When John left for work the next morning, Gerald was waiting for him.

John stopped short, just over the threshold of the building's main entrance, not quite managing to withhold a sigh. Gerald looked unperturbed – as always – and, John noted with some irritation, not even a little tired.

Sherlock not needing as much rest, John could accept, but he wondered darkly if there was some kind of secret drug that Sherlock gave all of his people that eliminated the need for sleep.

It would certainly explain a lot.

Like how Gerald could look so well rested after having been instructed to collect John from Sherlock's office late the night before and appearing again in time to take the doctor to work.

Given what he knew now about Sherlock's tendency for secret drugs, the idea that Sherlock was behind this somehow – not Gerald's presence, but his apparent ability to do without much sleep – wouldn't have surprised John.

He sighed again, admitting to himself that Sherlock had consciously sought out people like him. There was no reason the similarities had to stop with intelligence and a flexible approach to the law.

John considered refusing the ride, savouring the thought of doing so for just a moment, even as he knew it would be pointless. He'd tried to protest last night – after all, London had a very functional tube system, and he could have taken a cab if he'd missed the last trains – but arguing hadn't got him anywhere.

Sherlock had a way of insisting that was able to transcend minor technicalities like not actually being there to enforce the decision.

John was being chauffeured, whether he wanted it or not.

That sparked a simmering resentment that he knew was stupid – of all the things he could complain about in his life, this was hardly a hardship. In fact, he reminded himself, it wasn't a hardship at all.

But as much as he tried, he couldn't keep himself from chafing, at least a little.

It wasn't really the ride itself – god knew Gerald had driven him plenty of places before, with or without Sherlock.

It was the lack of choice, the way Sherlock blithely bent the world to his liking without asking what John wanted.

And if John had pressed the case that this wasn't what he wanted, Sherlock would have steamrolled over his objections by pretending they didn't exist or pointing out how stupid they were.

He'd get his way no matter what John said, and it annoyed John even more to realize that was the best reason to simply go along with it.

He got into the car, forcing a smile and thanking Gerald – after all, it wasn't the chauffeur's fault.

The trip was quick, and John was tempted not to bother going into his office, but to make the five-minute walk to Sherlock's office building and tell his partner off. Sherlock hadn't come home the night before – John wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that, given the whole situation with the bodyguards.

He shook his head, abandoning the idea of storming into Sherlock's office and let himself into his, surprised to find Mary already there.

She smiled and greeted him brightly, and John noted that she didn't look tired either. It was probably one of the reasons Sherlock had picked her for an interview.

John gave himself an internal shake; he had no idea what Mary had been up to the night before, and for all he knew, she was well rested because she'd gotten a solid eight hours of restful sleep.

And hadn't, for example, gone partway across London to tell off her boyfriend for having her followed by some very effective and apparently invisible bodyguards.

"You're in early," he settled for saying, keeping his tone light and matching her smile.

"Your filing system is still a mystery," she replied, gesturing to a pile of files spread out before her.

"Sorry," John sighed.

"Don't be," Mary replied. "It's part of the reason I have a job. Plus, I think I'm cracking the code. But it might be worth digitizing all of this, you know."

"Yeah, I know," John muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I'm not suggesting you do it, John," she said with a wry smile. "It would fall under my job description. And I can be handy with a database, when I need to be."

"Could you do it?" he asked, feeling a rush of relief when she nodded. "Mary, you're a bloody miracle worker."

Mary laughed.

"Careful, John, or you'll make a good case for giving me a raise."

"I think that case is making itself," John replied. Not that Sherlock would bat an eyelash if John requested a higher salary for his nurse, and he probably should. He made a mental note to look into it later. "What do I have on for today?"

"Nothing until ten-thirty," she replied.

"Good," John said. "Let's go for breakfast."

"Sorry?" Mary asked, surprised.

"Breakfast," John repeated. "First meal of the day, commonly cited as the most important – although that's debatable. Still important, though. If you've already eaten, you could join me for a cup of tea. It's on me, of course, and I guarantee your boss will give you the time away from your desk."

