Sherlock
Waking is slow, and cold. By some instinct I know the world outside my own head will be too bright and I don't even try to open my eyes. Not yet. I don't need to, anyway. I know that light. It has a very precise, sharp quality. It'll give you a headache even if you don't start out with one. But it belongs, here in a place of precise, sharp instruments, and precise, sharp smells. Almost like acetone, almost like nail varnish remover, but so much less personal than that. All about washing away, about destroying, eating everything away to a microbial level. Bleaches and disinfectants. I feel like someone filled my skull with them, and what overflowed ran down my throat and left it burning. The burning, then, in its turn, smouldered through the rest of me, through flesh and organs, clearing it all away, accounting neatly for the feeling of hollowness. Yes. That's what happened. I've just been cleaned, that's all. It's a bit like having one's stomach pumped, though nothing quite so simple as that.
Hospital, by the way. In case you hadn't gotten that. Maybe you need to open your eyes, see all the white and steel and aqua green before you'd know that. Hospital. Exactly where I wasn't supposed to end up again. It's not fair. It's not breaking your word, your resolution, if it's forced upon you. It's not. It's not and I tell myself that and I tell it and tell it but… I'm still exactly where I wasn't supposed to end up again.
Can't be too hard on yourself. People say that. I've heard them. Nobody ever said it to me, but they say that. People should shut up.
The voice that starts saying my name should shut up; it's going right through me. The hand shaking my arm should take itself off and not come back. It wouldn't even be here if it knew what an idiot I've been.
The hand becomes familiar before the voice does. There's something wrong with the voice, but the hand can't disguise itself. It's long and thin and soft with never being dirty or used. Wonder how that feels. But the hand is familiar and demands to be grabbed, now that I can move, grabbed hard and told, "Mycroft, this wasn't me. I didn't take anything. This wasn't me. I didn't-"
"Quiet," the voice says (I'm reluctant to attribute it. The hands are right but there's still something wrong with the voice). "I believe you."
Right, fine, I'll accept that wordlessly, gift horses, mouths, fine… "Really?"
"Angle of the puncture, concomitant bruising… I don't believe you did that to yourself."
Incredible acts of fraternal faith; it has to be him. Risking the punishment of the strip lighting, I just crack the nearside eye open. The blurry silhouette is compatible, all the colours are right in the right places. That'll do.
"Which leaves only the question-" he begins again.
"Was it worth it? No, I'm sorry. I don't think I found anything useful."
"I was going to ask if you didn't do it who did? From what the doctors tell me it wasn't… your usual either. Sort of an ad-hoc attack, by all accounts."
Now, there are ways to deal with this. The unaccustomed instinct is to tell him the truth. Danielle, about so high, dark hair, you tried to have her killed last year? Yeah, you'll find her in the same place as before. You'd know that if you'd bothered to check your facts, rather than just assume people flee the country because they tremble at your very name. Went to see her, pissed her off and, well, the rest is history. Hm? What's that, brother dear? Rather suspicious she made this little attempt on my life just as I was forced to tell her about your theory? Well, you know I'm such a trusting person it hadn't occurred to me but now that you bloody mention it…
Danielle gets picked up, keeps her mouth shut under questioning, keeps her mouth shut under torture, is killed for not telling what she knows, nobody learns anything.
"They came at me from behind," I tell Mycroft. "I didn't see anything."
"You were found collapsed in Camden Town. Does that help, at all?"
If it doesn't he's going to keep asking. Heavens forfend he goes down there himself; the sight of that street might jog his own memory and then we're back to that other scenario. "I was," I tell him, "working my way up. From people I used to know to people who… who had a better chance of knowing whether or not there was any truth in what you were thinking."
"Sherlock," he sighs, like that was really a very stupid, amateurish play to make. Which it really was. Naughty me, awfully bad form. But in my current condition I don't think that's a half-bad effort, actually.
How to change the subject and get some formalities out of the way all at once, "Mycroft, did they.. give me anything?"
"Nothing. Fluids, epinephrine for lowered blood pressure. Nothing that would be worrying." A relief. A very real, palpable relief. I had already been lucky with the contents of the needle itself. A painkiller, she said, something she'd been taking to make her wounds easier to live with. Clearly a benzodiazepine of some sort, based on its immediate effect, and my reaction. My luck is in how easily absorbed those chemicals are, hence their effectiveness as painkillers; they have next to no neurological effect because very little makes it as far as the brain, and the sheer scale of the dose knocked me out too quickly for me to experience any pleasurable physiological effect. Getting away with a clean hospital visit too is about as much as I could ever ask for.
"Sherlock, if you remember anything-?"
No. No, sorry, I'd changed the subject. We had moved on.
Oh, but I do remember one thing. I remember how I ended up there in the first place. I wasn't getting anywhere with the other business. "Did you do any better than I did?"
If it's possible to hear the passing of one of those brief, barely-there smiles he is sometimes prone to, that's what I hear. In the same secret sort of way as before I open my eye again to get a look at him, telling me everything before he even opens his mouth, puffed up, looking really rather pleased himself. He only deflates to answer, and that's only when he sees me laughing.
