The motions of a pregnant woman's daily activities, as transmitted to the developing baby, are a gentle soothing sway. It's quite common, therefore, to find that the baby is most active when you are stillest. They finally aren't being rocked to sleep.
Mary had told dozens of women that, or something similar, with the calm, kind voice of authority, and knew it was all very normal. The knowledge didn't help her to sleep when the little stranger began its nightly gymnastics routine as soon as she began to nod off. She had only barely managed to attain a light doze when she awakened with one of the other delights of the third trimester, heartburn.
Climbing out of bed- awkwardly, given that she had recently shifted from "slightly chubby" to "vast" at a very rapid pace- she put on a dressing gown and went in search of some antacids.
She hadn't bothered to switch on the lights, and so the knowledge that someone else was in her living room felt more instinctive than anything else. A lot of what people call instinct is just senses that they aren't using properly, a skill which can absolutely be taught. Mary had been taught, and so within a second or two she was able to translate the instinctual "Someone is here" into "There is a faint smell of residual cigarette smoke, the reflected sound of my steps sounds wrong over in that far corner, the charge light from my laptop shows an incorrect shadow at about four feet off the ground over there: therefore, tall person, probably male, smoker, sitting in the recliner."
A surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins, but she didn't allow it to alter her movements in any way. Instead, she walked, seemingly unaware, into the kitchen, and reached into a cabinet for the Shreddies box.
Which weighed very little, as if it contained only breakfast cereal and not, for example, a loaded Smith and Wesson 4006.
"Looking for this?" the man in the living room said. Mary sighed, and switched on the kitchen light. Sure enough, Sherlock Holmes was sitting on the recliner, her gun in his lap.
"Only so many places you could hide this that are within easy reach of someone your height but yet well-concealed."
"Well deduced, Sherlock. Though another option might have been to just... ring the doorbell."
"Boring," he sighed.
Mary decided that every time she got out of bed from this point onwards she was going to dress all the way to her shoes. Wandering around in a dressing gown reliably instigated weird visitations. Moving one cabinet over, she took out the Tums and chewed up two of them. She was actually getting to like the chalky taste, now.
"Out of curiosity," Sherlock asked, "If it wasn't me, what would you have done?"
Without the intense rapid thought processes that a threat brings on, Mary had to think about it for a second. "Probably… pitch the breadbox at your head, then take a knife out of the block and go for you as quickly as possible. While you were still disoriented."
"Really?" he said, in a very unflattering tone of disdain.
"Yes, really. What's wrong with it?"
"I almost never get to discuss technique with professionals, and frankly I'd have hoped that as one, you'd have planned something with a bit more – style."
Mary frowned, piqued. "I'd argue that in a situation where I'm attempting to bring down a large-ish man who is armed with my gun I've lost enough control of the situation that I needn't focus on style points. I would want to avoid a prolonged hand-to-hand fight since I don't know my opponent's capabilities, thus, the element of surprise would be key. And very little is more surprising than a breadbox to the head. Did you want tea or anything?"
"Tea would be lovely, thank you."
Filling the kettle at the tap, she popped it onto the base and pressed down on the heating element. As it began to make its soft bubbling sounds, she asked "Given the hour I assume that you aren't here because John asked you to check up on me or anything?"
"He did not."
"Ah." Not surprising, of course, and wholly understandable, but it did hurt. She squelched it. "So to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"
"I thought," he said, and then he paused. Hesitated, really, which was bloody rare for him, "I wanted to hear about something."
"What's that?" she asked, popping teabags into cups, because naughty detectives who break in after midnight do not receive looseleaf.
"I want to hear about the end of your career. That file has a great deal of useful information but the finish is absent."
"I suppose it would be," Mary mused, "I put all those documents together before then, and I never really looked at them afterwards. But unfortunately it's really not all that interesting, not like when you did it. I accepted a mission that I knew was dangerous... they'd told me they'd lost two other operatives, and when you're dealing with the CIA and that kind of number you normally multiply by Pi to get the truth… infiltrating a ring of ordnance dealers in Romania. I met up with my handler, said I'd do a bit of reconnaissance and rendezvous three days later, and then just…. never showed up for that second meeting. I left behind all of my stuff and my money, never made contact with anybody I'd known before, and after a while the agency came to the obvious conclusion and took care of the rest for me. The official story they came up with was that I died in a car accident in Marrakech."
