On the occasion of her wedding, Mary got up at six in the morning to have her hair and makeup done by professionals. Before this appointment, she threw up, out of what she thought was the continuous anxiety that had been hanging over her for the last few weeks. Sitting on the floor of their house's dilapidated seventies-era master bathroom, she decided: just for today, she was putting all that aside. Just for twenty-four hours.
After the hair and makeup, she squeezed herself into something that was called "shapewear" but was clearly a corset, and put on a dress which took fully ten minutes for two of her three bridesmaids to do up in the back, due to the hundreds of fiddly little buttons. The third bridesmaid, Susan, had been dumped unceremoniously the night before and was viciously hungover. Janine had to talk her out of the toilets and dose her with coffee before she was able to walk down the aisle.
She got married. Mary Morstan, whose existence had always been unusually ephemeral, had finally disappeared entirely. Mary Watson took her place.
She got a threatening telegram (nope, not now). She got a surprisingly murder-mystery themed wedding reception. She got told that she was pregnant (mother of God…).
Then she danced and talked but didn't drink any more, because although she considered it very unlikely she was actually pregnant since she wasn't even really late yet she had to consider the source of the announcement and take it under advisement.
She and her new husband, in full wedding regalia, stopped the limousine to the Heathrow Hilton at a chemist's and bought a pregnancy test. This would have been an excellent opportunity to troll unsuspecting store clerks but was spoiled by John, who was slightly lit after the reception and couldn't stop giggling.
She saw the faintest "positive" line on a pregnancy test that she had ever personally seen. John kissed her hands. They mutually agreed that sometimes Sherlock's deductions verged on the creepy.
They made love, albeit more out of a vague sense of exhausted obligation than out of any particular desire.
They slept.
And then, unsurprisingly after her eventful day, Mary dreamed.
In her dream, her family had come to the wedding. Both Amy and Mary were orphans… well, probably. Amy's father was certainly always referred to as dead. But what nobody ever seemed to realize about Mary was that orphaned isn't typically a synonym for "alone in the universe." And Amy had never been alone in the universe. She had not one but two stepfathers, three half-siblings (the sister a full eighteen years younger than herself), half a dozen stepbrothers and sisters, and more cousins and second cousins than she cared to count.
Her family were… well, they were a pack of noisy, argumentative drunks, who contained among their numbers a surprisingly large percentage of the American intelligence community. But they knew that family comes with obligations and so a delegation of them had come across the Atlantic to watch her get married… griping every step of the way about the cost.
Peter, the second stepfather, was doing what he did every time he got hammered - telling vague but hair-raising anecdotes about what the CIA got up to in South America in the eighties to a fascinated crowd, that in this case included a sloshed Sherlock Holmes. Amy's half-sister Jenny had outgrown her teenaged awkwardness to become a legitimate babe, and was dancing with John, who had a really pitiful weakness for blondes. And Jack, the first (and very much favored) stepfather, was lighting one of the fifty Marlboro Reds he smoked every day, in blithe defiance of the "Thank you for not smoking" signs scattered about the room.
"It's a damn pity," he said, ashing into a saucer, except what he actually said was, "It's a dayum pittuh." But that was Jack. Looked like Tom Wolfe, sounded like Foghorn Leghorn, could call any given US president at any given moment and be sure they would stop whatever they were doing and answer. He was basically what Mycroft Holmes wanted to be when he grew up.
"Why?" Mary asked.
"Now that you're pregnant," Jack replied, "I mean, it was kind of an iffy life to bring a kid into to begin with, but you know what's going to happen in a while, right? He'll tell you to do something, and whatever it is you aren't going to do it. And then this'll all stop. You'll be fine, obviously. You always have been kind of a cold-blooded bitch."
Mary sort of realized then that this was a dream. The real Jack would never dream of referring to any woman as a bitch in public. He'd put too much effort into crafting his "gentleman" identity to commit such a vulgarity.
"You walked away from all of us without a second thought-"
"That's not true," Mary protested, though it was more true than she was proud of. She was always good at compartmentalizing, and once she'd made up her mind she'd not seen a whole lot of upside in dwelling on the people she'd left behind.
"And now you'll get to do it all over again. Except this time you'll do it carrying a kid around with you. And that's a hard thing to put onto a child. No peace, no safety… no father." He sighed and took a deep drag, the cherry at the end of his cigarette tracing little s-curves of smoke through the air.
"Maybe it's for the best," he concluded.