Mary smiled again, stacking her files aside.

"Well, I don't suppose that piece of toast I had this morning will get me very far."

"No, it won't," John said. "Come on, get your things and let's go."

"No time for breakfast this morning?" Mary asked as the server placed a large plate of steaming food in front of John. He eyed the full English appreciatively before giving her a wry smile.

"Not really," he said, although that wasn't entirely true. He hadn't been particularly hungry, so he'd opted for laying in bed longer, doing not much of anything at all. "Sherlock was working late last night, and I popped over to visit him for a bit."

Mary raised an eyebrow and John felt himself colour.

"Not like that," he said hurriedly. "Just to chat." That was more true, but smoothed over the nature of the chat.

"Well," Mary said, digging into her eggs, "I suppose he's a busy man."

"You don't know the half of it," John sighed, taking a sip of his tea, appreciating the warmth and the caffeine kick. "Sometimes I have to take what I can get."

"Don't we all?" Mary asked. "But it can't be that bad, can it?"

"No, no," John said. "Not really. Not usually. He's just… well, he's just Sherlock. He tends to get caught up in things. He sometimes loses track of the rest of the world. Eating, sleeping. That sort of thing."

"But not you, surely."

"Ah, well sometimes," John said, shifting a bit in his seat, feeling somewhat awkward at having raised the topic at all. "It's not intentional."

"I believe that," Mary said. "He doesn't strike me as someone who does anything unintentionally."

"No," John said with a chuckle. "He's always got some kind of agenda. Or ten."

"No wonder he gets distracted," Mary said seriously, but with a twinkle of laughter in her eye that gave her away. "He must be a pretty intense person."

"That is probably the best way I've ever heard him described. Although he wouldn't like it."

"No?"

"You didn't mention that he was a genius," John pointed out.

"Is he?" Mary asked, raising her eyebrows.

"Absolutely," John said. "Most brilliant person I've ever met."

"That's high praise," Mary said with a smile. "How did you two meet? I'm imagining some glamorous party, loads of champagne, him sweeping you off your feet…"

John laughed, shaking his head.

"No, nothing like that," he replied – her mental image couldn't have been further from the truth. He could remember the miserable little bedsit all too well, the cramped and caged feeling from having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the way Sherlock had waltzed in, with Gabe, each of them in suits that probably cost more than John would have paid for an entire year's rent there.

Sherlock hadn't so much as swept John off his feet as bowled him over with an ultimatum, one he knew John wasn't in a position to refuse.

"He was looking for a new doctor for the firm," he said, glossing over the details to get to the bare truth. "I needed a job. He found me through my sister – she's a solicitor."

The connection was ingenuous, John knew, but he didn't need to drag Harry's past into it, and the whole experience had pushed her to make some serious, and difficult, changes in her life. She was much better now, although John knew it was still hard, and he made a point of staying in touch. He didn't think they'd ever be particularly close, but they got on better now than they had in years.

"Ah well," Mary said. "That's more realistic, though, isn't it? Life can't be like the films."

"Don't let Sherlock hear you say that," John replied.

"What do you mean?"

"He didn't meet me somewhere posh and glitzy, but I think that's partly what made me stand out. The rest of his life… It's filled with the kinds of things you were just imagining. Sometimes it's like dating a film star, only most people don't know who he is."

"An international man of mystery," Mary said.

"Definitely," John agreed.

"Well go on then, tell me about all of his daring international exploits. Or yours?"

"Mine?" John asked with a laugh.

"You were an army doctor – you must have some."

"None that are fit for polite company. Even if that polite company is a nurse."

"Well, Sherlock then," she said, taking a sip of her tea. "It is an international real estate firm, after all. He must travel a lot."

"Not as much as you'd think," John said, shaking his head as he drained the last of his tea. "And not as much as he used to. It's mostly around Europe now, and mostly for meetings." Mary wrinkled her nose but John shook his head. "I don't think he minds – when he travels for himself, he'd rather just relax than play the tourist."

He had a sudden image of Sherlock on their island, dozing in the hammock that was slung in the shallow water under the shade of several trees, fingertips dipped into the water from when he'd been trailing his hand through it before drifting off.

