"One day, my dear Miss Hooper. You will have one day of mercy, one day where you can make your proper arrangements and say your silly goodbyes. Cherish it. You may not be able to return for a while."
"...Will I ever?"
"The answer really depends on you, doesn't it? Look at you, poor, trembling creature, thinking of return even before embarking on your wonderful adventure. Why do you fear, love? I never meant for you to be scared, and seeing you like this breaks my heart. Really, it does. In fact, I pity you so much, little bird, that I think I'm going to give you a tip."
"I-I don't need - "
"Ah, but I'm going to offer it all the same. Try not to do anything funny. We are watching."
-Chapter 2-
The Notebook
-Day 0.
Molly does not switch on her lights. She is too disoriented from the encounter to remember such a trifle. It is a miracle that she makes it to her sofa before her legs give in, and she collapses, spent and nauseated from chilling trepidation.
She curls in a corner of the sofa, a pillow sandwiched between chest and knees. Her arms wrap around her legs and her hands are gripping, digging into her jeans. She can feel her fingers trembling against her legs. She can feel the hard edge of the train ticket cutting into the centre of her right palm. She can feel Toby's soft fur tickling her feet, and she can hear Toby's feeble purr, drowned by the roaring splashes of the storm. But she cannot move, and she cannot think.
She sits, frozen and shivering. Evaporating rainwater from her drying apparel robs her of body heat with every passing moment.
Bleep.
She suddenly finds strength in her limbs again, and jumps from the sofa in a flash. The pillow plops to the foot of the sofa. Toby screeches and leaps away.
She staggers toward the door and reaches for her bag, dropped earlier in terror. Her convulsing hands fumble aimlessly within the bag for minutes, until she finally growls in despair and violently dumps its contents to the floor. Crash.
In the mess of keys and gadgets and shades of nearly inseparable darkness, she perceives a soft glow and seizes it. Her phone. A text notification, but that's hardly important now. What is the time? Her lips quaver. Ten thirty.
It has been three hours since she returned to her flat. It must have been two hours at least since Guy Fawkes left. She has less than twenty-four hours left in London, and she has already wasted two.
Suddenly, she begins to pace frantically about her living room, mind churning in an effort to dispel chaos.
How did this happen? How did he get in? Who could he be? Why would he choose her? Why was she so stupid and scared and didn't even think of a good way to fish for any information? Why couldn't she be as intelligent and observant as -
Sherlock?
Molly halts abruptly, her hands dropping to her sides.
She does not know what Sherlock is doing, or where Sherlock is.
But she does know that Sherlock is alive.
Molly bites her lip and takes deep breaths, feeling her heartbeats slow. She may not be as astute as a consulting detective, but her hunch tells her that this incident, in all possibility, may not be solely related to her own safety.
They are watching. What can she do right under their noses in less than twenty-four hours? She glances desperately around and begins to chew her nails. Nothing. Nothing comes to her mind for minutes that feel like gruelling hours of torture, until the voices of two acquaintances suddenly resonate in her head.
"Miss Hooper, we are indebted. I will be keeping a friendly eye on you."
"That Mycroft Holmes needs to stop being so creative. Tampering with my card just to intercept me at an ATM machine! Seriously?"
Oh.
Molly switches on the lights and walks into her kitchenette. Toby has been watching her motions keenly, and promptly follows. The cat leaps onto the kitchenette counter and sits by the sink, continuing to stare. Molly pours herself a glass of water and realizes that her hands are no longer shaking.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees her beloved locked diary lying on her small dining table. She steps forward and seizes it. She opens it lock with a small key from her sweater pocket, and tosses the lock and the key into the trash.
Molly frowns as she gazes at the notebook in her hands.
"All right!" she suddenly declares loudly, making Toby jump. "The first thing I need to do before I go is to finish counting the astrocytes in that last neurohistology slide I took home from Bart's yesterday. Mike wanted it done this week and I can't leave him dangling, right, Toby?"
Toby meows softly.