Mary looked down into her lap and saw that she was bleeding, red blooms like poppies appearing on the white satin.
"No," she said calmly, "I'm not doing this now."
She stood up, but nobody in the reception hall noticed the screech of the chair casters or the woman in the wedding gown miscarrying at the center of it all. So Mary hooked her fingers under the edge of the table and flipped it, in a crash of broken glass and flapping tablecloths.
That did it, and she slammed awake, breathing fast, heart racing… but John was snoring gently beside her, so she hadn't thrashed or shouted. That was good. She lay perfectly still for roughly ten seconds, until her stomach turned over and she barely made it to the ensuite bathroom in time to throw up… oh, everything she had ever eaten in her entire life.
When she'd finished, she reached a shaky hand up to flush the toilet and rested her forehead against the cool porcelain.
"I did warn you, you know," John said from the doorway, making her jerk her head up in surprise, "When I asked you out. Naked crying in the bathroom. Didn't quite have this in mind but you can't say I didn't warn you."
He took one of the white terrycloth robes off the hook on the door and draped it over her shoulders, then sat next to her on the floor. Mary touched her cheeks, which were in fact wet.
"I don't think I'm much good at this whole 'pregnant' lark," she said, weakly.
"Well, you've got nine months to practice. I imagine you'll improve," John replied, "Do you want to cancel the honeymoon? We can probably get most of our money back."
Mary blinked, not having even put that on her list of concerns.
"It's Italy, not trekking through the Amazon. I can get ginger ale there just as well as here. And apart from when I'm actually being sick, I feel fine. So far."
"All right," John replied, and stroked a finger under her chin, before getting up and stepping over to the sink, "Think you got it all out of you?"
Mary flinched. Sometimes being in a medical household had its downsides, like never getting to maintain any sense of mystery about your body and its less appealing functions.
"Yes," she mumbled.
John filled a glass of water at the sink and unscrewed the cap of the little blue complimentary Listerine bottle. "Swish and spit," he instructed, passing her the water and then the mouthwash. She did this, and then without further ado he hooked his arms beneath her and stood up.
Mary flung her arms convulsively about his neck and blurted, "John! Your shoulder!"
"Yeah," John said, in an unflatteringly strained tone of voice, "It turns out this is actually a lot more difficult than it looks in films." But regardless he carried her back into the bedroom, and set her, with exquisite care, back in the spot she had unceremoniously vacated. He pulled the duvet up to her shoulders and climbed in, wrapping his arms around her.
"Thank you," he whispered in her ear.
"Pardon?" Mary asked, dazedly.
"For… for doing all this for our baby. And for our baby. Christ! Our bloody baby!" he laughed, resting a hand just below her navel, on the flat plane of her stomach. Which, she abruptly realized, wouldn't be flat for long, not anymore.
"Oh," she said, smiling into the dark, "It's my pleasure."
And Mary knew, then.
This moment, right here, this was worth having. And it was worth doing whatever was necessary to keep.
Later that morning, Mary sat looking out over the atrium of the hotel. John was showering, and she was trying her first ever cup of decaf coffee. It turned out to be… fine, but sort of pointless. Twenty four hours had passed, which meant it was time to end her vacation in denial.
And just as she thought that, her phone pinged with a text from Janine.
-Good morning Mrs. W! Hope the honeymoon got off with a bang! I just wanted to let you know I went over and fed Calton and I can tell he misses you already by how he tried to murder my feet. And you will never believe who just rang to ask me out…
Mary smiled, despite herself, and typed:
-Prince Harry?
-The fuck are you doing out of bed? And no. Less likely than that.
-Our flight is in an hour and a half. Prince William?
-Even weirder.
-Prince George.
-Possibly not that weird. But I bet I will have tales to tell when you get back. Drinks next month sometime?
-You're on.
Mary set her phone down and drummed her fingertips over her collarbones. Janine… who, over the years, had sent her several emails from her work account.
She pulled out her laptop, connected to the wifi, and found that Janine's company allowed remote web-based access to their email server. She considered, for a moment: Janine was born in... and her dog's name was… then typed "jhawkins" into the userid box and "Copper82" into the password box.
Rejected. Damn. Except Copper was a newish dog and people tended to reuse the same passwords over again and her former dog's name was-
Tinker82
And bingo. She now had full access to Janine's emails… but more importantly, the calendar of one Charles Augustus Magnussen.
That would do to be getting along with.