Chapter Twenty.
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With a rattle of chain, the guard unlocked the wire gate, releasing the orange-suited prisoners into the compound. Sherlock milled along with them, head-down but not defensive. The other prisoners eyed him, aware that he was an unknown quantity, but unwilling to call attention to it under the eyes of the guards.
The compound was dusty and dry, and there was nothing much to do. Already, Sherlock could feel the back of his neck burning. He turned up the collar of the awful jumpsuit ('Show off', John told him).
Half a dozen of the incarcerated men had struck up a game of basketball. There was a hoop at one end of the compound, and several of the prisoners were clearly very good. Lots of time to practise, he supposed. Aside from the basketball though, activity was desultory at best. Most of the men had broken into little social groups, squatting on their haunches in whatever shade they could find. Sherlock settled himself on the outer edge of a group, near enough to let them know he was listening. Their eyes flickered towards him occasionally, wary, but not overtly hostile. They spoke in a mix of dialects, Pakistani and English, but mostly Arabic. Sherlock listened, and watched.
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Wrapped in a thin towel, Mary stood before the mirror in the tiny hotel bathroom, her arms braced either side of the sink. On the other side of the door, John was getting their daughter dressed. She could hear his patient voice and Billie's piping replies, the way she heard them every morning at home.
"Would you like the yellow shirt or the stripy one?" John was asking, for the third time that morning.
"Ducks!"
"No, the one with the ducks is in the wash. Would you like the yellow one?"
"Lellow lellow lellow ducks!"
Billie's language skills had increased in leaps and bounds since they'd left England. By the time they got out of here, they'd be taking home a fully-fledged toddler.
If she went home.
If England was home.
Mary looked at her hands, braced against the chipped porcelain. The tendons stood out sharply. Blue veins were visible between the knuckles, more prominent than she remembered against the dull skin. Give it another five years, Mary thought, and she'd have the hands of an old woman. She had a sudden visceral picture of her mother's hands, liver-speckled, swollen-knuckled, with their smooth, pink, perfectly-shaped nails. Her mother would have loved a grandchild.
The woman she had been before she was Mary was forty-one years old now. It wasn't so unusual to be orphaned, by that age.
It hadn't been anything spectacular, in the end. Complications related to diabetes, that was all. For over a dozen years she'd been kept sporadically updated on their little lives. Her mother had played bridge on Friday nights; her father had sold the car. Her mother had overdrawn forty-five dollars at the cash machine down the street; her father took medication for his cholesterol. Little facts, little details. The sorts of things that could be communicated in a short dossier, that could be gleaned by a bored junior agent with half an hour's access to credit card records. She'd been in Belize when word trickled through that her father had died – heart attack, eleven days prior. She'd been in Lebanon when she'd heard about her mum.
Mom, she thought, in the quiet of her head, trying the long-unfamiliar accent on for size.
If she took Billie back to Illinois, she could be a Mom too.
And that was the crux of it all, wasn't it? It had all seemed so simple when Mycroft had offered his ultimatum. Her family was dead; Illinois had ceased to hold any appeal for her back in the eighties; and she owed nothing to the CIA but twenty-two years of grief and hard living. But still… It was treason that Mycroft wanted from her, plain and simple. Take the talents that the CIA had given her and turn them upon their makers.
She'd never approved of Guantanamo. There was no God-given right to occupy, to detain, to torture at will. Being American didn't change that. That didn't change because you gave yourself a title and called yourself the Leader of the Free World.
But still.
She ran the water in the basin as cold as it would go. She cupped it in her palms and let it trickle out over her swollen eyes. In the bedroom, John and Billie had progressed to socks.
That was what Mycroft was offering in exchange, of course. John, Billie, the life of a middle-class nurse. But would it hold? John and Billie… Billie, who was named for Sherlock. Already, the edges were fraying. Throw Sherlock back into the mix – Sherlock, whom she loved, but whom John loved more – and who knew what might happen. How long could the house of cards last in the face of that? And if it folded, as it must, what would be left for her in England? Barbed coffee mornings with Janine; a sad little affair with someone like David; occasional wet-work for Mycroft-the-bastard?
She still remembered reciting the pledge of allegiance in grade school. Hair in two pigtails, hand over heart.
They didn't do that sort of thing in England. It was too overt, too brash, too open to mockery.
But still, she remembered it.