Molly stacks her plates away into the cupboards above the sink. Then she opens the storage cabinet underneath. Bottles and apparatus knock against each other. Soon, the dining table is covered by Molly's collection of flasks, beakers, and other laboratory glassware. Molly retrieves her microscope from her bedroom and sets it up within the pile of glass. She spends a few hours completing her analysis of Mike's neurohistology slide.
Then she pulls out a piece of blank paper to write a leave note. Her pink notebook rests underneath the paper as support, as she scribbles carefully away.
When she finishes the note at last, she packs her suitcase, and organizes her chaotic living room. She does not put the experimental equipment away. "The microscope is too heavy and it's too much work. I hardly think it's worth it, since I don't know when I'll be back. Right, Toby?"
Toby nuzzles his furry head against her ankle.
It is two hours past midnight when Molly finally finishes all of her chores, but she doesn't feel the slightest bit of fatigue. Sleep will not find her this night. She sits at her sofa and occasionally paces about her flat, until the sun is high, its rays filling her living room with brightness and coziness that she has not the leisure to notice.
9:00A.M.
Molly rushes into the bustling streets of London.
She takes a cab to the Bank of England, and withdraws one thousand pounds over the counter for her upcoming "adventure". She wonders if Guy Fawkes is kind enough to let her bring some allowance.
She then runs to the nearest ATM machine, and withdraws 505 pounds more.
"Mycroft, this is preposterous."
"No, Sherlock, this is precaution, and unless you would rather risk seeing ghost stories in the headlines that would attract the attention of Moriarty's remaining network, I'm afraid you don't have a choice."
"I can evade people easily enough. It's what I've been doing all my life!"
"Perhaps, but you can't deny that you're at my disposal now, and you have to do as I say. Need I remind you who it was that came to me and pleaded for help?"
"Oh, fine. Fine! For the next three months, I'll stay quiet and hidden as a long-distance consultant in Iceland, but on one condition. If John - "
"The hound, Sherlock."
"Oh for God's sake, I'm not in Iceland yet!"
"That's not a reason to let your guard down."
"Would you quit trying to interrupt my point? If John - "
"The hound."
"- If any one of the hound, the bear, the panda, or the rabbit is in danger, I will be compelled to return immediately."
"You will be summoned if the situation is dire."
"Don't try to brush my request away with an obscure statement, Mycroft! I repeat, if anything happens to any one of them, I will return immediately. This is my sole condition, and I will not leave this city until you spit out an agreement!"
"And I repeat, Sherlock, that you will be summoned if the situation is dire."
-Day 3.
Sherlock scoffs and tosses his phone aside. Perhaps he won't send Mycroft anything after all. He begrudges his brother still, for taking more than twenty-four hours to inform him of Molly Hooper's call for help. If Sherlock were the one keeping tabs on Molly's bank account, he would've acted immediately; Molly rarely asked for assistance from anyone, and when she did, something was always very wrong. But no; it took one whole day to convince Mycroft Holmes that Miss Hooper's peculiar double cash withdrawals and her shaded S.O.S. were important enough for his attention. One, entire, day of wasted, precious time! She could be whisked out of the country now by criminals, for all Sherlock knows.
Sherlock surveys the flat again, and his countenance further darkens. The timid pathologist is one of the few people to whom he, the most brilliant consulting detective in the world, owes a debt, not to mention her knowledge of his secret links her well-being directly to his own safety. Should Moriarty's criminals ever catch wind of his survival, she would be their first target, and he knows that only too well. For this reason, when he was in Iceland, he often found himself wondering how she was faring more than he liked, especially when he allowed himself a cup of coffee on rainy mornings - black with two sugars.
When he first saw Mycroft's text, his heart skipped a violent beat and sank. He immediately turned on his laptop and booked the first flight available from Reykjavik to London.
On his way to the airport, Mycroft briefed him on the situation. "She requested a long leave in person yesterday morning, using a handwritten note. No one has seen her since she left Bart's."
