Author's note: This chapter is not especially pleasant. And so I am giving what I expect will be the last reader's warning: we have both an incident of nonconsensual sexual contact and a consensual but fairly fully described sex scene. I'm probably making it sound worse than it is and set the fic's rating with this chapter in mind, but I'd really not rather hurt anyone's feelings so feel free to skip if that's likely to be upsetting.
The things you worry about never happen. She'd always said so, and she'd really never been proven wrong. The plane you think is going to crash will land safely, the boyfriend you think is going to cheat will be entirely faithful until he starts to bore you to death, obsessive self breast exams will never find a lump.
This belief of Mary's was not founded in irrational optimism. That had never been a problem for her. It was the purely cynical observation that horror, when it comes into your life, is always a surprise.
It began with a text. Four texts, actually, while she was charting at her desk.
-I like the nose.
-Very pretty. Better than the old one.
-Not so sure about blonde, though.
-Sort of… aging.
Mary picked up her mobile, frowned, and replied,
-Wrong number.
-Sorry.
And she didn't really think about it again, since she got similar things frequently. Mary was seriously considering getting a new number. She completed her daily rounds… a short set, being it was her half day shift. Wellness check on child with Down syndrome, new baby, new baby, new baby. All very ordinary. She was thinking about the wedding: how it was absolutely insane that she was expected, as a woman with no interest or prior experience in party planning, to put together a formal dinner with dancing for 100 without any outside help especially given the stupidity and slovenliness of the English customer service industry and-
Pling.
-So this isn't you?
Mary had seen the photograph that came in with the text, many times. It was a group of young women in hiking gear, smiling widely, arms linked, at the summit of the mount of the Holy Cross. The woman… girl, really... in the middle, was petite and had auburn hair, and Mary put her hand to her mouth.
-Or this?
The same woman, slightly older, raising a frozen strawberry daiquiri in a toast to the camera.
-Or these?
A small, serious-looking girl in a red pinafore. A teenager with intensive braces and an honor roll certificate. A thirtysomething woman in a dark turtleneck sweater trying very hard not to be photographed.
Finally, and most damningly…
A man, giving a speech to a crowd para mob in front of the Porta Macedonia in Skopje. A very famous, very bad, and now very dead man. The face of the woman who killed him had thoughtfully been circled in red, in the crowd.
A twenty-two year old, face-on, smiling proudly, with an unfortunate mid-nineties "Rachel" bob. This last shot was a scanned copy of her very first CIA identity badge.
-See, I was looking for Amy. Though that's not you any longer, is it?
Ah, Mary thought, so when this finally happens your hands go numb and you can taste copper. How interesting.
She was shaking. She was fucking shaking, so badly that it took her three tries to manage to tap out:
-Who is this?
-St. James's Park. If you leave now, you can be there in thirty minutes. Take the Jubilee line. I will know if you don't.
Mary tucked her mobile into her pocket, and looked around. Was she actually being watched, right now? Cameras were everywhere in London, just part of the backdrop, she barely noticed them anymore. And there were tracking devices, RFID and GPS… God, probably a half dozen new things she hadn't even paid attention to in the last five years.
She didn't know. She couldn't know. And so she hurried off to the underground station.
This was worse than she'd ever imagined. She'd sometimes had worries that someone would find that she hadn't really existed until five years ago… but going from that point to getting her actual name? And her old profession? She wouldn't have thought anyone could have done that unless they had someone deep at the CIA.
St. James's park, near Buckingham Palace, was busy on this pleasant spring afternoon, filled with tourists ambling around, enjoying the gardens and the lake. It was also enormous, and she had no idea what she was looking for.
-Around the lake to your right.
Mary obeyed, feeling like a puppet on a string. She curved around the lake until-
"Over here, Mary Morstan!"
The voice had an upmarket Scandanavian accent, and was ridiculously cheery. She followed it to its origin… a tall, slender man, middle aged, receding hair, verging on handsome, wearing a bespoke suit and waving her over to one of the park benches.
She had no absolutely idea who he was.
