Mary tucked her hair up into the rubber cap, slipped on her flip-flops, and padded out towards the pool, only to be stopped dead by the sight of herself in the full-length mirror in the locker room hallway. She gave her reflection a searching gaze and decided that this had to be the last time she'd wear this bathing suit until… well, not for the foreseeable future, that was for sure. It wasn't so much the belly, although she was definitely bulging about the midsection now, and looked pregnant even when fully dressed. The curious glances she'd got at work ever since John's abrupt departure had been replaced with pitying ones, a fact which shouldn't have bothered her all that much, given everything else going on, but really truly did.
Anyway the real problem was with the breasts. She'd already had to buy new bras, and in this suit they were actively oozing out at the sides like she was a porn star. Mary actually quite liked them, she just wished they'd turned up twenty years earlier. She could have gotten much more mileage out of them back then.
The only other person swimming was an old man doing a snail-slow Australian crawl in the far lane. Mary kicked off her sandals and dove in, relishing that one quick moment where she first struck the cold water and her heart seemed to stop-
Sherlock had perked up a bit once the paramedics had gotten him on oxygen and run a saline drip into his heplock... enough to violently object to John joining him in the ambulance.
"I only want Mrs. Hudson," he'd groused, folding his arms over his chest like a recalcitrant toddler, and none of John's objections that he was actually a doctor were enough to make the EMTs override a full-on minor celebrity strop.
The door closes behind them, and John leans back against the wall and stares at her. Mary flinches beneath that steady, clear gaze, but holds her chin up high.
"So, what was the plan?" he asks, in a falsely friendly tone. "Find some incredibly thick bastard, get him to marry you and knock you up to really just… complete the disguise, and then wander around making hits for the mob whenever the daily grind got a bit too tedious?"
"That's not- I didn't plan to-" fall in love, have a baby, shoot a friend, really any of it, it all just sort of happened when she wasn't paying attention. Mary takes a deep breath. "I never wanted to lie to you, or trick you. It was incidental."
"Incidental?" John scoffs lightly, "Oh how nice."
"It's not nice but it's true. I couldn't tell anybody. The only people who know the truth about me are you, Sherlock, and Martha. And Magnussen, obviously, but he certainly didn't get it from me. Everybody I know now thinks I'm… what I seem to be. And everybody who knew me before thinks I'm dead."
"Oh, you faked your death too, did you? I'll have to try that sometime, it really is the hot new trend."
"Can you please not talk like that?"
"Like what?"
Like he's cold-blooded and cynical and all those things she knows he's not, because she's getting alarmed now, and would infinitely rather he shouted. Hit something. Hit her, if it'd make him feel better.
"Like you're not… angry," she says, weakly.
"Oh, I've moved well beyond angry, now. Do you have-" John chokes on his own words for a moment, and then continues, "Do you know, the only bloody frame of reference I've got for this is Sherlock's lying to me about his death. And that, Mary, was actually easier than this. Because it wasn't a betrayal. He at least thought he was doing the right thing. But you didn't, and you didn't trust me, and you were going to just lie to me every day for the rest of our lives. And you thought that was okay."
It wasn't a matter of trust at all, and she wants to point to the pen drive he's holding and tell him how she had put her life (and her freedom, which is far more important to her) in his hands and ask him how he can believe that she doesn't trust him. It was pure cowardly fear that they'd eventually be in exactly this situation, where she'd look in his eyes and see none of the warmth that was always there when he looked at her, even back before they're really meant much to one another. And all she can manage is a lame, quiet,
"I wasn't happy about it."
John laughs quietly to himself, and says, "Happy. Yeah. That was something we were going for, wasn't it? Give me the car keys."
Mary fishes them out of the pocket in her handbag and hands them over, not letting her fingers touch his as she does it. John puts the pen drive into his pocket.
"I'm going over to the hospital to wait and see how he does," he says.
"Shall I- Do you want me to-?" Mary asks hesitantly.
"I don't care what you do, Mary."
With which killer exit line, Mary thought, throwing her arms over the edge of the pool and resting her chin on the smooth concrete lip, that marriage had basically ended.
