Necessary Faith
By Alecto Perdita
Chapter 11 - Go back to the start
Rating: PG-13
Posted: May 16, 2012
Life on the road—alone and without Mary's company—is blanketed with long stretches of silence. Sometimes it is contemplative, peaceful even, but other times completely maddening. When he can't take it any longer, he pulls the skull (which he had never been able to stow away in storage with the rest of his belongings) out of the glove compartment and engages in rather involved but one-sided conversations with it.
Then there are the days when he fills the car interior with nothing but the music of violin concertos. Mary helped burned the CDs for him before he left; he suspects she knows exactly why and thanks her for not commenting. John's still rubbish at identifying the actual songs, and he doesn't know Paganini from Vivaldi.
Sometimes he wants to give himself odd glances.
After almost four weeks of wandering aimlessly and three false positives, Mary rings him with a potential job in Newcastle. He would have kissed her had they not been so far apart. Her lead is solid. In just two days, John manages to track the redcap that had the police department scrambling to solve a series of bloody murders taking place over the last month.
He jokingly refers to her as "dispatch" in the wake of the case. It sticks and their working relationship changes accordingly.
Mary uses her extensive network of contacts to help find leads. And sometimes she'll get calls from old family acquaintances or friends with jobs of their own. John keeps hunting and Mary goes back to her life, all while still lending him support and mentoring him in her spare time. It works for them, because it gives them what they each need without cutting out the other from their life.
Unlike Sherlock, she always gave him the full story and always made the risks clear ahead of time. She may even fuss too much for John's taste. She prioritizes the workload based on urgency and prior first-hand experience. He is content, on the most part, to get his "marching orders" from Mary with absolute faith that she will not put him at unnecessary risk.
But John is (still) an idiot sometimes (don't look like that, almost everyone is) and he longs to fling himself recklessly into the embrace of the unknown.
-x-x-x-
Three weeks after leaving Mary in London, he acquires a second mobile. It's nothing too fancy. All he really needs is a burner phone capable of taking a few low-quality photos and sending the occasional text. It becomes his de facto number—the one that he gives to other hunters and those that he's helped along the way. He fills the address book with new contacts and acquaintances.
Unless he is in the middle of a job, this is the number that he answers without fail.
He sometimes thinks about retiring his old mobile number. Harry calls him about once a month at the old number. John doesn't always pick up. She used to call once a week after Sherlock's death. But in the months of traveling with Mary, the phone calls had tapered off due to John's unwillingness to speak to her. Lestrade still texts him from time to time with small updates from London and asking how John's faring. John tries to take a few moments when he can to compose a response, usually accompanied by a photo from wherever he's passing through at the moment.
John still likes Lestrade after all. It doesn't seem fair to worry the detective any further.
But tenacious reporters and overzealous Sherlock Holmes fans do manage to ring him occasionally. These are aggravating at best and inevitably send any good mood into a ditch for the rest of the day.
One would think that after one and a half years, they'd very well learn to leave John alone.
He really shouldn't bother with the expense of two mobiles... And there are a lot of excuses that he makes to himself every time he decides against dropping the old one: that he needs the data plan for emergency internet access; that he doesn't want to saddle some poor sod with the harassment when the number gets put back into rotation; or that he needs this divide between his personal life and hunting (and who is he kidding with that? Hunting is all his life is anymore).
Yes, there are lots of reasons to hold onto his London number. John would just keep telling himself that none of them have anything to do with Sherlock himself.
-x-x-x-
Molly sent him an invitation—an invitation to a Christmas party she's throwing at her flat.
Upon initially receiving the email, John ends up staring at the screen for almost fifteen minutes straight. He goes back to the email again and again over the course of the next few days. After a promising lead in Canterbury turns out to be a dead end (no actual supernatural menace, just a group of very imaginative and cruel teenagers), he fires a text off to Mary before heading toward London.
TO: Mary Morstan
10:52 AM, December 20
Do you have any plans for Friday?
Before he knocks on Molly's door that Friday night, Mary grabs his hand and gives it a little squeeze. Lestrade is the one to answer the door and let them in with a drink on one hand.
"John!" The detective exclaims; his face flushed with the warm glow of alcohol. "Come in!"
The flat is warm and decked in holiday decorations. The Christmas tree standing in the corner of the room is strung up with lines of fairy lights and ornaments. About a dozen other people are milling about, laughing and chatting as they moved between the kitchen and the living room for food and beverage. He helps Mary out of her coat and Lestrade directs him to deposit their belonging in Molly bedroom acting as the night's impromptu coat room.
