Their instructions were clear. Pack as little as possible; luggage will be waiting at the room. Take this flight from this airport to that airport in this many hours; check in under the names of this married couple and effectively enter into deep cover.
Approximately 15,778,500 seconds in six months. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The first day, she made it clear that every drawer in the dresser, as well as half of the wardrobe, belonged to her. He set up his laptop while she stood at the window, gazing across the teeming street to the room in which their adversary—a flamboyantly wealthy man called Konevski—lurked. She would stare and stare and stare, attempting to figure out his habits and weak spots as though he wasn't just as aware of his surveillance as they were. And she would gain a wealth of useless information and become frustrated. Sherlock didn't have time for such fruitless exercises.
He longed for the dining room table at Baker Street, where his equipment was probably still sitting, his cultures slowly dying one by one.
She took the bed while he feigned sleep on the sofa.
The second day, they began the wary dance around each other that came with the requirement that they were to act as thoroughly in love as possible. Sherlock found the notion worthy of his most dramatic eye-roll, but Lily's dissatisfaction with the situation might as well have been stamped across her forehead, practically shoving him away from her whenever they were alone.
They went out, though, breakfasting in the hotel dining room because that was where Konevski was eating. She twisted golden strands around her fingers and fed him bits of toast from across the table and laughed charmingly at a joke John had told him years ago when he had stumbled home drunk, jumper askew and lipstick on his cheek. She came up behind him as he stood outside smoking—watching Konevski hail a cab and request to be taken to a nearby art museum—and delicately plucked the cigarette from his fingers, murmuring in flawless Russian about how she wished he wouldn't damage his lungs so. She clung to his arm at the art museum as they followed Konevski through the pristine white halls, pulling him over to stare at this or that meaningless piece of artwork and babbling about their histories even though neither of them was actually paying attention to a word she was saying.
He was tall, statuesque, and graying gracefully, wrapped in a genuine fur coat and paying little mind to the bottle blonde who was swinging from his arm spewing fake admiration for the artwork before them (who was actually married and running and insurance scam in a different part of the country). He was so obviously criminal—everything about him screamed be afraid—it was ludicrous. What was the point of sitting at the head of one of the world's most lethal criminal organizations if you were going to be so unbearably conspicuous about it?
He very nearly caught them staring, but Sherlock sensed the change in his stature and quickly dragged her in for a kiss instead, feeling every muscle in her body tense before quickly complying.
When they got back to the hotel room, she slapped him for it, rubbing at lips that no doubt tasted of tobacco. That night, her voice was barely audible over the bustle of the street below as she whispered into the empty space of darkness between them that she had been engaged to be married and that he had been killed, as though he hadn't already figured it out. Then she got up and locked herself in the bathroom, and didn't re-emerge until after Sherlock had fallen asleep.
The third day, he caught her doing yoga. Yoga.
A headache-inducing mantra droned from the hi-tech speaker system in the corner of the room, making it a spectacular challenge to refrain from bashing the thing to pieces.
Konevski's security team was inconspicuous, but there, and highly trained. At least three were from a military background, another two extensively trained in the marshal arts. But there were more than five—he could see it in the way certain bellhops carried themselves, in the look that the maid had shot him upon passing with her cart—married, three children to get through uni. Not only were they surrounded, they were being watched.
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
tat savitur varenyam—
The building was designed in a curve, so that the front driveway made a large circle around which cars spun like clockwork. Konevski's room was directly across the way, which made it a simple task to observe him, but it would be foolish to assume that he hadn't been on to them since the moment the plane touched down.
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yo nah prachodayat—
If he had people working the staff, there was no reason why he wouldn't have people keeping track of everyone who checked in. In hindsight, following him the day before—however stealthily—had probably elevated the suspicion already in place due to the holes in the background checks that no doubt had already been run.
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
tat savitur varenyam—
They must have known. Surely, they must have known that the man practically owned the hotel. He was Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond. He knew when certain tasks were impossible to the point of ridiculous, despite how many times John had accused him of death-defying recklessness. They didn't expect to have Konevski apprehended—they wanted him and Lily to be captured.
It was fascinating, how the more details he uncovered about his target, the more he uncovered about the people he himself was working for.
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yo nah prachodayat—
She moved with fluidity and marked breathing, every change of position an exhale. She was not weak in the slightest sense, but it was so easy to imagine the skin stretched over her bones shattering like porcelain. Would she scream when they beat her? Cry out for her lost fiancé? What would the hair piled high on the crown of her head look like when it had been tinted red with her own blood?
Om bhur bhuvah svaha
tat savitur varenyam—
She glanced at him, catching him watching her, and gave him a hard look—you, judge me? For a moment he thought she was daring him to discuss what she had divested the night before, but she must have guessed by now that he was not prone to discussing feelings.
