Sherlock

Ladies and gentlemen, not just in public, but damn close to Vauxhall Cross. Either this is a very well-thought out and stoic approach to professional suicide or he's somehow developed some degree of faith in me. It does nothing to settle my thoughts, nothing at all. It's not nervousness exactly. The day I allow Mycroft to ever make me nervous again will be a sad day indeed. But the strangeness of this entire event is getting to me. I just keep thinking back on what he must have seen at the flat last night. What did he think when he saw six locks on the inside of the bedroom door, for instance? They're there to keep me in. I know they're on my side of the door, but at the worst of a withdrawal, I'm lucky if I can stretch up to reach the first three. I'd need to be really determined to get to the one that latches into the lintel.

Luckily, that's where I spent last night, coming through the first of the worst from my latest lapse. It'll be back, in another wave, but this morning I am looking and feeling relatively well. Better, in fact, than I did before the lapse. Ironic, isn't it? I'm presenting my best possible face to my brother, but I had to shoot up to get it. Perhaps I shouldn't dwell on that; if that sticks in my head as a possible use, I'll never quit.

This is what I mean; what if this is bad for me? I've never really thought about it until now, but what if seeing him here is bad for me? I've been avoiding him. I moved out of a bough-and-paid-for flat to support myself just so he wouldn't be able to find me. And I never stopped to think about the reasons for that, but this could be it.

That's why I'm here at precisely the appointed time. I think if I had to sit around and wait for him, I might get up and walk. I'm not surprised, as I round the corner, to see the car pull up and know that Mycroft had exactly the same idea. There's a comfort in it, actually, knowing this is giving him the same difficulty. It's been just over three months since I last saw him. He's put on a couple of pounds. Doesn't look happy. Tired, like he's working too much and, more importantly, not getting enough out of it. So I should avoid asking him how work is. Though I may be spending more time than ever on my own and locked in, I have enough of the social in me to still see that.

But it's another worry; the last time I saw him, I would have spotted all those factors and immediately begun to calculate just how long I could stretch the work conversation out for, how long I could wring him out. Today, though... Today I don't want to.

I meet him at the door of the place. He reaches past me, but only to hold the door open. Not the sort of courtesy I usually get. Usually I'm following him out of police stations, so maybe that's understandable.

I'm supposed to say 'Hello' and 'How are you?', but I can't quite make the words form up and leave me. It's okay; neither can he. There's not a word spoken, in fact, until we're both sat down and there's two black coffees on the way. Anyway, 'How are you?' would be rather a loaded question, I suppose...

The first words between us are the last I would ever have expected. Mycroft starts us off, and he says (bear with me, I'm only reporting this, I'm aware of how it sounds), "I'm sorry."

"What for?"

"Well, you made it clear you'd rather not have been found. I was worried you wouldn't come, this morning."

"Don't be ridiculous." He thinks about that and then nods, conceding. Whether or not he admitted it to himself, he knew I'd be here. It was that note of his, the wording of it. It was far too acceptant, too Do-What-Thou-Wilt. And Mycroft has always had such high expectations. Not just of me, of everybody. That was what made me so determined to disappoint him at every turn. So it follows, in a sick, human sort of a way, that when he stopped expecting, I would fulfil. I had thought the note calculated to elicit this effect, but he's left me wondering.

Because I'm wondering, thinking of other things, because I was up sick all night and still not feeling the best, I say something very stupid all of my own. "How did you find me?" There's a classic, hm? One for the outtakes, wouldn't you say...

"Don't be ridiculous," is his response. Fair enough. "Though I will admit, you made it rather more of a chore than previously."

"...Thank you?"

He rolls his eyes, but I'd swear, if I didn't know better, that was the edge of a smile on his face. Again, I'm only reporting the observable facts. Maybe when I'm not baffled I'll be able to give a little analysis. "You've kept your head down," he corrects.

Bloody right. Twenty-two weeks since my last arrest. That was the last time I saw him. Twenty-two weeks and a couple of days since I, in my laughable ignorance, thought 'I know, we'll see what these meetings are all about'. Eighteen days – how long the thought of seeing Mycroft again kept me off the stuff, and the longest I've lasted to date.