"Greg, this is Mary Morstan. Mary, this is Detective In—Sergeant Lestrade."
"Call me Greg." Lestrade extends a hand to her, which she takes gingerly but shakes firmly.
"You came, John!" Molly cries as she makes a beeline toward them. She stops short after catching sight of Mary, and her smile falters for a second. "You brought a friend."
Lestrade takes the opportunity to swan off somewhere, probably to refill his drink. It leaves John feeling a bit resentful as he becomes aware of the sudden tension between Molly and Mary.
John shakes his head instead. "Yeah, I hope you don't mind."
"Of course not, welcome, um—" Molly's obviously struggling as she realizes she doesn't know Mary's name.
"Molly Hooper, Mary Morstan," he gestured between the two women as a brief introduction.
Molly's attention flits sharply between John and the other woman. "Mary? The same Mary you've been traveling with?"
Right, he might have mentioned Mary when he ran into Molly at Tesco all those months ago. He is surprised that Molly still remembers though. He nods.
But before he can figure out why Molly's acting so strange in regards to Mary, John is pulled away by Mike Stamford to converse with a few other doctors from Bart's. Mary simply pats him softly on the cheek and tells him to go play with the boys as she can take care of herself. The first few times he glances across the room to check on Mary (he still hasn't broken the need to be constantly aware of where she is; useful on the job but a bit too much otherwise), she and Molly are attempting to have what seems like very silted conversation.
John enjoys seeing Mike again (after all this time, there are finally moments when he can look at the other man and not think about how he introduced John and Sherlock to one another), but he quickly bores of conversing with the other doctors at the party. He hasn't practiced medicine in almost a year, other than the necessary first aid needed to patch up himself and Mary.
When he finally gets away from the pow-wow of medical persons, Mary is sitting with Lestrade on the couch and they're sharing a laugh.
"Sorry for abandoning you like that," John apologizes as he sidles up against her on the arm of the couch.
She rolls her eyes. "I'm a big girl, John. No need to fret."
"Your date's a keeper." Lestrade gives a toothy grin over the rim of his glass.
John snaps automatically and without thinking. "I'm not his date."
They both stare at him for almost a minute before John realizes exactly what he said. He almost wants to run and lock himself in a room somewhere until the urge to vomit passes. But that feels both childish and stupid. Instead, John rubs the back of his neck nervously and offers them a weak smile, "Sorry, force of habit."
They take pity on him and let the slip slide without further comment.
The next hour passes amiably, which comes as a complete surprise to John. Before coming, he was half convinced that the entire affair would be daunting. It's...nice to know he hasn't forgotten how to connect with ordinary people, that he hasn't totally lost touch with the rest of the world. He thinks Mary understands too as she smiles softly and meets his gaze.
Out of the corner of his eyes, he can spot Molly...just hovering constantly in the background. She spends most of her time glued to her mobile phone while making distracted conversations with her party guests. She must be distracted, because John can continuously feel the weight of her gaze and she levers turns away fast enough to avoid meeting his eyes when he does look at her. She alternates between texting, waiting for her phone to buzz, and jumping when it finally does so.
After a few drinks, John gathers the courage to talk to Molly again. He maneuvers around a couple coming out of the kitchen to approach the pathologist standing by the Christmas tree. Her back is turned to the rest of the room and she's hunched over her phone again, while her fingers fly over the touchscreen.
John reaches out to touch her elbow, and she jumps and shoves her phone behind her back—but not before he catches what appears to be a photo of him and Mary at the party.
"Oh! John!"
"Molly, is everything alright? You've been kind of distracted all night?"
She fidgets and lowers her gaze to her shoes.
"Molly?"
Suddenly, her head shoots back up to look him straight in the eye. "Are you happy?" She blurts out as her eyes dart back and forth while studying his face.
John blinks, not sure of what to say at first. Happy? It had been a long while since he thought of himself as being happy—months, though it felt like years at times. What is happy? Happy was running across rooftops, flying tackles onto the backs of fleeing suspects, inappropriate giggling at inappropriate times in inappropriate places, Chinese at 2AM, late-night conversations about James Bond and Star Wars, and everything else... What is happiness now? Is his happiness now joking about mediocre food from petrol stations, stargazing on the car bonnet, dodging around police presence, or celebrating small victories with wine? But he doesn't have that either. Not while Mary remains in London and he keeps running.
He blinks again before answering honestly, "I don't know."
"Does she make you happy?" Her eyes are narrowing and probing with all the mental strength she can seem to muster.
