A/N: Hello everyone, thank you for all the lovely reviews! I just wanted to let you all know that although Mary and John have finally reconciled in the last chapter, there is still plenty of story left so I will continue updating. And I will try my best not to wait too long in between chapter to post. Thanks for keeping with it, enjoy this next one!

OOOOO

"So, I heard Mary and John have sorted it out," Molly said into the phone. "Back together, the way it should be."

"News travels fast," Sherlock replied, smiling at her through the pane of glass that separated them. He had had many visitors today—Mrs. Hudson, John and Mary, his parents, Lestrade, Andersen, even Mycroft—and so far Molly was the only one who didn't seem to want to comfort him about his present incarceration. He had a few guesses why.

"Did you know already?" she asked in surprise.

"Of course I knew," he replied cockily. "Do you think John ever makes any decision without narrating it in full to me first? You should hear him deliberate over pizza toppings."

She smiled and looked down. "So, I should be getting back to St. Bart's…lots of bodies to be sorted."

"Just like in here." Sherlock paused to check on the position of the guard, who he had already deduced was an idiot of a man far too concerned about the fact that he would soon be coming out to his family to be paying attention to Sherlock and Molly's conversation. "Have you spoken to Mycroft about…?"

Molly nodded discreetly. "Just putting the final touches on everything."

He gave his own subtle nod. "Alright then."

"Don't worry," she said reassuringly before slowly getting up from her seat. "Goodbye Sherlock."

OOOOO

"Hello Dr. Watson," greeted a smiling, but slightly surprised Lara. John wasn't sure why she looked so befuddled, and then it hit him. The intern had not seen him smile this profoundly in months. He didn't bother trying to contain it, he was far too ecstatic. "Are you alright?" she asked, unintentionally embellishing just how strange it was for him to look so happy.

"Hm?" he acknowledged, though he was quite in his own world. "Oh, course I am. Never better." He gave a finite nod and began to walk away, but stopped quickly after a few steps. "Oh, and Lara, could you please make sure exam room four is free in about forty minutes. I'll need it until eleven."

"Okay," she complied with a nod, still unsure of what had the doctor so giddy.

"Thank you very much," he practically sang, continuing on his way. When he got to his office, Mary was already seated at his desk, munching on a breakfast sandwich. His smile broke into a grin. "What are you doing here?" he asked in surprise, as he greeted her with a kiss. "I thought you weren't coming in for another hour."

She swallowed what she had been chomping on and put the sandwich down with a smile. "I couldn't wait," she said, scrunching herself up in adorable excitement. "Are you still too busy?"

John bit his lip and looked regrettably at a stack of files he was supposed to get through before Mary's arrival. "No, no I'm not," he decided, bringing his attention back to her. "That can wait."

"Good," she beamed, pulling his face into a kiss. Her hands gracefully fell into her lap where they could cradle her belly and a deep inhalation brought her chest up, its immediate release signaling her readiness. "Shall we then?"

"Yes," John nodded, taking both her hands to pull her up out of the seat. "There we go," he said elevating her, trying to suppress a grunt from the challenge of lifting his eight months pregnant wife. "You okay?"

"Mmhm," Mary nodded as she began to waddle out of the office, visibly exhausted. "Ooh! Honey, could you grab my sandwich before we go please…"

"Yep." John's face instantly wrinkled in disgust when he caught a whiff of it. "Sorry, is this egg, bacon and…"

"Relish," Mary happily finished, reclaiming her second breakfast of the day from him and taking a big bite out of it.

"God that smells terrible."

"It tastes heavenly, try some." She thrust the concoction in his direction making him recoil back.

"Not for all the riches in the world."

"Dr. Watson," a girl's voice called from down the hall, interrupting the aromatic assault. It was Lara hurrying up to the pair with a file folder in her hand. "Oh, hi Mary." Mary returned the 'hello' and Lara turned back to John. "Mr. McDonald is here for a refill of the prescription you gave him last week. He says he's very busy and needs it right away."

"He's a prick," John replied, reaching for the handle of exam room two. "Tell him he'll have to wait like everyone else and if he can't wait then he'll have to come back later."

"Okay," the intern said with a nervous nod as she turned to leave.

"Oh, and Lara…" She spun back around. "Don't worry about that exam room I asked you to keep open. I'll be using this one." She respectfully nodded again and then took off to deal with the waiting room.

"Mr. McDonald," Mary thought out loud after the girl had gone. "Why does that sound familiar?"