"Well, not to rub salt in the wound…"
Jim
Danielle stayed away last night. She met my messenger so she'd know where to come. But last night she stayed with a friend. That's the phrase she used and I didn't question it. It was just so she could be sure she was absolutely clear
This morning, I've had Moran meet her a couple of streets away. Not that I don't trust her, but given the circumstances I wanted her checked over for any devices of any kind. When he comes back with her, she stands in the hall with her hands up. Says, "The clothes I met him in are still at my place, the clothes I left there in are in a pub toilet four or five miles from here, so I'm pretty sure I'm not being tracked. And I've put an old sim in a new phone so that's clean too."
"And nobody followed you?"
"Oh, gosh, you know, I forgot to even look…"
"You're not funny."
"Be calm," she says. Moran's been saying the same thing all night. I tell her the same thing I've been telling him, all bloody night. That I'm out of house and home and none of us know how safe we are, never mind the work, never mind poor Creepy Carl, who represents, by the way, a rather elaborate and experimental piece of work that we're all very much invested in and nobody more so than me. Danielle, again, like it's going to make any difference says, "Be calm."
"Don't bother, love," Moran says. He walks past us both, headed back up the stairs, to his post where he knows he belongs and he's in charge of it and knows who he is. "I've been trying, but he's inconsolable."
She rolls her eyes, "Then you're not saying the right things. We've gone over this before."
He shakes his head, surrendering, "And that's why it's your job."
And he lumbers off, one stair at a time, at his own pace. I wait until he's gone before I turn to her. "What does he mean, 'your job'?" She lifts up her hand, twirls one finger. The meaning is clear. And somehow I find myself actually turning around, like it says. "What's 'your job'? Is this some other part of the conspiracy that leads to mimicking competitions?"
"Oh, darling, those aren't competitions. I'm like the team that travels with the Harlem Globetrotters for their show games; I was never not going to get beaten. But it makes Seb feel nice."
"Why did you turn me round?"
"I didn't. You're leading me. To the kitchen, so that I can make you tea."
"That's not what I want."
"Well, you're not going to get anything stronger. For one you'll only get wound up, for another it's too early and last-though-never-least we have business to discuss."
Over the course of five tea-making minutes, certain other things are said, in a low, level voice that the kettle sometimes drowns out. That there is nothing in her place that could lead them to me or mine. That there is no direct threat right now. That our enemies have only rumour and conjecture for now. That, though she is totally in favour of this decision to bug out to a safe house, it will very likely prove to have been a purely precautionary measure.
And there is, much as I hate to admit it, something very comforting about an exhausted posh tart with a mouthful of marbles using phrases like 'purely precautionary measure'. A vintage radio voice, you listen and find yourself believing and nodding without really hearing the words, saying like a creature hypnotised, yes, yes, loose lips do sink ships. Definitely going out to dig for victory. Buying Arm & Hammer toothpaste as we speak, love, yes, yes indeed…
But there is one thing still holding me to the world, like the jolt when a bomb fell somewhere and the radio just crackled for a bit, "What does he mean 'your job', though, that was my question."
She puts a mug down in front of me (and I look it over, naturally, being in a strange house and not knowing how long it's been lying around), smiles and says, "Jim maintenance."
"Keep grinning, Cheshire, we'll see you disappear. Now tell me what happened."
She does. It is a long and harrowing story and as sarcastic as she might want to be about it, I'm glad she went through all that calming business first. I don't even want to know half of this. And yet I have to listen, and very carefully, because I start to get the feeling she's censoring herself. Just some little thing she's holding back. Like, she says they used a 'lackey' to try and get to her. Which I don't exactly believe and I don't believe they would believe she'd believe it either.
"I know what you want to ask," she says, "but it doesn't matter. What matters is who sent him. And that's what I needed you calm for-"
"Why?"
"Because I'm not calm about it. Took me all night just levelling out. Somebody ought to be calm." She stands behind my chair, at the back door. Pretending it's only so she can smoke. But I do her the favour of not turning round, either, not looking at her. "You probably won't even remember the name, but I do. Jon would… I mean, Seb. Seb would remember. I don't even want to tell him because-"
She can't get as far as actually saying it. I help. "Mycroft Holmes."
There's a hiss. It's probably just her letting a lungful of cancer go. Probably. "I want him not to be a problem anymore, Jim. Do you think we can do that? You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if I was taking this too personally, but I want to rip his genteel heart out and eat it without cutlery for using that poor, sad boy. Could that be arranged?"
Silly girly. Doesn't she know who she's talking to? We'll come to questions about her poor sad boy later. For now I'll just presume he's a shag she's especially fond of. That's always at least an eighty per-cent chance. No, we'll leave him for later, because for now she's in distress. You wouldn't spot this if you didn't know her. It's a boon, to someone in our sort of business, and I have similar tendencies myself. Here is my advice to all who would hear:
If you strike at people like us, aim to kill. And if you miss, and oh God if you wound us, run. Because we will eat your genteel hearts, and not a knife or fork in sight.