He straightens as a chill settles in the base of his spine, "That's really none of your business, Molly. Thank you for the invitation, but Mary and I have to get going. We have plans in the morning."
It's a blatant lie.
At the door, Lestrade claps him across the back and orders him to stay in touch. John shouldn't promise to, but he does so anyway. He doesn't realize that he's been crowded under the mistletoe with Mary until too late. He rolls his eyes at the sight of Lestrade's wolfish grin and can't bring himself to be annoyed with the detective. Before John can ask Mary, she's grabbed onto the back of his neck and is dragging him forward to her lips. The kiss lasts just as bit longer than it really needed to be, but John doesn't protest and revels in the warmth of the body pressed against his.
As he pulls away, John spots Molly still hanging in the background and clutching her phone until her knuckles are startlingly white. Then her phone rings out loud, and Molly nearly drops the device. One look at the caller on the screen sends her fleeing into her bedroom.
-x-x-x-
By March, John has been consistently on the road for almost three months. Winter has melted and thawed, paving the way for spring to bloom forth. With the vernal equinox, hunting patterns in Britain also change. Demons and possession are still as much of a problem as any other time of the year, but the fae kind decided long ago that this was "the season" to pop over from the dimension or realm next door to abduct unsuspecting humans for their games and whims.
Other than the changeling abductions last year, Mary had steered them clear of encounters with the fair folk last year. But John's on his own now and he needs to learn. During his last case looking into the disappearance of a bus full of schoolchildren, she put him in contact with an old family friend. It had never occurred to John before than that there could be specialists; all the other hunters he had meet up to that point had been jacks-of-all-trades.
Boy is he grateful to have Tim O'Mallery's help and guidance.
Fairies call for an entirely different skill set that most hunters don't bother cultivating: a quicksilver mind and the gift of Gab (Tim has also privately admitted to having leprechaun blood in his family, which probably also helps a great deal). It's hard enough to kill fairies and stupidly dangerous to try trapping them. The best methods are also the most difficult: tricking them or negotiating with them.
Watching Tim work, John couldn't help but think of Sherlock. His former flatmate could probably run mental circles around almost any fae. He could have made an excellent fairy negotiator. John had to smother the laughter then, but did so barely in time and still managed to offend the sidhe they're talking to.
Thankfully, John managed to more than make up for his faux pas when his quick instincts saves them both from being ensnared in the vengeful sidhe's binding circle. Tim is exceedingly grateful ("Don't fancy being bound in servitude to a sidhe Court for the rest of eternity") and invites John to consult with him on a few more jobs. And John, never one to turn down an opportunity to learn more, readily agrees.
So John, on his way to meet up with Tim to talk to some elves (though Tim assured him they were more Keebler than Tolkein), is just 15 kilometers outside of Cambridge when the car starts issuing all sorts of noise from under the bonnet. Ten kilometers later, he is forced to pull over into the emergency lane before the engine gives out. His attempts to rev the engine produces a few sputters and then finally nothing. He pops the bonnet and is immediately assaulted by a cloud of hot steam and smoke.
With a heavy sigh, he pulls his mobile and rings for a tow truck.
"I'm afraid your transmission's shot, mate." The mechanic offered a small sympathetic shrug.
John only groans when he's told how much repairs will cost. John is already painfully close to broke having used up much of his pension for that month. He momentarily contemplates asking Mary for a loan, but quickly discards the idea. He knows for a fact that she doesn't have that much money to throw around either. Their previous travels depleted each of their personal funds.
Hunting doesn't pay the bills—he didn't get paid at all for his work. It's no wonder most hunters worked at least part-time jobs. The rest gambled, cheated, hustled, and conned away their money problems. John prefers not to have to join the ranks of the latter type.
It doesn't feel right not to get the car repaired either. The Corsa doesn't belong to him.
He flicks open his wallet to stare petulantly at his bank card. Maybe he should apply for a credit card, no matter how much he dislikes the notion being in debt. It's only when he plucks the bank card out of the holder that he's reminded of his second bank card tucked behind the first. The one he had been issued after opening a second account where he promptly transferred the sum of Sherlock's inheritance to him and forgot about it.
In reality, John does technically have more than enough to pay for repairs. In fact, he has more than enough to continue hunting and living comfortably for another few years without working. He hesitates though...
Then he remembers that Tim is waiting for him. And there's a woman waiting for John to bring back her girlfriend—the love of her life. There are people relying on him to get the job done, and John has never let anyone down if he had anything to say about it.
John tries to still his hand tremors as he passes the debit card over to be charged.
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