Threatened? Abducted? Handwritten... did she leave a clue? Sherlock taps his fingers together impatiently as he muses, facing a curious Toby perched on the windowsill. Soon he turns away from the cat a frown and shakes his head, focusing his attention on the living room again. No suspicious scratches at the keyhole on the flat's doorknob; no sign of a forced entry. The small living room, dimly lit by a spotless elegant floor lamp, is cozy and organized. The beige leather sofa is pristine. The glass tea table has been wiped, and upon it Sherlock can see his own reflection. Even the heart-shaped red pillow on the sofa has been patted; though its loosening seams indicate that it is a few years old at least, it leans against the centre of the sofa, plump and fluffly like new. Molly has cleaned before she left.
Sherlock paces to a shelf by the door and looks thoughtfully at the dried flowers in the potpourri basket. The basket is positioned in a most aesthetically-appealing corner, and the shelf is speckless. But there is dust on the edges of the dried flower petals.
Sherlock looks down at his feet, and ambles around the entire flat again, through her bathroom, her kitchenette, and her bedroom. A while later he returns by the living room windowsill, and stares in disdain at a clueless Toby who perches there still.
"It was a good try, if it weren't for you!" he groans furiously and swings a fist at the cat. Toby screeches and leaps, and swerves across the floor as Sherlock frantically steps after him and shouts abuse. "She cleaned all the tabletops except for the one in the kitchen, where she left out all her experimental equipment! Why do you think that is, cat?! Because she contacted Mycroft and had hopes that I might come here, and she put the apparatus out for my use! There were two other things she didn't clean: the windowsill and the floor. Why do you think that is now, cat? It's because she figured the criminal came through her window, and hoped that I could find some footprints to analyze! But you, cat, your favourite place to lounge on just happens to be the window sill, and God knows where else you've been running around and rubbing my evidence onto with your stupid fur! How the hell am I supposed to obtain the prints of the culprit now!?"
Toby shrieks and sprints from his assailant, from living room to kitchenette to bathroom, until, finally, the smart creature jumps at Molly's bedroom door handle. The door clicks open, and Toby slips in, leaving Sherlock staring angrily after him.
The consulting detective turns around and faces the kitchenette with a sigh, before a pink notebook by the sink's edge catches his eye. He seizes the notebook and glances at the trash bin beside his feet. There is a pink lock and a small key inside.
"What do you want to show me from this, Molly?" he mumbles and flips roughly through the notebook. The first half of the book consists of Molly's diary entries, each page diligently numbered. The second half is apparently a collection of letters to a "Dear Antirealist", and it seems that Molly, at some point, gave up on numbering the pages.
The notebook doesn't seem to offer anything useful. Sherlock tosses it aside and sighs.
He pulls up the picture he furtively took of Molly's leave note on his camera and grumbles, "I am prepared to be very disappointed in you, Molly, if you don't even have anything useful to offer in this - a handwritten note, unusual by default in this age of flourishing technology."
The note is written partly in print and partly in cursive.
"Dear Mike,
I am writing to request a leave. After all that happened a few months ago and after trying to juggle my work and my unsteady emotions, I think this is the time I must make use of my accumulated holidays. It would mean loads to me if you could grant me two months of break. This break will include all the extra time I have worked for during the previous four years. I have just finished the project you have assigned me, and I hope this won't be too much of an inconvenience. Please let me know, and thank you very much in advance.
Sincerely,
Molly"
Twenty-three letters scatter throughout the note in cursive. An anagram? By this point Sherlock has already tried hundreds of combinations of "riwgqetdyjesitchoadobul" in a few different languages, but he couldn't obtain anything coherent.
Sherlock squints at the picture again. While in Mike's office, he noticed that these cursive letters did not resemble Molly's normal hand. Her natural writing is light and carefree, sometimes so faded that Sherlock could hardly read it. But these letters look rigid, dark, and emphasized, almost as if she tried to trace them from elsewhere -
"Oh! Of course! It requires another book to decode - a book Molly unlocked intentionally for me to read!"
Sherlock turns to the forgotten pink notebook and frantically flips through it. He smirks as he sees exaggerated depressions on certain letters in the pages that are evidently recent trace marks. "So, you want me to find the words from which you traced your letters. Not bad, Molly, genuinely not bad for an ordinary mind."
