when he pointed out his mother across the moor, through the haze of spells. Sirius's tone.
Meanwhile, it seemed that Sherlock could not resist a jab at his brother. "Putting on weight again?"
"Losing it. In fact." Mycroft had the same holier-than-thou intonation that Orion Black had used on the one occasion Remus had met him. Oh Merlin.
"He's your brother?" was all Remus could manage to say.
"Of course he's my brother. He's also the most dangerous man you've ever met." Strangely, it was almost a compliment.
"Please. I occupy a minor position in the British government."
"He is the British government. When he's not too busy being the British Secret Service or the CIA on a freelance basis." Something occurred to Remus. This man was related to Sherlock Holmes and was apparently dangerously well connected and omniscient. Yet he believed Remus's story about being an army doctor, and just an army doctor? Wow. Remus silently thanked Merlin that he had gotten into med school before everything had gone digital, so that there was nothing funny about his school records.
And then, for just a second, he felt a thrill. He had fooled one of the most dangerous men in England. He'd done it, all by himself. He felt briefly invincible.
Invincible was a bad word. James was supposed to be the invincible one, and look where it had gotten him. Remus was starting to sink into his memories when Sherlock said, "Dinner?"
It was the right kind of moment for one-word sentences. Remus grinned, surprised that Sherlock had said something that felt that right, and replied, "Starving."
A/N: Please review! The next chapter is a full moon, and then I don't know what's going to happen.