"Oh, well, of course I'm harder to keep track of when you're not having to run after me."

Far too quickly, caring too much about setting me straight, "That's not what I meant."

I look him in the eye and see that he's telling the truth. So I put away the comment about how comfortable he must have gotten (he's always been sensitive about his weight) and tell him instead, "I know."

"You didn't have to hide." This hurts him. I have hurt him, staying away. All of this I know because suddenly he can't make eye contact anymore.

So while we're being honest with each other (and myself), "I was scared you'd put me in rehab." Especially after that bloody meeting. I just imagined those every day and bright airy rooms with locks on the doors and the enforced company of others and I... There's not a lot I am genuinely afraid of, and even less I'll openly admit to, but rehab is it. I'll do it. It'll take me time and it'll hurt like hell and I'll hate myself and keep lapsing, but I will do it, and I will do it alone.

But Mycroft just shakes his head. He has to turn away from me for a moment, asking one of the staff to bring him a blueberry Danish, but he turns right back and says frankly and openly, "No. That's why I left it so long before coming to find you."

Don't ask where I was that night. And please tell me he doesn't already know. "Why now?"

"I'm only so good a person." I laugh. Mycroft just made me laugh. And now what I need is somebody to tell me this isn't all some extended fever dream and I'm about to wake up next to Ruby all over again. "And... Sherlock, please don't feel I'm trying impose anything on you but... If you need anything-"

I stop him. Not with a word or a sign but, well, he stops. Maybe just because his pastry's arrived. Giving him the same moment's rest he gave me, and you can tell this waiter just absolutely hates us, "Actually, could I get one of those too?" Then, as he takes off rolling his eyes, in as light-hearted a way as I can possibly manage, I say to Mycroft, "A distraction, if there's one going."

But he probably doesn't really know what I mean.

Jim

They're completely useless, y'know. My nearest compatriots, this is. My left and right hand advisors, they're begging me to find replacements for them. They're completely and utterly fecking dense. I got Moran round this evening and put it to him; if I can figure out what the Next step is, would he be along with me? He was all for it. Dead excited about the idea. Bless him, he does get rather the look of a young puppy about him when he's wound up about something. But since then, he's done nothing to prove himself of any worth. He tried thinking about it for a while, but it clearly wasn't working out for him. And then he remembered Liverpool are playing for the Cup tonight and took himself off into the living room. At least he's out of the way.

Still, I expect it of him. He's no self-discipline. If you ask me, that's what the army does to people. They get so used to all their orders coming from outside they can't do anything for themselves anymore. And Seb's just not much of a thinker, really. He's very good in a crisis, and if the task is, say, getting out of a building full of unfriendly guns, he'll have to that figured out in mere seconds. But this is a bit bigger than that. We'll forgive Moran. Especially since his team are getting torn to shreds.

Hm? Oh, I haven't so much as looked at the match. No, I just know by the noises he makes and the lagers he's gotten through and it's not even half time yet.

Dani, though, Danielle I am disappointed in. She paced up and down until she was too sore to pace. Now she's lying on the sofa opposite me in the office, tapping her foot because she can't drink while she's drugged up. I can read what's going through her head and I'll tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, the only thing she's thinking about is whether or not she can be bothered to face the pain of getting up to go out and have a smoke. She's not even trying anymore. You know I used to think she was intelligent? Seriously. Do you ever get that; the more you get to know somebody, the more laughable your first impressions of them come to seem?

Me, I'm sitting at the computer, looking at the lists.

All the jobs are just sitting here. All the basic, everyday little jobs that aren't enough to constitute Next. There are about twenty which are ready to go. See, we time them, leave a while between murders, a while between thefts, and that way everything stays sporadic and feeling natural. So they're all just sitting there, a little of codewords. Redhead and Speckle and Carfax, Olivier and Jubilee... But none of them are any good. Most of them don't even require my intervention, once I trigger them. Which doesn't help me at all, does it?

"Dani."

"Mh?"

"Remember last year, when I first met you and Moran?"

"...How could I forget?"

"Don't jump down my throat, angel," because I can hear her getting geared up for that, "But what was different about that and what we do now?"

"Well, any one of us could have been murdered at any given moment."

