(Author's note: This chapter makes extensive use of dialogue from "The Empty Hearse," written by Mark Gatiss and property of the BBC. Credit should also be given to arianedevere at livejournal, whose tireless transcription efforts have made life so much nicer for the fanfic writer.)
Seven months later, Sherlock Holmes rose from the dead. He did this, for reasons which passethed all of Mary's understanding, while disguised as a pantomime French waiter.
That incident was the culmination of a day that had started off with extreme promise and then gone sharply downhill. Over breakfast John, with forced nonchalance, had said that he'd got a dinner reservation at a posh restaurant they liked in the Marylebone road. They seldom dined there because it would actually be much more affordable to stay home, burning pound notes to keep warm.
Mary had said with a bright smile, "Oooh, that'll be nice," and then had a minor panic attack and phoned her hairstylist to beg for an emergency appointment after work. She did this because she'd gradually become aware over the last few weeks that John was working up the nerve to ask her to marry him. He'd been subtle about it at first, dropping casual statements that suggested he was expecting her to be around in the distant future and seeing how she responded. Then he'd become increasingly agitated and started blurting things like, "That woman's ring is pretty, isn't it?" whenever they were out.
It was adorable, and she was fairly sure she'd managed to steer him in the direction of something nice as far as rings went… not too expensive, not too ornate, and not a solitaire. But if he didn't manage to pop the question soon she was going to have to put him out of his misery and just ask him, or he was going to stress himself to death.
Because of course she wanted to marry him. Of course she did. The last seven months had been the best time of her life.
She'd had two previous long-term relationships in her life, and both of them had turned out, eventually, to be chuckleheads. John was not a chucklehead. He was troubled, and angry, and continuously frustrated at how overqualified he was for his life, but never a chucklehead. It had been remarkable how perfectly he'd fit into her life, as if there'd been a John-shaped hole that she hadn't even known was there...she had made the mistake of using this particular analogy to Janine in the early daydreamy stages of the relationship and the younger woman had snorted red wine out her nose.
Cheap joke though it sounded like, it was true. Everything seemed so natural, with him. They transitioned from "regular booty call" to "full-out dating" without any additional fuss. Her lease ended, and she moved out of her place into his, bringing her deeply dissatisfied cat along. His lease ended shortly thereafter, so they spent a few days filling out banker's paperwork and a few weeks being dragged around on Saturdays by cheery women with big hair. Then all of a sudden they owned a small townhouse in Maida Vale which would probably be quite nice once they'd put an additional fifty thousand pounds worth of work into it.
They had blissfully christened every room in the place, including the stairs. Twice, because it turned out that her standing four inches above him was just what was necessary to make all the standing positions that had never been all that successful… well, very successful indeed.
She'd gotten him to go see a therapist, which had taken surprisingly little nudging on Mary's part. He'd just shrugged and said, "It's probably about time I started getting better again," at which her heart had clenched up because apparently she had completely gone soft. She'd accidentally mostly cured his drinks problem by the simple expedient of keeping him busy in the evenings. When the therapy made his PTSD symptoms worse before it made them better, she'd held him through his nightmares and said she loved him.
Albeit the first time she did that it wasn't… entirely on purpose. She was really not all that good at this stuff.
Mary had looked at John one evening while he was carefully julienning bell peppers for the stir fry they were going to eat, and realized, suddenly, that she was happy. Really almost all the time now. It was so far from being her state of nature that it had taken her a long time to recognize it, but she was.
Even the little annoyances that came with living with a man seemed to glide off her shoulders. When John developed, the flat second she moved in, a selective blindness to dirty dishes? Hell, it was only dishes. When she shyly asked him if there were any fantasies that he'd always wanted to try and he came back, hopefully, with "two women at once?" He could keep right on hoping. When he took ten days camping in the Pennines with his Army buddies and came back with a truly fug beard, which he then shaved off apart from a less-fug but still awful mustache? She would enjoy the improved sensations during oral sex and ignore that he looked like a porn star from 1972.