"Erectile Dysfunction," John answered, leading her into the room. "Comes in every other week for his blue pills."

Mary made a face and shook the mental image. "Okay, done with that."

"Thank God." John helped her up onto the examination table and made sure she was comfortable. The ultrasound machine was already in the room and they both felt their heart rates quicken just a tad as John wheeled it over. They had waited a long time for this. He let out a heavy sigh and smiled through his sudden anxiousness. "You ready?"

"Uh-huh," she said with a smile and an excited nod as John motioned for her to lift up her shirt. She obliged and watched as he squeezed the blue gel onto her abdomen, flinching at how cold it was. "Never quite get used to that."

John gave her a smile and took her hand in his, leaving his other free to operate the eye of the transducer. "Alright then…let's see."

Mary lay back on the inclined table and breathed in slowly. "I can't believe it…we're finally going to know."

John looked back at her and smiled, giving her hand a gentle squeeze while he still moved the device over her stomach searching for their baby. "There we go, see the head," he said finally, turning the screen more to Mary and pointing at the obvious image.

She smiled and felt her heart beat a little faster. "Mmhm…" She studied the screen hard, trying to see if she could tell the gender from what she saw. She couldn't.

John was having an equally tough time. "Hold on…let me get a better angle."

"Alright." Mary watched her husband reposition the eye against her tummy, trying to locate what they needed to see. "Wait, right there!" Her hand shot up to the screen, pointing to the money shot.

John's eyes moved to the place she was pointing at and he froze his hand. "Oh wow, yeah," he murmured as he made sure of what he saw and swallowing hard before a smile stretched into his lips. "It's a girl."

Mary saw it too and had tears welling up in her eyes almost immediately. "It is a girl…we're going to have a baby girl, John!"

He turned to her with a grin and planted an ecstatic kiss against her lips, quickly snapping a still of the scan. Coming back up, John stared at the screen in awe. "I've got a daughter…" A happy chuckle escaped him, same as the one he had expelled when Sherlock revealed Mary was pregnant at their wedding. He looked away from the screen to see Mary wiping tiny tears off her beaming face. "Are you happy?"

"What do you think?" she laughed, taking a tissue out of the box beside the examining table to tend to her eyes. "I can't wait to hold her."

"Soon," John said, giving her arm a warm rub. He grabbed some tissues as well and cleaned up Mary's belly, making sure all the gel was off before rolling her shirt back down. He printed out two scans, one for each of them, and wasted no time in taping his onto his desk. Prior to actually finding out the sex of his baby, he hadn't thought about whether he would prefer a boy or a girl; but knowing now, he decided the outcome could not have been more perfect. Knowing for sure now that he was going to be the father of a baby girl made John feel as though nothing was more right.

"We'll have to tell Sherlock," Mary proposed, swinging her legs over the table (even though she needed John to pull her back up.) "He's been sending me texts all day about everything under the sun…I think he's hoping I'll mention the sex of the baby without him having to come right out and ask."

"You too?" John laughed, pulling out his phone to read some of the texts he had received from the detective that day. "'The fridge is making a noise,' 'Mrs. Hudson wants to know when you will be home from work today,' 'Bored,' 'On average, how many toothbrush bristles do you lose a week, need to know for a case,' 'Whose that actress with the hook nose that Mary likes?' oh and here's a good one… 'I found an axe under the fridge, yours?'"

Mary giggled. "It's sweet he wants to know."

"Sweet would be asking if we found out the sex yet and then actually having a normal human reaction to it," John said with a look. "My pocket vibrating every ten seconds with increasingly pointless messages is…well, it's Sherlock, I guess."

"Yes, it is." She smiled, rubbing her tummy lovingly. "Why don't you call him and tell him."

"Tell him?"

"That it's a girl, don't tell me you've already forgot!"

He smiled and brought her arms around his neck, kissing her lightly as he entered the embrace. "I haven't forgotten. I just want to share this with my wife for a little while, just us." He rested his hands against her round bump. "Plus, it'll be fun to watch him sweat it out."

She gave him a scolding smirk, but then rolled her eyes. "Fine, make him wait, but not too long!"

"I won't." He smiled and gave her another kiss. "He's coming over tonight to help me with something anyway, we can tell him then."

OOOOO

"This is torture, nothing fits, it doesn't add up! We have to be missing something!" Sherlock yelled, startling Mary who was enjoying a cup of tea two rooms away in her kitchen. She turned an ear in the direction she heard the outburst.