The memory was so sharp and clear that John had to swallow hard and push it aside. Even just thinking about it in someone else's company felt like giving a secret away.

"Well, meetings around Europe must still be a far sight different than the kind of travel you used to do," Mary commented, oblivious to the sudden derailment in John's train of thought.

He forced a small chuckle, nodding.

"You could say that," he agreed, and felt the muscles along his spine tighten at another sudden memory, this one much older, of Sherlock commenting to him that he didn't operate in war zones, that it was too risky.

Sherlock hadn't been in Afghanistan – as far as John knew – but he had been in Pakistan. It might have been unconnected; there were certainly reasons for Sherlock to do business in Pakistan, both legitimate and illegal.

But something had happened to him there.

Something that still gave him nightmares, ten years later.

John felt an unease coil in his stomach, dampening his appetite.

"What about you?" he asked, forcing his focus back to the conversation. "We've been talking about me – well me and Sherlock – this whole time. Have you travelled much?"

"A bit," Mary said. "Not as much as I'd like, maybe, but I try."

"Go on then," John said. "What was your favourite trip? Tell me everything."

It was easy enough to slip back into the office without arousing suspicion. The security guards all knew her by now, and it was London, where people came and went at all hours. If Mary wanted to do some extra work or had forgotten something or was killing time before meeting up with a friend, the guards didn't care. She was pleasant to them, and made sure to chat briefly (never too long), so they were inclined to think kindly about her – when they thought about her at all.

Sherlock's medical file was back in the stack she'd locked in her desk drawer, but ever so slightly askew amongst the others from where John had slipped it back in. He'd done a good job, and had she been anyone else – nothing more than a nurse, for example – she'd never have noticed.

Of course, she'd also been looking for it, and anticipating him staying behind to go through it. As the doctor for Sherlock's firm, he had every reason and right, of course. Technically, he wouldn't be Sherlock's doctor – that was still listed in the file as Michael Stamford – but she doubted that John was concerned with those particular technicalities.

Sherlock was unlikely to be, either.

John had likely been through this file before, at least once, when he was first hired. It wasn't unusual that he refresh himself of its contents, but the timing was.

John had just accidentally dosed Sherlock with some illegal medication, medication he'd had no idea that Sherlock had, and that Sherlock had acquired from Irene Adler. Mary wondered what Irene's part was in all of this was – if anything beyond the drugs. She made a mental note to check into it, but it wasn't nearly as important as the information in front of her.

John had also spent a good part of the conversation this morning talking about travel – at Mary's gentle prompting, of course. He couldn't come out and simply say he knew something about Sherlock's past, and wouldn't, not to her.

Not yet.

She wondered how much John knew – it certainly wasn't the entire story, or he wouldn't have been searching through his partner's file for medical details. His destination had been the same as Mary's: a decade ago, when the incident in Pakistan had happened. Stamford had kept fairly detailed medical records, and for all his disorganization, John did too, but the more recent pages had been skipped past in favour of this older information.

There were faint, fresh creases on the edges of the pages where John had held them between thumb and forefinger while scanning for what he was looking for. Like the placement of the file in the stack, Mary wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been watching for it and hadn't known the signs. John, secure in his knowledge that she'd never notice, hadn't thought to disguise his actions.

Privately, Mary was a bit disappointed in him. Sherlock Holmes, she thought, would have prevented anyone from figuring out his movements just out of habit. He may not suspect her in particular, but he would suspect the possibility someone might want to know what he'd been up to.

And he hadn't wanted anyone to know what he'd been up to in Pakistan. There was no mention of it, no records of unusual travel vaccinations – but that, Mary noted with some satisfaction towards Holmes' thorough nature – was because he kept his vaccinations up-to-date. Given the amount he did have to travel for work, it made sense, and could be passed off as nothing more than being responsible for his own health, all while masking any trips that would otherwise seem odd or out of place.