And now they were going to get engaged and she was practically floating through the day singing "La la."
Until Katrina, one of the other nurses, developed what Mary and everyone else at the practice were quite sure were Braxton-Hicks contractions. They could not, however, prove this to Katrina's satisfaction, since they didn't have a tocodynamometer or any OB cover at that site. Mary mentally rehearsed the conversation that began, "You can't take off and go to your obstetrician just because you're eight weeks preterm and think you're in labor, I want to get maaaaaaried." She realized, with a sigh, that there was no way that she wouldn't come off as a psychopathic bitch and agreed to take the last two hours of Katrina's shift. And charge of the after-hours nurse phone line.
Which was okay. It meant she'd have to rush, couldn't drink and might get interrupted at any moment, but it was fine.
When she finished her extended shift, she changed into her lucky bottle green silk dress and fancy new underwear (burgundy satin, with ties at the sides of the pants) (!) in the staff lockers, and was almost out the door when a flushed and ill looking toddler being carried past her projectile-vomited all down her back.
Mary turned on her heel and walked back into the staff lockers, to applause and a chorus of "Strike the board." She showered (it had soaked right through to the skin), changed back into her scrubs and saw that they had, indeed, replaced the"33 (Nigel)" with a"0 (Mary)" on the "days without surprise bodily fluid attack" whiteboard. Mary felt that sometimes she could cheerfully throttle every single one of her co-workers.
She was running very late, now, so she jogged to her salon and did her face up while Courtney shellacked her hair into careful waves. Then she speed-walked to the nearest store and spent far too much money on something purple with a pattern of leaves.
When she skidded into the restaurant, twenty minutes behind schedule, John jumped to his feet, rattling the glassware on the table. He groped for something in the inside pocket of his coat… and then he stopped. And stared.
"Gorblimey," he said, "Look at you. You're stunning."
Because it was actually a perfect moment, of course the nurse phone line rang.
She fished it out of the pocket of her coat, showed the blocky, old-fashioned flip phone to John, and said, "It's work. I should probably…"
"Go on. I'll be right here."
Ten minutes passed with her leaning forehead-first on a wall in the reception area, because it turned out that there were in fact many ways to say "Yes, that sounds like you're having a heart attack, you need to hang up and dial 999" and the patient was surprisingly dithering, or, at least surprisingly if you hadn't spent five years dealing with sick Englishmen, and eventually she just put him on hold and dialed 999 herself and then transferred the call to his GP.
Mary took a deep breath and went back down the stairs to where John was waiting for her. She apologized for being late, sat, and said, "Now then, what did you want to ask me?"
Then she mentally slapped herself because John hadn't actually said he wanted to ask her a damn thing, and there was really such a thing as being too keen. But maybe it was for the best, because some of the tension dropped away from his shoulders and he smiled, slightly.
John was seriously about three words from actually proposing when a waiter with a bottle of champagne and a ridiculous accent popped up like a jack-in-the-box and began regaling them with a list of its qualities as described by someone who didn't actually drink wine but had read some labels. They made eyes at each other and valiantly repressed their giggles and John tried to drive him off until…
Until her soon-to-be-fiance, aged 43, type A personality, both parents prematurely dead of cardiovascular disease, turned slate grey and stopped breathing, and Mary immediately thought "Oh, God, that heart attack on the phone was an omen."
Happily, it wasn't. But a few moments later, when her mental card index finally pulled up the right name to match the face (she had an excellent memory but sometimes when people were wildly out of their proper context it took a bit) she wondered whether the heart attack might not have been preferable. Men recovered from heart attacks, all the time. A living Sherlock Holmes might prove much more challenging.
Just at the instant, though, her time was occupied by keeping John from murdering his undead best friend. The weird thing was, she could tell… he wasn't actually angry. She'd seen him angry, and that was a cold and unsettling thing. He was ecstatic. But somehow a wire had gotten crossed in his brain to the "punching" nerves.