They hadn't discussed anything, he realized, save for the case and the man she had lost—and that couldn't really be considered a proper discussion. Perhaps he should attempt to do so now…it was only appropriate, since it was his fault she would soon be brutally tortured and then killed. Perhaps he should pay her the courtesy of getting to know her beyond what he had already deduced, like he had John. Figure out precisely how her mind worked, what she loved, whether she hummed while she made coffee or marked her place in books by turning the corners of the page down.
But murderers rarely took the time to get to know their victims before killing them, unless they were especially sick. And that was what they were—a murderer and his victim. And she didn't even know.
bhargo devasya dhimahi
dhiyo yo nah prachodayat—
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The fourth day, something went wrong in the equation.
She'd let him fall asleep on the couch, the Russian equivalent of crap telly playing softly in the background like an ironic sort of lullaby. Upon waking and attempting to force the stiffness from his limbs, he discovered her kneeling at the window in the sitting room. He was fully prepared to roll his eyes and groan when he noticed that she was not, by any means, doing yoga.
The window was open, screen removed, and the long mouth of a sniper rifle was protruding from it into the crisp night air. All remnants of the fog of sleep were ripped from his mind but he didn't even have time for a startled "No!" before she fired.
Just one shot.
Across the way, Konevski fell over like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
…
"She shot him?"
"That is what people do with rifles, John."
"Christ," he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose and glancing ruefully at the cup of tea that had gone cold beside him. "Why the hell didn't she at least make an attempt at bringing him in alive?"
Ah, John. Always the soldier, always keen to follow orders—except, of course, when other souls were in danger. Sherlock grinned, but the doctor didn't smile back.
"I suppose that's something we'll never find out," lie. "Not everyone is as prone to following orders as the good army doctor."
"But she was Mi6," was. "Following orders was her job—" was. "—and she completely threw the main objective of your mission out the window!" John threw his hands up in the air as though the mere notion was a novelty.
Fighting a laugh that would no doubt go unappreciated, Sherlock said, "While I admit that it was surprising and…rather unprofessional of her, the circumstances as they were—"
"Circumstances? Sherlock, you could have drawn him out, taken him on when his security was at his thinnest, dug for more info, blackmailed him,anything."
"You sound like a very promising criminal right now, doctor."
"But she killed him right in the middle of his own territory!" John sounded far more frustrated than need be. "Had she not done that, you might not have—"he stopped himself mid sentence. Been captured. Been injured. Been tortured to the point of delirium. He scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered something about 'disregard for authority'. God, Sherlock had missed him.
When he brought his hand down from his face, John was wearing a look of sympathetic recognition. Oh, lord, here come the feelings.
"So…" he said slowly, his voice much calmer. "This is the ugly part, yeah?"
A snort escaped before there was anything he could do to stop it. "'Ugly part'?" he repeated. "You've watched men blown to bits and you call a simple bout of torture the 'ugly part'?"
His friend's brow furrowed. "Torture isn't simple, Sherlock," he proclaimed. "Don't ever belittle your experiences simply because you believe yourself capable of handling them." His tone of voice suggested that he did not believe Sherlock to be capable of any such thing.
Would they not have been captured had she refrained from killing Konevski? It was doubtful. He had goons everywhere, and they were already under suspicion. But it didn't matter. None of it mattered. The look of righteous indignation on his best friend's face was something Sherlock had never thought he would see again, and that in itself was novelty enough. He wanted regular conversation back, wanted that indignation pointed at Sherlock for failing to utilize social etiquette or some other great offense. He wanted John to smile and tell him he didn't have to go any further, that he wouldn't push it. That, or he wanted the doctor to leave.
But John changed tracks a moment later, peering out the window into the London evening beyond. "But if you…you know, want to think it through first, I could go get takeaway?"
So he was going to push it, then. Sherlock quirked an eyebrow. "Chinese?" he wouldn't eat a bite of it, but the sight of John putting on his coat and leaving Sherlock in peace was a relief no drug could supply.
A minute later, though, when John had left, he realized how big of a mistake that was. Suddenly, far too suddenly, he was dwelling on it. And then his pulse was growing faster, as was his breathing, and bile was rising in his throat.
The sound of a car backfiring was a gunshot, the blaring of a horn Lily's screams. Cuts that no longer existed stung his back and his vision blurred with a concussion that had healed months ago and his knuckles were turning white from his grip on the back of the chair but his fingers wouldn't work and the smell—
The time hadn't even come to properly discuss it yet, and he was already falling apart. This was why John should have left well enough alone. He'd forced Sherlock to think about it, about her, when all he wanted to do was delete every time she had smiled and replace it with John's smile. John was welcoming and home and medicine while she was knives and fire and icy, icy blue.
He shouldn't have tried to get Sherlock to face his past. He should have complied with his friend's request to simply move past it, forget it happened, return to married life with Mary and a baby and laughter and god, why wouldn't the man smile?
When John re-entered the flat, arms laden with Chinese food, it was to the sound of retching.