There was no other information from that time, no mention of injuries, medications, or rehabilitation therapies. Whether those records existed or not was irrelevant at the moment – she knew Holmes had been injured, and suspected the extent of his injuries had been worse than she remembered. She'd only seen him the once, briefly, and not immediately before his miraculous escape.

Mary frowned, allowing herself to be annoyed by that. At the time, circumstances had drawn her attention away, and she hadn't been particularly interested in the young British man being held hostage. She'd surmised at the time that the British government had been informed, and she'd probably been right about that – Mycroft Holmes must have known something about his baby brother being abducted so close a warzone.

But how had he escaped? All of her contacts and the discrete enquires suggested it hadn't been a military intervention. It might still have been – kept so tightly under wraps that only a handful of people knew about it. But the fact that she'd heard nothing, not a single whisper about it, suggested it probably wasn't.

Someone had swept in, invisible, and scooped Sherlock Holmes from the grasp of his captors, returning him to safety.

Such as it was.

And where had they returned him to? That information didn't appear to exist, either. Whoever had taken him and wherever they'd taken him to, they must have left a trace.

Mary, with all of her resources, had yet to find it.

She stifled the irritation, refocusing on the file. Ten years ago, Sherlock Holmes was, for all intents and purposes, a healthy young man without any medical issues.

Except for one thing.

There it was, dated to several months after she'd seen him in Pakistan, innocuous to almost anyone – anyone but her, and John.

His records listed the identification of a small, precancerous mole that needed to be removed. There were notes about the biopsy and the surgery – which would have been very minor, had it actually happened – and follow-up notes about the recovery, including some details about plastic surgery to remove the scar.

The timeline was wrong.

Unless Holmes had left it a very long time, there was far too much recovery time between the initial surgery and the plastic surgery to account for such a minor procedure. Mary very much doubted he was the kind of man to let that go for a day longer than necessary. He wouldn't want a scar marring his body, and certainly had the means to have the problem resolved.

She didn't doubt there'd been plastic surgery; the scars left from his captivity must have been vicious, and he wouldn't want that reminder written all over his body. John certainly would have noticed them if they'd still been there, too, and it would have warranted an explanation. Something like that would be difficult to pass off as an accident or a minor altercation, and explaining the situation was clearly not something Holmes was inclined to do.

Mary wondered where the surgery (or, very likely, surgeries) had been done – there was no mention of it, of course, and she suspected it had been somewhere else, maybe America. Somewhere he'd be unlikely to be recognized, even just in passing.

She followed the trail of information until its end, making a few more mental notes about the discrepancies. The painkillers Holmes had been prescribed following the initial surgery were stronger than necessary for the scale of the procedure. It was possible that Stamford had provided them at Holmes' request, but Mary doubted it. There was no reason for them, not unless something else had happened, like an infection, but the notes about the post-op antibiotics gave no indication of that. Holmes also didn't strike her as someone who indulged in that sort of thing unless he really needed to.

Beyond the dates and the painkillers, nothing else seemed out of the ordinary.

The file had the entire incident resolved within half a year. In reality, it would have been at least that long before he'd recovered enough from the initial injuries to have any follow-up surgeries at all.

But moving forward in time through the file, the next year or so was entirely uneventful, and the next entry was a routine physical, complete with exemplary blood work, which gave no indication whatsoever that anything had been so amiss.

She sighed to herself, sitting back in her chair and rubbing her eyes.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

She fished her second phone from the hidden inner pocket of her handbag, opening the camera. Unlike the one she used for calls and texts, this one was never connected to a network, and had had the capacity to do so completely removed.

She took a few careful photos of the relevant pages of Holmes' medical file, then returned it neatly to the stack, locking it in her desk drawer again. For a moment, she let herself wonder what John Watson had made of this information, and what he planned to do with it. He was well-trained enough as a surgeon and a GP to know something was amiss in those notes, and Mary intended to use that knowledge to her advantage.

But not tonight, she decided, locking the office door behind her as she left. Better to let it simmer awhile, for the doubt to work itself into something substantial. In the meantime, the was a very appealing happy hour with some half-priced cocktails and some decent company just waiting for her to arrive.