They got thrown, in rapid succession, out of three separate restaurants and then Mary put her foot down and said, firmly, "John. Let's go home. Go get us a cab, okay? You two can finish your talk tomorrow when you've had some time to cool down."
"Oh, fuck that," John snorted, "We're quits, Sherlock. You cannot treat people - treat me- like this. Not anymore. We're done."
He stalked off and left her standing on the street corner with Sherlock, who had both hands clapped over his nose and a sullen, offended look on his long face. Mary got a sachet of tissues out of her purse and passed one over to him, "Here."
Sherlock dabbed at the blood oozing out of his nose and said, "I dod't udderstad. I said I'b sorry. Isd't thad whad you're supposed to do?"
Mary exhaled an exasperated puff, "Gosh, you really don't know anything about human nature, do you?" She was honestly slightly disappointed that Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, who she'd only heard described in the glowing tones reserved for the beloved dead, had made such a dim misstep. Sherlock, by the looks of it, felt much the same way, since he smiled vaguely down at her and replied, "Nature? No. Human…? No."
"I'll talk him round," Mary said.
Sherlock lowered the kleenex, and for the first time he really seemed to be looking at her. His eyes were pale, and sharp. It was unsettling, given... everything.
"You will?"
"Oh, yeah," she said, confidently, though of course she intended doing no such thing. She just wanted a breathing space to figure out what the hell she was going to do next. In any case, John didn't give her any opportunity to talk to him about anything, because after a few minutes of silence in the cab he began a sustained rant about everything wrong with Sherlock Holmes.
It was quite a long list.
They got home, and Mary kicked off her high heels and hung her faux fur wrap in the coat closet. She made two portions of pot noodles (sighing regretfully over the risotto al funghi with truffle brined egg that she had been planning to eat). John didn't want his noodles so she ate both, because she hadn't had anything since lunch and that was ten hours ago. She took off her dress and changed into pyjamas, brushed thirty pounds worth of professional styling out of her hair. And John kept right on going for this entire process.
"It's the sheer fucking sack of the man that really gets to me," John finally said, chest bare and mouth full of toothpaste foam, "Acting like I couldn't keep a bloody secret when he can't go two minutes without saying exactly what's on his mind."
Mary made a moue and said, "Well, but it wasn't really just a secret, was it? It's not as though you could have taken off and gone with him. That'd let everyone know something about his death was weird which would sort of defeat the purpose. You would have had to have stayed behind anyway. It's… you'd have to have lived a double life. Acting one way and knowing, all the time, that it wasn't the truth. To everyone. To... me, even. It'd probably have been quite difficult."
It was, in fact, extremely difficult. And she'd been doing it in one form or another for nearly twenty years, so she should know.
"Apparently he thought Molly could manage it," John replied, spitting his toothpaste into the sink.
"And I can't imagine it was easy for her, either. Although… I know you think she's a bit of a doormat but there's a lot going on under the surface over there. But he might have actually thought he was doing you a favor. And I know," she emphasized, before he could interrupt her, "That that's not true. But people sometimes do dumb things, for people they love."
Exhibit A, of course, was getting almost engaged to the best friend of a professional detective who was also the brother of an MI-6 senior official while simultaneously trying to maintain a false identity. That right there would probably guarantee her promotion to Captain Dumb.
John rolled his eyes at her and said, "Love? Look, Mary, I know there have always been rumors about me and Sherlock but they aren't true."
Mary rolled her eyes right back and said, "Yes, I know, you're intensively straight and he's…?"
"No idea, though I think it's likeliest he reproduces by budding."
"Anyway. People love each other in all sorts of ways. He comes to you when he needs help... Which, honestly, you might actually consider doing. I'd prefer if we didn't have any terror attacks here in London. Just as someone who takes public transport a lot."
John stared down at her, dumbstruck, "Christ, you do, don't you?"