"Right. So everything was better when we were in danger..."

Oh, wrong thing to say. On the plus side, though, it gets her to sit up. "Well, we'll just go off and murder another minor dictator, shall we?"

"What did I say about jumping down my throat? Christ, if you're so desperate for a fag, open a window."

She sighs out eternal gratitude, and is on her feet in seconds without wincing. She leans out head and shoulders before she so much as sparks up, so there's that much respect left in her. Or that's what I think, untils he leans back and calls over, "You need to stop staring at those jobs. I helped plan at least four of them and I'm telling you, it's all small-time. Those people don't need you once you give out instructions."

Yes, thank you, dear, I had thought of that...

Not content with this, she goes on, "I think what was different about last year, none of us could have gotten through it without the other two. It's a sum of the parts kind of thing."

What was I saying, about her not being intelligent?

I look at the codewords on the screen with fresh eyes and yeah, fine, they're nothing, they're absolutely sweet fuck all on their own, totally meaningless, each of them impacting on twenty people tops, but there are twenty of them, and there's one in Aberdeen and one in Aberystwyth and the rest from Aberanywhere. Fuck's sake, I've been staring at them, and it's here, it's perfect. 'Next, please'. Next. This is what's next.

"Danielle, pick a city, a UK city."

Her wrist still hangs over the window ledge, but the rest of her is back in the room, looking me over with wary interest, the way you look at a monkey behind bars when it might be about to go buck nuts. "I don't understand," she says. But she will. When I put it to her, she'll understand.

"A city. Preferably a major one. I'm going to ask you to cripple it, so choose wisely."

"Edinburgh," she says, as if crippling a city is something she's given a deal of thought to, over the years.

"Fine. Take Edinburgh. Blow the castle to kingdom come if you want, but make the world talk about it, do you see what I'm saying?"

"I still don't get why." But she's intrigued, isn't she? Enough to drop most of a cigarette down all those floors without a thought and come over to me, looking over my shoulder. I've brought up a map and am plotting where all the planned jobs are, plus all the work in the queue that might be taken care of relatively quickly. And I've just put a big blue pin in Edinburgh. She shakes her head. Doesn't understand, couldn't articulate it, but she's shaking her head. She starts to look towards the door, about to shout for Moran, but I beat her to it.

"Moran, pick a city you want to fucking nuke!"

The TV roars as another goal goes away. Moran makes a noise like he's been shot and bawls back, "Manchester!"

So I put a big pin in Manchester too.

And then I start highlight all those other little works of genius I can trigger with a single mouse-click. "No," Dani mutters. Then louder, "No, no, what are you doing?" On instinct, her hand flashes out to grab mine back. She stops millimetres short of contact and grabs my cuff instead. Which is all I need to know; if she really wanted to stop me, she wouldn't have been able to stop herself like that. She wouldn't have wanted to. I... dislike physical contact and Danielle knows that. She would have deliberately held me back. So, when I shake my arm, she just lets go. All I could have needed to ask her, just answered.

I give her a moment's eye contact and go back to lining it up. It looks good on a map, y'know, it looks like mainland Britain (and one of the Isle of Mann) has multicoloured chickenpox. She turns away.

"Sebastian! Seb, get in here. He's lost his mind; he's booking us all into Her Majesty's Hotels!"

"Do you trust me?" I say, while he's tearing himself away from the telly.

"Not when you're doing mad things. This is not 'Next', this is 'Last'."

"So do you want me to take you off Edinburgh then? Walk away, Dani. I understand, it's absolutely fine. I'll give you a ring when it's over"

"Yeah," she says, sounding defiant. "That'll do." She passes Moran in the doorway. I'm too deep into this to really care. I'll notice in the morning, I'll feel shit in the morning, but then again I'm going to have an awful lot to do, keeping track of all this. It really will probably end up that I just call her when it's over. Anyway, I couldn't be too wrong; Moran doesn't seem half as concerned as she was, looking over my shoulder. He watches that single click, as I let everything go, sending all that out into the world all at once. But maybe he doesn't see it all so clearly as she did. Besides, he wanted this as much as I did. He doesn't need to understand much.

I tell him, "Rip that town to shreds, alright?"

And he says, "Alright."