She took a few deep breaths and checked her swim wristband for her heartrate which was still, somehow, well within healthy "exercising" levels. Mary had heard somewhere that some professional athletes used HCG as a performance enhancing drug, and she made a mental note to learn how that worked, because enhancing was definitely not her experience of that particular hormone. The laps she had just done would have been a barely adequate warm-up a few months ago but now all she wanted to do was go home and go to sleep. She didn't even bother checking her lap pace, since she knew all it would do was depress her.
There was no way in hell she'd be able to do the full 1800 yards she'd planned. But she wouldn't give up quite so easily, and kicked off the wall, starting in with the butterfly.
Janine, visited in hospital, has her head bandaged which she somehow manages to make look chic, and greets Mary with, "Do you know what your bastard husband's bastard friend just did to me?"
She's sitting in a four-bed ward in the A&E waiting for a neurologist to review her films and discharge her. One of the police officers taking her statement has just asked for her number, and the other one is looking daggers at his friend for getting there first.
But after a brief description of her assault and a much more lengthy complaint about Sherlock's behavior ("I'm glad he got shot, the prick," she says unconvincingly.) she calms down and looks, intently, at Mary's face.
"Oh, my God. You." And Mary glances uneasily at the cops but Janine continues with a high pitched, "YOU'RE PREGNANT YOU TART!" and leaps up and hugs her, all her own woes pushed aside in the face of somebody else's happiness.
In Magnussen's office, Janine tries to run, cries, "Please, don't!" in terror at this masked stranger who has come to hurt her. Struck on the temple, she collapses like a marionette, into a pitifully small heap.
Janine is discharged shortly thereafter and taken home by the two police officers. She calls Mary a few days later, and then again a few days after that, sends friendly emails. Mary finds it impossible to answer any of them. She's too ashamed. So much for Janine, whose only fault was poor taste in her fellow human beings.
Sherlock, visited in hospital, is clumsily kind, when he's not sedated, borrowing her phone to send verboten text messages, or complaining about the food. Mary institutes a second weekly baking night, focused exclusively around chocolate, to help with this last.
Apparently while John and Mary were on their honeymoon Sherlock acquired an in-depth knowledge of pregnancy and birth and has decided that she should opt for a prelabor c-section at 39 weeks regardless of her opinions on the topic ("The balance between lung maturity and placental aging is optimized at that point."). When Mary says that she thinks she'll opt to see what an actual obstetrician has to say about it as they get closer to the date he snorts and tells her that she's not to blame him if young Sherlock destroys her pelvic floor on his way out.
Mary forbids Sherlock to think of or mention her pelvic floor ever again. She declines to comment on "young Sherlock."
In Magnussen's office, Sherlock lifts a hand to his chest and murmurs, "Mary." His face is a mix of surprise and betrayal that she'll never be able to forget.
But he starts getting better and is released from hospital, and she's so glad. Except he obviously returns to Baker Street, which is clearly off-limits "John" territory, and so now there's nobody that she can really talk to.
Mary had never had the patience for any sort of conventional meditation, but running and swimming have always served the same purpose for her. The repetition, the exertion, they all act to clear her mind and let her focus without distraction on one thing.
Except when they don't. Like tonight.
The box arrives three weeks after John moves out. It's addressed to both of them so Mary opens it without qualms (but with gloves, because she's actually still in quite a bit of danger and a dose of anthrax really wouldn't brighten up her day.) There is a note, written in a Catholic-school copperplate hand, which says:
Mary-
Thought you might be sad you wouldn't be getting these, so I had the boys in the lab print them out. We can get you the digital copies after the trial is done. Sorry none of us know how to do any of that photoshop shit but he was actually pretty decent even without.
Sally D.
And below the note, there's an album covered in cream parchment. The first page is inscribed: "Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Watson, From Your Friends at NSY!" and signed by… oh, thirty-some cops, from Lestrade's blocky engineer print to Sam Bradstreet's calligraphy.
The second page is a photograph Mary had never seen before. It's a candid shot. The bride is looking down as the groom whispers something in her ear. She has a hand up over her mouth trying to cover a laugh. The groom has his arm around the bride's shoulders and can't repress his smile and there's nothing but love in his eyes
Mary slams the album shut, with a sound like a silenced gun going off.