He sat on the end of the bed next to her and scrubbed his hands over his face.
"I'm sorry about tonight. I'm not… happy… that I acted that way in front of you. It can't have been much fun for you."
"Oh, Jimmy," she said, reaching out a hand to stroke his cheek. John quirked a half smile at the sound of his pet name and leaned into her palm, and Mary continued, "It obviously wasn't what I was expecting. But life with you is never boring and I like that."
"And with you-" John hesitated, then took her hand off his face and held it in both his own, "Look, Mary, at the restaurant, before we were interrupted, I was going to-"
"I know. And I'll say yes, obviously, so you can relax. But-"
"But what?"
"I do want… a proper proposal. Where I show up on time and don't have to work and you get to give your speech and don't get into a fistfight. With dinner, and wine, and all that," Mary said, confidently, though she felt deeply embarrassed that she actually did want all of those things, like some crack-brained teenager dawdling over bridal magazines.
John seemed to understand. Or at least, he smiled slyly at her and said, "So you're trying to tell me you're not even a bit curious to get a look at the ring?"
Mary considered, until both she and John noticed she was faintly vibrating where she sat and he laughed and went to fish it out of his jacket pocket. In its red clamshell box, the ring was… well, it was pretty much perfect, a very simple three-stone mount, low profile enough that she wouldn't have to take it off to wear rubber gloves at work.
"Go on then," she said, extending her left hand.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
The ring was maybe a half a size too big, so she'd have to get it refitted, but Mary didn't even care.
"I'll wear it," she said, decisively, "But that doesn't mean you aren't still on the hook for the proposal."
They kissed, chastely but firmly, meaning it as a promise. John asked, shyly, "Can I…?" with gestures that indicated what he meant, so Mary switched off the lights, leaned back into the pillows and let him rest his head on her stomach while she carded her fingers through his hair. He liked to lie like this, in the dark, when he had his bad days.
"How about tomorrow after work?" he said, finally, "I don't think I can get us back into the Winter Garden… I practically had to promise them our firstborn to get that table and I doubt they'll welcome me back after all that. But I can find someplace."
"The pub down the end of our street's fine," she said, stroking the coarser, greying hair above his ears.
"And you shouldn't take the train tomorrow. Just drive. We can afford your parking," John continued, because he was really crap at being able to communicate his nicer emotions and had to do these absurd male protector things instead.
"Okay."
"I'll… I don't know what I'm going to do about all this. But I'm not going over there."
"No?"
"Nope," John said, popping the "p," "Sherlock can bloody well stew."
"If that's how you feel, that's fine," Mary replied, and honestly it sounded pretty much ideal to her. But John barely slept that night, and the next day sort of assaulted one of his patients. Mary suspected Mr. Szikora had deserved it since she knew tragically well that having him as a patient was signing on for sexual harassment. Still, it was terribly out of character for John and he was clearly not doing well. Therefore after she finished her half-day, she decided the hell with "sisters before misters," blew Cath off, and drove over to Baker Street.
Or… about a quarter of a mile from Baker Street, anyway, since there was a reason she mostly preferred not to drive through central London and there was literally no place any nearer that she could park. Mary thought, getting out of her car, that ten minutes of conversation with Sherlock would probably help her to clarify her thoughts on what to do about him. Because really, she thought, how could anyone possibly just look at someone and know everything about them? It was probably a combination of John's literary talents and a lot of heavy-duty behind-the-scenes research, like she had always done when she'd been on a mission.
Her phone pinged with a lot of religious gibberish, and Mary sighed. She really preferred the British telecommunications system except for the constant stream of text messaging spam she received. Reporting them never did any good either. She was making to delete it when her brain informed her, "No, Mary, this is important and you need to pay attention now."
It gave her this notification in her own voice… but her old accent.
She narrowed her eyes and reread, with a clarity that was unusual for her nowadays. Then her eyes widened. And then she ran for help.