There was another man with him, equally unfamiliar, a huge slab of muscle, obviously the heavy… not that she could do anything here, in broad daylight, with hundreds of witnesses. Mary focused her attention on the immediate concern, who was patting the seat of the bench next to him with a happy smile.
She sat.
There was a moment of silence as the man took a bag of sugared peanuts out of his pocket and started snacking.
"You can't imagine," he said, eventually, "How intrigued I was when a routine background check on my new PA turned up that her dearest friend was a woman who had been dead for forty years."
That was enough, and she flicked through her mental card index:
PA- Something to do with Janine- Fancy party-Clammy hands- Oh God. That guy? He's a billionaire and if he's paranoid enough to run that level of deep background on his employees he's involved with something important. Oh God.
Mary cleared her throat and began, "Mr. Magnussen, I-"
"And then to find out you used to be so interesting!" he interrupted, "That was tricky. I've spent too much time in England, I'm out of practice with actual security agencies. I honestly wouldn't have bothered… but then you went and made such unusual friends, so I just had to."
Magnussen folded over the bag of peanuts, tucked it into his pocket, and put his hand on Mary's knee. She blinked. She wasn't clear whether he was petting her or trying to clean the sugar off his fingers but either way she desperately wished he wouldn't. But she kept her mouth shut and sat still.
"You truly are in love with danger, aren't you? Certainly John Watson's dubious personal attractions aren't enough to justify your staying in the orbit of the Holmes boys otherwise."
His hand was firmly on her thigh now, and gradually creeping upwards and inwards. Mary realized, suddenly, that in twenty-five years of dating men and fifteen years of spying, most of which had involved daily contact with the dregs of that gender… she'd never before been felt up without being enthusiastically into it. That had been such a nice record to have, she thought despairingly.
"What do you want from me?" she asked, hating how weak her voice sounded, "I have money, if that's what you're after."
She did, too, nearly a hundred and eighty thousand US dollars worth of emergency-escape-hatch money that was all she'd managed to draw out of her old funds without looking suspicious. It had been nearer to two-fifty, but she'd used some for the wedding and the down payment on the house… because she'd thought she was safe. And Magnussen was a billionaire, so she really wasn't surprised when he chuckled and replied, "You never had enough money to interest me even when you actually mattered. But I'm honestly not quite sure what I'll do with my new pet psychopath. The current queen is taking her time to die… maybe I might like to have someone help her along and let her horsefaced moron of a son take over. Or, hm, perhaps I might have you help yourself to the keyfob that accesses your soon-to-be brother in law Mycroft's laptop next time the four of you get together for a hand of bridge. Or maybe you can just open that pretty pink mouth of yours and suck my cock."
His hand had stopped just short of where they'd be arrested for public indecency, and his voice was still so cheery.
"The point, Mary Morstan, is not what I'll have you do. It's that you'll do it. Because you're mine, now. And if you don't, well-"
Magnussen sighed, theatrically, and then continued.
"You've made a lot of enemies, over the years who would be very keen to find out what you've been up to. It'd be interesting to see your thug fiance try to deal with, oh, say, a Spetsnaz Alpha operator. And really, he's got better odds than some of the others. Did you know that your little sister has actually just joined the Peace Corps? Clearly it isn't genetic."
Mary swallowed to try and get some moisture back in her mouth.
"So why," she asked, carefully, "Did you call me here today?"
He shrugged.
"I had a spare hour. And who knows when I'll be needing your… services? It'll be best to avoid having this tedious conversation when I'm in a hurry. Much more convenient to have my poppet already on the strings when I want her to dance."
Magnussen kissed her then, on the side of her throat, a spot where she generally adored being kissed but which made her skin crawl now. Then he patted her knee, twice, and stood up.
"Best of luck with the wedding. Love to John."
And with that, he was gone, his bodyguard trailing behind him.
Mary sat, perfectly still, while the life of the park went on around her, and tried to think. She disregarded, quickly, two thirds of what he had told her as posturing. The queen of England was a powerless yet well-guarded figurehead that nobody sensible would bother trying to assassinate. And some men just wanted to think that their penises were more intimidating than was actually the case. But a lot of people might like a look at Mycroft Holmes' laptop.