"I know," Sherlock replied drily, "I looked up the obituary. Did people really believe that you were a rug buyer for Ikea?"
"I'd been doing it for over ten years, I was a senior buyer, thank you very much." The kettle had boiled, so Mary filled up the two teacups and carried them into the living room. She put one at Sherlock's elbow and simultaneously retrieved her gun, putting the for-Gawd's-sake safety back on (the casual way he handled firearms always made her twitch).
Sherlock ignored his tea (of course) and looked at her over his tented fingertips. Mary looked calmly back, eyebrows arched. It was actually quite nice: she'd never fully been able to relax around him. But there was nothing for her to be frightened of anymore, no secrets he could uncover that could do any further harm. She was free, and could enjoy the company of this remarkably intelligent and delightfully weird man without stress.
"All very interesting, but my question actually dealt more with motive than method. Though I recognize that's not my usual preference."
"Oh," Mary said, nonplussed. Then she smiled, slowly, "All right, then. You're a bit of a historian of crime, aren't you? Ever hear about a man named Dean Corll?"
Sherlock's gaze was hooded as he responded levelly, "The Candyman."
"That's the one. I'd never heard of him, but then about five years ago I went to a wedding-"
The bride's name is Heather, and they'd actually been housemates for the last two years of college. Time, distance, and very different lifestyles had lowered the friendship level down to a more casual acquaintance, but they are still mutuals on Facebook and that was enough to justify sending Amy an invitation. It's occasionally nice to have some time living a real life with real people, and she'd never been to Galveston, and that was enough to justify Amy's accepting.
It has been a vaguely unsettling day. Heather seems happy; the groom, Andy, is some sort of real estate baron, and seems perfectly pleasant by the standards of rich men. Nothing about him, however, would appear to justify the fact that Heather:
-Is now affecting a Southern accent so thick that it sounds like she was just dredged out of the Mississippi.
-Has abandoned her aggressive youthful atheism to the extent that she thought it entirely appropriate to force three hundred people to sit through an entire excruciating Catholic mass just in order to watch her get married.
-Allegedly chose, in her right mind, to wear an enormous nightmare of a wedding gown which looks like Scarlett O'Hara mated with a puffball mushroom.
It's just example eight thousand nine hundred thirteen of intelligent women getting inexplicably dumb as soon as they fall in love. A notable list, Amy thinks wryly, with her own mother at the head of it. Nothing like that will ever happen to her, surely.
Anyway another bizarre thing about this wedding is that the ceremony was held before noon but the reception won't be for another six hours. Most of the wedding guests have responded to this by heading down to the hotel's fabulous pool (complete with swim-up bar) and pouring liquor straight down their throats.
Amy does not get drunk with people who don't already know what she really does for a living. So after a token glass of champagne and a bit of friendly chit-chat, she's made her escape into the air-conditioned comfort of her own empty hotel room. She slips out of her high heels, brushes off her dress (and five years later, too fat to fit into anything smaller than a pup tent, she will think with fondness of how beautiful that dress had been, and hope that her sister Jenny ended up with it after she 'died.' It was dove-grey, high-waisted silk shantung with a faint metallic sheen, bought in a tiny boutique in Greenwich Village for about one month's worth of Mary Morstan's salary).
She turns on the TV, and watches a big-haired blonde read the news. The weather will be hot (a-duh), the Texans are ten points behind the Colts at the half, and "The body of a teenaged boy found on a Jeffco beach in 1983 has been identified through DNA analysis as the twenty-eighth victim of notorious serial muderer-"
"It was just a random news clip, but it drew my attention, you see," she told Sherlock, back in the present, "Because twenty-eight is my number."
Mary sighed and pressed her knuckles into the small of her back. She never could get really comfortable in any one position anymore.
"I'd have quibbled over being called assassin, back then. I was a spy… well, you know, you've read the file. But I suppose it's really like "whore" in that respect, if you've done it for money once you get to hang on to the title forever. Most of those were legitimately in self defense, or in the defense of others. "
"But not all," Sherlock said quietly.