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In the end, it took them two days to get everything organised. Two days of increasingly unbearable tension, during which everyone was snappy and short-tempered with everyone else. Mary, Mycroft and Irene spent most of those two days cloistered together, talking out strategies and contingency plans and conducting a little delicate hacking. John tried not to resent it, but it was hard. It wasn't as if Sherlock had ever really explained his thought process, but he'd usually shared it at least. Bits and pieces, scattered thoughts, always with the assumption that John himself should have been able to put it together if only he was clever enough. They'd made a game of it sometimes, Sherlock handing him just enough to let him know which threads to pull. On the rare occasions when John had managed to put something together before he had, Sherlock's eyes had gleamed with pride.
Mycroft's scheming, by contrast, left him feeling as if he'd been weighed and found wanting – dismissed, with nothing of use to contribute until the grownups had made their plans for him. John resented it deeply, but Mary was in no mood to conciliate. Since the evening of their aborted truce she had been both smug and dismissive, her conversation peppered with casual cruelties and snide comments. She seemed on the one hand to be constantly pushing John down, and on the other to be insinuating herself amongst his friends – implying that she knew them better, that she was trusted more, that John himself was an outsider amongst people he'd known for years. It was a tendency he'd noticed in her before, something schoolgirlish and petty that was among her least attractive qualities. He knew that he had hurt her with his revelation regarding Billie's name, but he did not fully understand the reason, nor know how to put it right.
Billie herself was another cause of tension. Mycroft had arranged for Billie and Molly to be met at the airport and taken to safety by a former colleague, one of only three people, he assured them, who had his complete and utter trust. She had been Mycroft's superior when he first joined the Service, but had retired to New Zealand some twenty years ago. John had even met her – a tiny, grey-haired, vigorous old woman called Em who had taken him tramping up Mount Ngaruhoe and beaten him soundly in a sparring match. That had been back when he was still going out with Sarah; back before Moriarty or the Woman, before the roof of St Bart's, before an unseen shot on the highest floor of C.A.M. tower. It seemed a lifetime ago.
As the day of their intended rescue approached, John had been comforted by the thought that Billie, at least, would soon be out of danger. He had reckoned, however, without Mary, who refused to let their daughter out of her sight.
"Don't be more of an idiot than you can help," she'd snapped at him. "He's not trying to keep her safe, he's trying to use her to control me!"
"She's a child! The further away from this mess we can get her, the better."
"Oh yes, because I'm sure Mycroft Holmes has our daughter's best interests at heart! She's his insurance policy, John! He thinks he's got me where he wants me so long as he's got my daughter in his pocket. He doesn't trust me!"
"Frankly, I don't trust you either," John had told her – a comment that had earned him a night on the bedroom floor and yet another morning of chilly silence.
Still, Mycroft and John together might have been able to override Mary had it not been, curiously enough, for Molly. She didn't want to leave.
"I care about Sherlock too," she'd told them, chin thrust outwards defiantly. "I want to help. I was ok with just being the babysitter when I thought you needed me, but I'm not going to take her away from her mum if Mary doesn't want me to."
In the face of Mary and Molly's combined determination, Mycroft had given in, though it didn't prevent him from getting the last word.
"Frankly, Ms. Agnew, if you want to risk your daughter's life, that's your own affair," he'd said, sneering down his aristocratic nose. "Though it might behove you to consider the effect of any possible repercussions as regards your marriage."
John, needless to say, was not happy.
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John slept poorly the night before their intended rescue mission, his dreams tangled and vague. James Sholto appeared with his arm blown off, something that had never happened in life. In the dream, James was cursing at him, his eyes flashing, blood flying from the sleeve of his fatigues as he gestured. The sleeve had been carefully folded and pinned back above the elbow, but nobody had thought to staunch the blood flow. James had raised his remaining arm and pointed, and John had seen in the distance a long dusty line of armoured vehicles creeping over the hill. And then a shot had flowered in the middle of James's chest, and he had slumped earthwards with a soft sigh. And John, turning, had seen that it was Mary who held the gun.
"I did it for you, John," she told him. "Moriarty had snipers watching. They would have killed you if I hadn't done it."
Her voice was rich and deep, and when she stooped to kiss him, she was tall and thin and unyielding, with enormous, pale hands.
He woke disquieted, and the memory of those large hands followed him as he dressed. In the dream, the hands had been cool and assured, without a trace of the unpractised awkwardness he suspected they'd exhibit in real life. Bluffing, he thought with a sense of satisfaction, before reminding himself that it hadn't been real, and that the ulterior motives he was so pleased to have seen through belonged to his own subconscious.
He frowned as he pulled a shirt over his head, his battered ribs twinging.