The Australian-crawling old man had gone and the pool was empty, so Mary tugged her cap off, regardless of the effects of chlorinated water on bleached-blonde hair. She had a special shampoo for just this sort of situation anyway. She floated, mid-lane, and thought of nothing.
And then she jerked because it was happening again, and it was definitely not gas, not this time. It was, however, by far the most bizarre sensation she'd ever felt. Mary pressed, gently, about two inches south of her navel. She couldn't feel anything with her fingers but there was a little responsive flutter, so she murmured, "Can you feel me too?"
Obviously there was no answer. But she smiled, suspended in the water.
Twenty minutes later she was walking up the footpath to her house when a shadow on the stoop moved and resolved itself into John. He was talking urgently into his mobile and Mary just caught, "No, she's here, she's okay-" before he stalked down the three concrete steps (which really should be redone, they had no relationship to a ninety-degree angle anymore) and snapped, "And where the bloody hell have you been?"
The part of her that was still a teenager tossed her head and said, "Out," but the actual Mary replied calmly, "I went for a swim."
"A swim. I kept calling you."
Mary looked at her phone, and in fact found four missed calls (but no voicemails) from John and one text from Sherlock saying, "Please do answer his calls, I am trying to nap."
"Sorry," she said, "It didn't ring through."
"It's the middle of the fucking night."
Two possible responses to that comment leapt to mind, with the first being:
"Well John, the lovely thing about being for all intents and purposes single is that I can do what I like, when I like it. But since I do enjoy these occasions when you show up smelling like a distillery and wanting to fight or have sex, and would so hate to miss one, perhaps we could work out some system of advanced notification. Maybe an Evite?"
And the second one was:
"The great thing about swimming is that when I do it I feel somewhat like myself instead of like a hormone-addled pregnancy-brained moron, and I wanted to have a good think about things tonight. I know you've put the fact that I'm pregnant off in the man cave of your mind palace so you won't have to deal with it, but the baby- your baby- has been kicking me all day and has forcibly reminded me that I do not have that same luxury. I have so many terrible choices to make and I've never been so scared and I don't want to make them by myself."
The first one was just pointlessly nasty, and although she and John had gotten quite good at that in recent months Mary really wasn't in the mood tonight. And the second one was both unfair to put on John, and would make her look weak, which… just no. If you still had your dignity you still had something, even when everything else had gone. Mary had learned that one as a girl and it had never left her.
She took the too-tight-in-the-tits bathing suit out of its orange Sainsbury's bag and showed it to John.
"Wet swimsuit. Look at my hair," she said, pointing to her combed but not dried head, "Swimming."
John cocked his head at her and then stepped up to her and sniffed deeply, before slowly agreeing, "Chlorine?"
All of a sudden Mary felt completely emotionally exhausted.
"Chlorine. I went swimming, that's all. I really don't have any other lies to tell you."
John hadn't stepped away after smelling her, and she could feel a warm puff of breath on her ear as he exhaled a quiet laugh. "You do have to admit that that last one was a doozy."
She laughed back, a bit, and said, "It was fairly impressive, though I say so myself."
They used to laugh together so much, and she was finding that she missed that more than anything else. Though evidently the "anything else" was still on the table for the evening, because John still wasn't backing off, and was in fact bunching the silky fabric of her blouse in his right hand.
Mary bit her lip.
"Did you- do you want to come inside?"
John nodded, and then his other hand was on her waist and she was tilting her head to give his lips better access to her throat.
They should stop doing this, she knew. It didn't solve anything in the long run, and was probably actually making things worse, since it let them act like their old closeness was still in place without doing any of the work that would let them bring it back for real. But he smelled so good… not like a distillery at all, but like toothpaste and the Acqua di Gio she had bought him at Christmas.
And she'd never been all that good at doing the right thing.
"Come on then," Mary murmured, as she unlocked the door.
Author's note: I swear to God things start perking up a bit after this point. This also seems like an opportune moment for a spot of self-promotion, so if you have been enjoying this story you may like to read its sister fic, "Scenes from a Marriage," available on this site. It kicks off roughly in parallel with this chapter and presents John's POV of this story. By comparison it is shorter, dirtier, and has more Sherlock. And even though that one was published back in 2014 I actually started this one first ha ha hah God I'm slow.