"No, not all," Mary agreed, "And the story just kept niggling and niggling at me. I don't want to give you the impression it was some sort of crisis of conscience, or anything. I didn't feel bad about my job. Still don't, actually, the CIA absolutely deserves their bad reputation but they don't always get the wrong man. I'm confident I never did. It was more… a moment of clarity. When I got into the business it was for all the right reasons. I wanted to make the world a safer place. I agreed to be disavowed after 9/11 because I knew I could act more freely if I were unofficial, and because I wanted to be sure that the people who are immune to the law aren't immune from justice."
Mary smiled, and laughed a bit at herself.
"Like James Bond. Or like you, actually, now that I think of it. But the upshot of all of it was that I was thirty five and had no friends, no real relationships outside of work, it had been years since I'd been with a man I could tolerate for longer than it took to sleep with him… and I had gotten rich by being a serial killer. Quite a successful one, too, the reporter said that Dean Corll had been the most prolific American serial killer before Ted Bundy came along."
Mary kept smiling, although the bitterness that had accompanied this revelation the first time still threatened to choke her.
"I do more unambiguous good in a very average Tuesday as a nurse than I did in years of black operations. The world generates new bad guys quicker than anyone can get rid of them. And so I wanted to just… stop. But you can't just quit once you get to the level I was at. There's not much space between "I don't think I should keep doing this" and "I don't think anyone should be doing this and that's why I came to you, Mr. Assange," and I could bring down governments with what I know. If I wanted to start over, I was going to have to really start over. So- Romania. And then Mary Morstan. And that was all."
"I see," Sherlock said. He finally took up his tea, although he didn't drink it. His eyes shone in the dimly lit room.
"You do realize that Dean Corll didn't only kill twenty-eight people, right?"
Mary blinked, and asked mildly, "Beg pardon?"
"Because his extracurricular activities weren't discovered until after his death it's difficult to get the full tally but he almost certainly began several years before the earliest known victim. And there's a few unexplained gaps in his record. Men like that do not just take a holiday from murder. And as for the most prolific American serial killer, hah!" Sherlock snorted disdainfully, "The press never gets anything important right. Was there no Henry Holmes or Belle Guinness in the universe where this broadcast was made?"
"Sherlock, sweetie, this is all extremely interesting but the point of that story wasn't really so much about the exact numbers involved."
"I'm just saying that if you were going to burn down your entire life it might have behooved you to do a bit more background research first. Has anyone ever told you you tend to be rather impulsive?"
"Often," Mary replied, "And for as long as I can remember."
"And now," Sherlock pronounced, "You're planning to do it all again. Your friends have showered you with a large quantity of small clothing and toys, but you have not put them away, bought other baby requisites, or engaged in gestationally appropriate 'nesting' behavior. Odd, unless you're expecting not to build your nest here, but in… Brazil?"
A lot of the time Mary was convinced that Sherlock was just a very good cold reader, but every now and then she wondered about actual psychic powers, because although her final planned destination was Uruguay, she would be traveling on a Brazilian passport that she was 100% certain he had never seen. All she gave Sherlock was a vague smile, and a sealed envelope which she took off the coffee table
"This time it's not impulsive, is it? Here. I was going to drop this off but it's probably best if it… if it comes from a friend." She'd taken three tries to write the letter inside, and then made a fourth fair copy because the original was tearstained and nobody wants to live in a Johnny Cash song.
Sherlock didn't take the envelope. He asked coolly, "You would take John's child away from him?"
Just as coolly, Mary replied, "If at some point John decides that he would like to get to know the baby, I will not prevent that. There's instructions in there… he can use the word 'Shawshank' on his blog and I'll be in touch within ninety-six hours. But I'm keeping it, because I can keep it safer than he can."
And because it's hers. This baby, that kicks her constantly and jumps when it hears loud noises and has a frustrating reluctance to expose its bottom to ultrasound imaging, has done something Mary never thought was possible. It's given her something… someone… she absolutely cannot walk away from.
Sherlock tilted his head and said, "I certainly wasn't suggesting you should leave the baby. I can think of nobody less suited for single parenthood than John. Did you know he actually got into a fight with his laptop yesterday? Called it a lying cow."