Slamming the notebook on the dining table, he turns and drags his luggage into the kitchenette. He throws its lid open and fumbles through crumpled clothes for paper and pen.
Minutes later, his fists pound suddenly on the wooden surface, sending a few Petri dishes beside him into the air. Toby, who has regained enough courage to peek from Molly's bedroom, screeches and again retreats hastily into his fortress.
Sherlock groans and tears the decoded message to pieces. "Rain, in, what, green..." All were simple words that meant next-to-nothing, individually, strung together, or rearranged.
"I must be missing something," he spits contemptuously through his teeth as he shuffles absentmindedly through the pink pages of the notebook. "It can't be that difficult! This is Molly I'm dealing with here! Think and observe, Sherlock! What didn't you see?"
Wait. His mutterings and his motions suddenly cut to a stop when he comes to the unnumbered pages. Suddenly, he flips frantically back to earlier entries and gazes pensively at the page numbers.
These page numbers' ink colour doesn't always match the ink colours of Molly's entries.
They are fresh. And all of Molly's trace marks lie within numbered pages.
Sherlock chuckles and lays the notebook by a new blank piece of paper. He rubs his fists in excitement. "Now the real decoding starts. 'Riwgqetdyjesitchoadobul'. What do you mean?"
The first letter, "r", is traced from page 9 of the notebook; the ninth letter of the diary entry on that page is an "f". The second letter, "I", is traced from page 15; the fifteenth letter of the writing on that page is - well, another "I". The third "w" is on page 19, corresponding to a "v" which is the nineteenth letter of the entry; and the following "g" on page 25 corresponds to an "e"... Sherlock's grin widens as the deciphering continues.
For a while, the kitchenette is silent except for the flipping of pages and the scratches of occasional scribbles. Toby gathers enough courage to tiptoe out again, and slowly inches his curious self towards the consulting detective's crossed feet. But before the cat can even come close to the foot of his chair, another dull slam sounds, and some more Petri dishes fly into the air and crash to the ground.
Toby is startled and stops advancing; he curls his long tail and blinks his green eyes at the stranger on the chair, who is now staring at the notebook as if it were a most intriguing new cat toy.
It takes Sherlock a few moments to tear his wondrous gaze from the notebook and cast it toward the decoded message in front of him. Suddenly he turns to Toby and laughs.
The letters on his paper spell,
"fIve thirTY IpsWicH kings X"
-Day 1.
"You keep an interesting diary, Dr. Hooper."
Molly gasps and drops her keys. She hastens to pick them up, nearly tripped by fright. As her figure straightens, she sees Guy Fawkes leaning leisurely against her sofa, her pink diary in his hand.
"Y-You shouldn't be reading - "
Guy Fawkes's smile seems to widen, as if it's possible. "Ah, but dear, it's your fault to have left it unlocked. I've skimmed through it. It's filled with the banalities of everyday life, I see, and a little bit of mystery. Who is this 'Dear Antirealist' you write to?"
"It's none of your business," Molly grips onto her keys tighter, feeling rage fill her chest as the jagged metals digs deeper into her palm.
"Gained some guts overnight now, have you?" Guy Fawkes sneers between cold chuckles and tosses the notebook onto the tea table. In a moment of angry courage, Molly seizes the notebook and runs into the kitchenette. Guy Fawkes watches with the smile as she places the book carefully by the sink.
"That's a strange place for you to put a private diary," he remarks. Molly turns to him and almost rebukes, but her eyes meet the two dark, hollow spaces of the mask, and suddenly all her courage is drained. She bites her lip and feels her body begin to tremble.
Guy Fawkes rises and moves slowly toward her. She lowers her gaze toward her feet to avoid the sight of the two ghastly black holes on his face, but his large, gloved hand violently lifts her chin and forces her to stare into his eyes.
"I told you, darling, that we are watching, and you, dear - you listened to me well. Too well, I think. You exceeded my expectations."
The icy sensation that seeps through his glove chills her to the very bones. Molly tries to break away from his clutch, but fear has been weathering her strength; she cannot budge, and he squeezes her face tighter and laughs.
"I will now tell you one more thing, my sweet. We also like to play games."