A/N: Hello lovely people! My sincere apologies for the lengthy delay between chapters. Sometimes, real life's a bitch. Thanks as always to everyone who's left reviews and encouragement. We pick up the story with our heroes about to set foot on Cuban soil for the first time... And they are not in good moods.
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Chapter Nine.
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Their final flight was, thankfully, a brief one. The plane was small, only a couple of dozen seats, and they stepped out onto the tarmac at Santiago de Cuba into an almost tropical heat. Once outside the shabby, over-warm terminal the Watsons hailed a taxi, leaving Greg and Molly to experience the delights of Cuban public transport. En route to the hotel, John made the taxi pause outside a tiny hardware store where, in accordance with Mycroft's instructions, he picked up a folding hacksaw.
The downmarket hotel where Mycroft had reserved rooms for them had been chosen for one very specific reason: the rooms on the second floor were laid out in mirror image, arranged in such a way that the closets backed on to each other. Upon arrival, Mary switched on the battered television and selected a loud and obnoxious American music channel. Judging by the audio time lag and accompanying static whine, it was probably being broadcast illegally. Ignoring the pixelated boy-band on screen, John went to work with the hacksaw. Twenty minutes later, they had a nice little communicating door in the back of the closet. John swept up the last of the sawdust, tossed it out the window, and turned the music down to a more manageable volume.
"God, this is so old-school," Mary groaned, collapsing backwards onto the bed.
John frowned. "I thought it was pretty recent."
The music seemed familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. A particularly catchy lyric filtered through the background noise, and John grimaced.
'Why are we still so afraid? The things we do deserve their rightful names…'
(Sherlock Holmes, get out of my fucking head).
"Not the song, dingbat," Mary told him, with all of her customary sensitivity. "This, the whole thing… Hacksaws and phone-taps and fake hairdos. It's insanely old-school. Espionage with a capital 'E'. These days people just buy a bloody safe-house."
John frowned. "Well, Mycroft's on a budget for once in his life. Not much of one, maybe, given he's flown us everywhere from London to Timbuktu, but…"
"I hope that's all it is," Mary said darkly.
"What do you mean?"
"Just that his ideas of what he calls leg-work appear to be the tiniest bit out of date. Like Cold War out of date."
He snorted. "I doubt you even remember the Cold War. You were a bloody kid."
"Maybe, but my handler wasn't. Believe me, I've heard stories."
John stifled the flinch that travelled across his face, but he knew Mary had seen it. She sank back against the headboard, looking suddenly tired.
"When are you going to get over it, John?"
John laughed without humour. "Oh, that's what I have to do, is it? 'Get over it'?"
"If you want this to have any chance of working, yes."
John's jaw tightened, the lines about his mouth suddenly more pronounced. "That wasn't the deal. You agreed. I asked if Mary Watson was good enough for you, and you – you said yes."
"And I would have been fine with that," Mary snapped. "Fine. If you want the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids thing, then we can do that. But you don't get to go running round playing secret-agents with Sherlock and then get pissy when I do the same."
"In case you hadn't noticed, Sherlock's not here."
Mary sighed. She raised her chin and looked at him intently.
"We're going to get him back, John."
Her eyes were direct and very blue. Something in their glance made John feel exposed.
Unwilling to confront her, he turned away, stooping to release Billie from her portable travel cot. He lowered his daughter tenderly to the floor, where she made a beeline for the still-blaring television. On-screen, a dozen barely-clad women gyrated humiliatingly (and in defiance of Cuban censorship laws) about a pixelated and posturing rapper. Hastily, John reached for the remote and switched the thing off, ignoring Billie's whine of protest.
"John," Mary said, unwavering. "What are you afraid of?"
It took John a moment to answer. When he did, his voice was low and strained.
"That I don't know you. That I don't know who you are."
Mary made no sign. She didn't run her hand through her hair, or bite her lip, or pinch the bridge of her nose. Mary had no tells.
John had been married to Mary for not-quite two years, and the only guess he had about her was that she might be American because she'd worked for the CIA and didn't take milk in her fucking tea.
Mary tilted her head slightly to one side and looked at him. "How well do you know Sherlock?"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Just tell me. How well?"
John shrugged. "Well enough. Age, weight, shoe size, favourite brand of marmalade. Usual stuff."
"Really? Is that 'usual'?" Mary arched a politely disbelieving eyebrow. "You know those things about all your friends, do you?"
"What?"
Mary gave a dismissive wave. "Doesn't matter. The point is, you know those things about me too."
"Not really, no. Alright, I know that Mary Morstan doesn't like marmalade; but do you? Who knows? Maybe Sherlock could work it out, but I never will."
Mary rolled her eyes. "I've never lied to you about my marmalade preferences, John."
"I don't think that's all that much to be proud of, myself."
"Maybe not. But the point is, I'm no different from him. You say you know him, but you know next to nothing about his history. He tells you nothing about his childhood, his family. You didn't even know about their older brother till Mycroft told you."
John shrugged, irritated. "Yeah. And that annoys me. But you know what? It doesn't actually matter all that much because – and this is the crucial difference, here – I'm not married to him."
"As if that made me matter any more to you than he does!"
"It does."
"How is it any different, John? So you don't know if my parents were Russian or Swedish or Australian. You never knew his either until after he came back."
"Yes," John said coolly. "But I've got to know them rather well since then, as it happens. Something to do with their son being laid out in a hospital with a bullet hole in his chest."
"Aaand we're back to that again!"
Mary was angry now. They didn't talk about it, not really, but it had never entirely gone away. It reared up when they fought, whenever John felt Mary's trustworthiness was in question, but most particularly in arguments about Sherlock. There was an element of stubborn intransigence in John's character that Mary had categorised, privately, as 'wilful blindness'. He refused to discuss or openly acknowledge the things that angered him, yet he couldn't prevent himself from worrying at them, terrier-like, refusing to let go.
That she'd angered him now, she had no doubt. John's face was closed and wrathful, his brows drawn darkly down over his eyes.
"Perhaps if you had told me the truth from the beginning –" he said tightly, still striving for control, and the injustice of it, from a man who had refused to even hear her explanations, hit her hard.
"Really John? Really? Because you would have been so understanding, I'm sure –"
"So maybe that's a risk you should have taken instead of letting our whole marriage be a damned lie!"
"Oh, right, because you've never lied to me before!"
"No I bloody well haven't."
"Oh yeah? And how long did it take you to even tell me about him? Four months of me tiptoeing around like you're some grieving bloody widower…" she feigned sudden recollection, smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. "Oh, wait, that's exactly what you were. And now we're all back on the bloody merry-go-round because he's up and left you and you can barely function like an adult without him."
She paused, head cocked on one side in mock-concern. "Does it bother you, John? The fact that you need him, and he doesn't need you at all?"
The look on John's face was terrible. He lifted his chin and set his jaw, eyes a sudden, frightening blue.
"I never lied to you," he said. "Not once. And if you can't understand why I didn't want to talk about it, then I don't know why we're even having this conversation."
He grabbed his wallet, phone and room key from the bedside table and jammed them into the pocket of his jeans. He picked up his jacket from the end of the bed and shrugged himself into it with such violence that Mary heard a seam tear. At the door to the hotel room, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder.
"I suppose I shouldn't expect you to empathise," he said. "It's hardly something assassins are known for."
The slam of the door as he kicked it behind him rang loudly in the sudden silence. As the echoes faded, Billie began to cry.
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Up next: In which Mary is left holding the baby, and John goes looking for trouble...