"I'm pretty sure that's what the psychiatrists call transference."
"Meh," Sherlock shrugged, "You might be surprised. He got in rows with consumer electronics well before he had any idea you existed. No, my point was that young Sherlock deserves both his parents."
"I'm sure it does," Mary replied, because she was still not going to bite at the "young Sherlock" bait, "But this is real life and we don't all get what we deserve. Look, if it were just me… I'd chance it, honestly. Capturing me has never been a trivial exercise. But it's not just me, anymore, and I've waited too long as is. I'm already going to have to get a letter from my doctor proving I'm not too pregnant to fly."
"Even if someone incredibly clever were to have come up with a brilliant plan by which you could remain Mary Morstan for as long as you would like?" Sherlock grinned at her, widely. Mary frowned, and asked,
"And what would you be leaping off this time? Look, Sherlock, even if I were willing to let you try to buy off a blackmailer John hasn't managed to speak to me in two months. I think… I think he'll probably be happier if we move on. Domestic life was never quite his style, anyway."
"I'm well aware of that. Back when you got married I gave your relationship about a three year lifespan before you, being a woman of normal spirit, got fed up with being married to an adrenaline junkie and divorced him. But a woman whose most notable previous job is universally attributed to Seal Team 6 is much likelier to have a relaxed attitude about little things like getting shot at. Plus you can come along with us, now. You can be the muscle!"
Sherlock was so visibly enthusiastic at the prospect that Mary felt like the Antichrist for trying to deflate him.
"Sherlock, it's not that simple."
He looked down at his cup, nonplussed.
"Possibly not," he replied, "I do realize that. And I can't make things right between you… though… I don't suppose you'd be willing to make him think both of you are about to die, would you?"
"No."
"Didn't think so. But I can make it so that you, and the baby, are safe. You just need to be patient, and brave, for a bit longer. And who knows what John might do, given a bit more time?"
Mary felt an unusual flickering of hope in the anhedonic pit that was her emotional life lately.
"So what's your plan?" she asked slowly.
"It's still coming into focus. But I've spoken with Magnussen and gotten him to agree to abstain from any action until after the new year. If you can come to my parents' house at Christmas we can finalize the details up there."
"Christmas? At your parents'? No, no, I can't do that," Mary said, cringing at the thought.
"I admit that having to locate this at the family home justifies my being reluctant to go through this but what exactly is your problem with it?"
"Sherlock, I shot you. I can't go and bake cookies with your mother and act like nothing happened."
Sherlock rolled his eyes at her and said, "You managed to feign a friendship with Janine to the extent that she saw nothing odd about being asked to be your maid of honour, surely you can conceal guilt from my parents for a day or two."
Mary frowned. If it was a night for rehashing one's terrible actions, she was not going to be the only one obligated to do it.
"I never needed to feign anything with Janine. Magnussen found out about me because of my friendship with her, not vice versa. She was working as a yoga instructor at the studio I went to when I first moved to London, and we hit it off because she is a lovely warm funny person who deserves better than either you or me, and who incidentally can put both legs behind her head."
She had made Sherlock flinch, and she was glad about it. He asked, hesitantly, "Did Janine happen to tell you-?"
"She told me eeeeverything."
And that made him blanch, and mutter, "Well, you knocked her unconscious."
Then he smiled, and tilted his head, and continued, "And you shot me."
"Um-"
"Right in the chest. It really hurt. I had to go to hospital for weeks. I could easily have died, and in fact had vivid hallucinations of doing exactly that. And now you won't even make one tiny little visit to Yorkshire for me?"
He coughed. Pitifully. And gave her puppy dog eyes.
"Guilt has never worked on me, Sherlock," Mary said sternly, though oh my GOD it was close this time.
"Fine, then. I need to stop Magnussen. I need you and John to help me bring justice to someone immune from the law. One last time, can you do that?"
Mary looked down at her hands. And then, slowly, she nodded.
Author's note: There are three lines stolen from "Hamilton" in this chapter. At first that wasn't on purpose but then I put in the third one to sort of make it seem like my work has "themes." Collect 'em all. Also? Sherlock ships it.