He knew coming this way was a mistake as soon as he rounded the corner and saw the Speedy's awning.
A lorry was parked out front, and two men – one tall, well-muscled and Slavic, and the other smaller, wiry and lean, like a whippet – were moving a sofa out of the lorry and carefully maneuvering it up the stairs.
Sherlock frowned. This was undeniably the real 221B Baker Street. It had apparently been re-let. Mrs. Hudson had bills to pay, of course. Life moved forward; things changed.
Lives end. Hearts are broken.
He wondered what changes had been made inside. Was the happy face gone? Had the smell of decomposition been somehow sandblasted from the kitchen floor? Was the ghost of John Watson still typing away at his laptop, even as the new tenants moved in?
His frown deepened. Standing here, watching this – it was ridiculous. Sentimental rubbish. He should go.
He couldn't move. He felt like something in his mind was broken. That was the worst of all – not being able to trust his processing. It was the most important thing he had, and it had so very rarely failed him. He couldn't allow that to happen again. He had to stop this. He had a way to stop it. He had a case – and not just any case, but a case that should, by all logical explanations, be impossible. Those were the only cases he cared about, the only ones that intrigued him.
But he'd taken a night off to stand here and stare and scowl and – what? Pity himself? This was the sort of thing wasteful teenage girls did, not Sherlock Holmes.
Gaze well on the results of caring too much, Sherlock, he told himself. Caring is unproductive at best and destructive at worst. You don't want to be either. You need to stay occupied and always, always stay a step ahead of this idle idiocy.
Even so, he waited until the two men had gained the top of the stairs before he walked briskly to the door, placed his hands over the brass numbers, and said his goodbye to the life he'd lived before.
The Counsellor sat in the solarium of her private quarters aboard the TARDIS, two hands over her belly. She winced. The pain was getting worse; before long, she wouldn't be able to hide it from Sherlock. She lifted her hands and noticed that her fingernails had taken on a very light orange luminescence.
A little longer, she thought to herself, then closed her eyes and focused her mind on the damage to her body. Her mental powers were startling, but she knew that what she was doing was extremely temporary. She would have to regenerate very soon.
I have to put it off; it has to be strategic, too. I don't want to waste the energy. It can be for dramatic purposes or for disguise, but it can't be wasted.
Her body responded, but it took longer and longer every time she tried this. When she was done readjusting the utilization of healthy cells versus diseased cells, she let out a long, shuddering sigh and leaned back on her chaise. She opened her eyes and looked out on the nearly perfect recreation of the solarium in the home she had shared with the Doctor. The two suns indicated to her it was late afternoon; she could see the swaying red grass in the distance, could all but hear the way the breeze ruffled through that grass. If she closed her eyes she could imagine that Suzian was with her husband in another part of the house, listening to his silly stories of humans and Earth and how different things were there.
It wasn't right, though. Things were missing; she had stopped asking the TARDIS to replicate her favorite beverage because she could no longer be sure it was doing the job well. Her memory of the taste of coronal sunflower essence was failing her. Also, the hair she could see in her periphery was this tawny golden mass of waves, not the pin-straight fall of platinum she'd had at the time.
She closed her eyes. Something else was different. When she'd done this before, she'd ended the session either angry or miserable. She didn't feel that way now. Instead she'd drifted away from the faulty details of her illusion and started thinking about that . . .that man. Not the Doctor this time. That . . .that Sherlock.
He was brilliant. She wanted to quickly amend her conclusion and say that he was brilliant for a human, but that was inauthentic and cheap, and it stole from him the strained nobility of his genius. He was brilliant period. He was the find of the century, and having survived only ten of those so far, that was significant. She smiled softly to herself when she imagined what it would be like to keep her end of the bargain they'd struck, to show him distant worlds and try to convince him that he could trust the evidence of his senses. Could she teach him about all of the known dimensions – time, perception, sensation – and the theories about the unknown ones? Would he want to help her continue her work?
She shook her head. That was too much. He was fascinating, yes, but she had to distance herself from such sentimental claptrap. Sentiment was what had blinded her so long ago. She had to execute justice on behalf of her people, then she had to –
"What?" she asked herself softly. "What then?"
It was, after all, possible that she could finally find the Doctor after all this time, now that she had Sherlock. She'd come farther in the past two weeks than she'd come in the past two centuries. Could she bear to have her business so swiftly concluded when she had no plan to sustain herself afterwards?
The soft chime of welcome, faithfully recreated from her Gallifreyan home's sound system, let her know that someone with a key had accessed the TARDIS. He had returned. This should not have filled her with the optimism she was feeling now. She was supposed to be cross with him for leaving in the first place. That raw pleasure was unwelcome – wasn't it?
She took a deep breath and carefully lifted herself off the chaise. She looked around at her phantom solarium, took another deep breath, then strode briskly from the room.
Sherlock was standing at the console to the TARDIS, staring at a display. The images flickering across the display were now very familiar to them both: the four known faces of the Doctor and several more that were consistent enough to be other regenerations; the known companions; the Doctor's odd TARDIS, forever trapped as a blue police box; and the locations all over London in which the TARDIS had been photographed.
"How do I stop an image to study it?" he asked as she entered the console room. No preamble; no greeting. No excuses or explanations for his disappearance last night. Oh, the Counsellor knew where he'd gone and what he'd done from a simple scan of his mind. He wasn't trying to hide it. Of course he'd visited his old residence. The power of the place was still strong for him, and apparently undeniable. But after that – that was far worse. He'd gone to visit someone whose face was cloaked in shadow and he'd purchased something he shouldn't put in his body.
Images of what he'd seen and felt assaulted her mind: High. Higher. Must go higher. Far from my failure to contain those emotions. Rise above it, purge. Eliminate.
EX-TER-MIN-ATE.
She gasped.
He turned to her, startled by that sound. She was clutching one of the support pillars of the TARDIS and staring at him, her raw fear unhidden.
"Counsellor?"
She shrank away. "Dalek," she whispered.
He approached her quickly but he did not move to support her as she slid to the floor. "What did you say?"
"Dalek."
"What's a . . .dalek?"