She had met the man, once, in passing at Baker Street, during which she had kept her head down and been as unmemorable as possible. He had returned a polite "no" to the wedding invitation but had sent them a silver-plated three-tiered cake tray (off-registry) anyway. The elder Holmes brother was probably the most powerful person in the country, though she had absolutely no idea how she actually might get access to him. And even if she could figure that out, a scrap of Kipling kept circulating through her brain, repeating, "If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane."
Mary scrubbed her hands over her face. Then she walked home. It was a long walk, but it was a very nice day out.
John was sitting on the sofa in the living room, typing something on his laptop with his surprisingly rapid hunt-and-peck technique. He had that intense wrinkle between his eyebrows and mumbled an abstracted "Hey" in her general direction, so he was probably working on his blog… that disappearing-knife stabbing from yesterday.
She set down her handbag and took five steps over to him, plucking the computer out of his lap, folding it closed, and setting it on the coffee table.
He looked up at her and said in the level tone he had when she'd irritated him, "I was technically in the middle of someth-" but then he stopped because she'd crawled into his lap and started kissing him.
She'd could tell that she'd startled him, and could feel the moment when he mentally shrugged and decided to go with it. He needed a shave: for a short, slight man, he had the facial hair of a werewolf and true smoothness tended to require more effort than he was willing to put forth.
Mary didn't care. She relished the faint burn on her cheeks and throat, seeming to erase the memory of any other touch. Insinuating a hand between them, she undid the top button on his jeans. Then she pulled back from John, leaving him breathless. His lips looked bee-stung, and his lovely blue eyes were wide and dark.
"Off," Mary said, firmly. And with a bit of a scramble they got his trousers and pants down, and she sank to her knees and took him into her mouth.
John gently put his hand on the back of her head as she worked him. He was always so careful with her when she did this, absurdly grateful afterwards, and he would never, ever ask for it. There was clearly something miserable in his murky sexual history around blowjobs. Mary wasn't particularly fond of giving them, but she still did, quite often, because she liked how happy she could make him.
And because she decided what she did, and who to. Nobody else.
John, she noticed, had moved his hand off her head and was tapping her shoulder, with a strained, "Um, Mary, I don't know if you want me to-"
No, she didn't, she decided. So she stopped what she was doing, stood up, skinned her t-shirt off, and instructed, "Put your hands on me." John made an incoherent noise in the back of his throat and obeyed her. She'd sparked an answering wildness in him, and he was probably going to leave marks with how rough he was being, and there was absolutely nothing more that she wanted at that moment.
As they wrestled one another's remaining clothes off Mary thought of how good they had always been at this. From the very beginning, they had clicked on this level in a way that she'd never experienced before. And she knew, desperately, that she should have left it on that level… just kept it casual, left John in his sad bachelor apartment, dumped him on any of half a dozen occasions, stayed independent and free and mobile.
So many decisions, each so small on their own… but the outcome of them was now she was trapped in something impossible. She should never have picked up anything she wasn't willing to put down again.
But then he had gotten her naked and positioned and, oh God, there he was, and she found that she blessedly couldn't think of really anything at all but that.
They finished, and her brain gradually spun up again. Her first coherent thought was to wonder how some positions could feel so sensuous and then transition to awkward and ridiculous a nanosecond after she'd had an orgasm.
The second thought was much less pleasant. She didn't really have time for third thoughts, because John had finished rearranging their bodies into something less stupid looking, cleared his throat, and said, "You know, if you'd told me this three months ago I'd have called you a liar, but… the pill really was suppressing your sex drive, wasn't it?"
Mary winced, because he was right, and because it was actually a little embarrassing. The first breakout she'd had since her teens had faded within a month, but her transformation from a woman with a healthy libido into a sexually voracious pervert didn't seem to be going anywhere.
"Sorry," she muttered, because she knew it was starting to give him performance anxiety.