The thing was, he and Sherlock had never been like that. He knew what people saw in them, and he knew they weren't wrong. He knew it was there. But it was just a potential, an amorphous something that neither of them had ever pursued. He didn't consider that this made them different from any other pair of friends. Sex, and sexual attraction, were intrinsic components of adulthood – and sexual interest sparked, to a greater or lesser extent, between most of the people he knew. The same potential that existed between him and Sherlock existed, in some form or other, between Sherlock and Irene, Irene and Mycroft, Molly and Greg, Greg and Sally, Mycroft and Mary, Mary and Irene – even, in a strange way, between Mary and Sherlock. Every adult friendship he'd ever observed was full of those little sparks – those moments of shared laughter, of flirtatiousness and innuendo, of eye contact held a moment too long. People made those connections every day and chose, just as deliberately, not to act on them. He didn't understand why the pull that existed between him and Sherlock should be considered any different.
He'd had dreams about kissing friends before now. Molly, once, after a day she'd spent flirting with Sherlock even harder than usual. Sally had appeared a couple of times, usually on days when she'd been particularly irritating. It wasn't as though Sherlock was any different.
Still, he thought, as he pulled a bulletproof vest on over his shirt, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start to the day.
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All in all, it was a sorry bunch of rescuers who assembled late that afternoon to receive their final instructions. The dislike that had simmered for months between Mary and Mycroft had progressed, in the past few days, to a fiercely watchful mistrust. John was hard pressed to remember a time he had ever been so furious with his wife, a fact that in no way prevented him from being almost equally furious with Molly. Molly and Greg, for some reason incomprehensible to the rest of the group, were avoiding one another like the plague. Irene, by some near-psychic facility, had divined the most embarrassing portion of John's dream, and had responded with appropriate maturity by treating him to a constant homoerotic badinage. Needling him about Sherlock was, curiously, the only thing she had even slightly in common with Mary, the two of them having saved time and stolen a march on everybody else by simply loathing one another on sight.
By the time they clambered into the recently-acquired van late that afternoon, hardly anyone was speaking to anyone else.
The drive was undertaken in tense silence. John was at the wheel with Irene riding shotgun, while the rest of the team maintained a stony distance. The only effort at communication, in fact, came from Billie, who was grizzling incessantly over the combination of a mild heat rash and a mislaid toy rabbit. John found it difficult to wrap his head around the fact that he was driving a stolen, shoddily-armoured vehicle containing his infant daughter towards a secure facility infamous for the most brutal interrogation techniques in the world, but clearly that was just his life. As the van barrelled recklessly through potholes, he seriously contemplated the prospect of just walking away. He could take Billie and get the hell out of there, leave Irene and Mycroft to their absurdities and intrigues, leave bloody, back-stabbing, not-her-real-name Mary to the life of violence that she obviously missed.
He thought of Sherlock's upturned coat collar and his coffee-with-two-sugars. He thought of a handshake on an airport runway and a postcard from Copenhagen. He kept driving.
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"Ok," John said, puffing out a long breath. "This is it."
He pulled off the road into a sheltered grove three miles north of the camp. A borrowed army truck sat waiting for them beneath the scrubby trees. They piled out of the van and, in silence, began transferring their equipment from one vehicle to the other.
John passed the van keys into Molly's hand.
"It'll be ok," she told him, bouncing Billie gently on her hip. "We'll see you soon."
"Yeah, I know."
He let out another long breath, then stooped and pressed a rough kiss against Billie's cheek. She kissed him back, slobbery and uncoordinated.
"Dada."
"Yeah, I love you too baby."
He kissed Molly as well. "Thanks Mol."
"Any time."
"No really." He swallowed. "Look, if things go wrong…"
"They won't."
"If they do. If we… My parents would take her, ok? I'm not asking you to do it all alone."
"I know."
"And my sister's got money. She'll help."
"I know, John."
"Ok."
"It'll be alright. Go on." She smiled tremulously and squeezed his arm. "Bring him back safe."
Throat too tight for speech, John nodded.
Mary kissed Billie and wrapped Molly in a brief hug. Greg kissed them both, a hand on each of their heads. Irene and Mycroft nodded their goodbyes. One by one, they climbed into the battered lorry. John started the engine and released the handbrake. As they pulled away, Molly had a last glimpse of his set face and blue, ice-chip eyes. Then the lorry was behind the trees, around the corner of the road and gone, with only a thin dust-cloud to show that it had been there at all.
And then there was only Molly left; alone in a foreign country, in possession of an armoured van and a fifteen-month-old child.
"The things we do for your Uncle Sherlock…" she murmured.
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A/N: Sorry about the huge delay in updates... All I can say is that S4 seeeeeriously messed things up. It's taken me this long to recover from it. Much love to anybody who's still reading. :-)