"Oh, I'm not complaining. You might actually kill me, but I'm certainly not going to complain. Now what's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," Mary lied automatically.
John arched an eyebrow, dropped his voice a third, and said, "By careful analysis of such seemingly inconsequential factors such as the temperature of the butter on the kitchen counter and the precise degree of fading of the wallpaper I am able to determine with upwards of ninety-eight percent accuracy the difference between a woman whose panties simply dissolved in the face of my overwhelming sexual charisma and one who has just used me as a human dildo because she's stressed out."
"Please don't do impressions while we're having sex," Mary groaned.
"Fine, then, I know you, Morstan. I know your black heart," John laughed, nuzzling his nose into her sternum, "And I strongly suspect if I hadn't been here you'd be obsessively alphabetizing the DVDs right now to try and calm down. So spill. What's the matter?"
He would choose right now to get all emotionally sensitive, Mary thought. Then she took a deep breath, reminded herself: be Mary, a nice normal woman with no actual problems at all… And told him the truth.
"The band's backing out of the wedding."
Or a truth, anyway.
"I guess they got a last minute opportunity to open for Billy Idol that night. Which is great for them and everything but literally every other band we looked at is booked now and I can't find anybody on youtube who's both half decent and available with less than two weeks notice. I thought maybe we could just plug in an iPod or something but Emily, at the venue, is being a complete bitch about "no prerecorded music" like she thinks your eighty year old aunt is going to want to slam dance or something. So I don't know what I'm going to do."
She had been so pissed off about this less than three hours ago, and now it seemed just as trivial as it undoubtedly was. But she'd enjoyed having trivial problems. They were so much more manageable.
John stroked her upper arms, and said, "Okay, I'll handle it."
"Pardon?"
"I'll fix it. Sherlock owes me a favor… thank you again for driving out to Swindon and posting my bail, by the by... and half of London owes him one. I'm sure someone on that list is a DJ or a musician. And as for Miss Emily, I'll talk her round. Because she thinks I'm cute."
He smiled, proudly, and not a bit smugly, because Emily did blatantly flirt with him in a way that Mary mostly found very amusing and only occasionally made her wish she had a shiv.
"See? Not just wedding day Ken doll, am I now? Or we could just run away together? It'd be nice if I could have gotten you to do it before we put down all the deposits but I'm still up for it if you are."
He was obviously joking and thus wouldn't have expected, "Yes, God, let's run away," which was the response she wanted to give him. And for just a second, the part of her that always whispered jump when she was standing on clifftops considered… just telling him. Spilling her guts, telling Magnussen "Publish, and be damned" and letting the chips fall where they may.
The thing was that if she did that, John would help her. He was such a good hearted man, and he hated bullies, and so he'd enlist Sherlock and Sherlock would probably enlist the British Government and one way or the other she'd be safe, though probably ultimately in witness protection. Where she'd never ever see John again, because there was never going to be any coming back from that revelation for them.
It had been so easy for her to fall in love with him. And in the dark corners of her heart she knew it hadn't been nearly as easy for him to fall in love with her… she could count the number of times he'd said it on her fingers. If he found out that the woman he loved wasn't really real, well? It would instantly extinguish that fragile little flame he had in his heart.
She wouldn't let that happen. So she smiled and said, "No. I'm sorry, I'm just being silly."
John kissed her forehead and then finally pulled out.
"No, you're not. It's kind of ridiculous to expect people to know how to do this sort of high-level party planning without any practice. Are you working tomorrow?"
"Um," Mary considered briefly, "No. But I did take a Saturday afternoon clinic shift."
"Me neither. So let's go down to the pub and get a pint. It sounds like you could use one."
"Sounds lovely," Mary replied with a smile.
John kissed her once more and then walked off to the shower, whistling the jaunty tune of the naked man who has solved every local problem in exemplary fashion.
Mary sat in the living room and started gathering up their scattered clothes. She had rug burns, somehow, on both her knees and her back, and she had just realized that the absolute best case scenario available to her involved lying to the person she loved most, every day, for the rest of their lives.
She'd never thought she could feel quite so bleak.