John groaned just as loudly and with the same frustration clenching each word—though his frustration seemed to be directed at Sherlock more so than the problem at hand. "We're not missing anything. You're not looking hard enough!"

Mary chuckled to herself and decided to intervene before things got violent. They had been going back and forth like this for nearly an hour. She grabbed her tea cup and, with some effort, pushed herself out of the kitchen chair.

"John, I can look at the bottom of someone's shoe and tell you where they've been in the past 24 hours and how long they stayed. I can tell you a café's entire breakfast menu just watching customers come out of it. I knew your wife was pregnant before you, her husband and a doctor. I can read someone's hands like a book, find criminal hideouts no one else can, and solve more mysteries in a week than Scotland Yard can even began to build a file for in a year! But this is impossible!"

Mary finally appeared in the doorway of the room where the men sat cross-legged on the floor arguing. "Hey, how's it going?"

"Great." "Perfectly." They answered simultaneously.

"Sounds like you've hit a bump…" she sensitively suggested.

"No," John answered with a nonchalant shake of his head and a 'what gave you that idea' look on his face. Sherlock also shook his head.

Mary glanced down at the pile of cot parts the boys were sitting in, the diagrams and instructions that came with it appeared to have been strewn across the room quite some time ago, and from where she stood, there did not appear to be anything put together yet. "So, uh…where's the baby's cot?"

The men sat silently for a moment and then Sherlock shot up. "Mary, this cot is completely impossible to put together. Might I suggest cleaning out a drawer, laying some blankets in it, and seeing how far that gets you? Children stay pretty much the same size for the first three years, right? Should work."

"Sherlock, we're not putting the baby in a drawer," John quickly shot down, getting up from the floor as well.

"If you hadn't bought a defective cot we wouldn't have to entertain the idea, would we?" he snarkily shot back.

"The cot is not defective; you just refuse to read the directions!"

"Those directions were written by a moron."

"You think everyone's a moron!"

"And that is almost always correct, especially in cases where a person is instructing another person to put together a contraption that has to safely hold a child and fails to say what goes where in nearly every direction and diagram."

"It's all right in front of you, you just have to look! Pretend it's one of your cases."

"I didn't see you attaching any pieces!"

"I could have if you let me read the instructions!"

"Boys!" Mary yelled, throwing her hands up between the bickering men. They both shut up, but continued to stare each other down. "You're not going to get anywhere yelling at each other. So, if you can't do this then I guess I'll have to."

She determinedly waddled over to the pile of parts and, holding her stomach for support, lowered herself to the floor. Sherlock and John quickly went over to her, scolding each other and feeling pretty guilty themselves. "No, Mary," John pleaded, taking her hand to pull her back up. "You've been on your feet all day and you aren't supposed to be doing anything remotely strenuous. Let us do it."

"No, you two can't get along and I don't want our child to be sleeping in a drawer, so I'm doing it." She stubbornly went to work, looking for something to connect the piece she currently held in her hand.

"Mary," Sherlock began, coming over to her other side. "I recently read that sitting on the floor this close to your due date can induce early labor."

"That's not true," she replied dismissively, grabbing for the instructions which were unfortunately out of her reach.

"Darling," John said with a grunt as he squatted down next to her. "I promise he and I will stop bickering and put this thing together—"

"How can you promise that?" Sherlock chimed in.

"Because we're going to use the bloody directions," John firmly answered back. He returned his attention to his wife. "Just leave it to us, it'll be fine. You know you can't sit here and do this very long, and if you have to keep getting up to stretch you'll be exhausted."

Mary gave each of them a hard look, but nodded in compliance anyway. "Fine, but only because I can't really breathe in this position," she said, holding the place where her uterus was pushing into her diaphragm.

"Sherlock, help me get her up. Now."

They each took an arm and lifted her back up, all three concealing their heavy breathing when the process was over. "Thanks," she said, patting the two of them. "And I'm sorry I yelled at you…" neither appeared to be to offended by the disciplinary action, but a confused look came over Sherlock's face when he noticed Mary's lip begin to quiver and her eyes redden. "It means so much that you're here helping, Sherlock, really it does." She wrapped him in a tight hug, befuddling him further.

'Mood swing,' John mouthed to him from behind Mary. Sherlock nodded, understanding best he could.

"It's no trouble," he told her, patting her back. "Don't want it sleeping in a drawer, do we?"

Mary pulled back and wiped her eyes a bit. "Oh, um, actually we don't need to say 'it' anymore." She rejoined John, grabbing his hand with a smile. "We found out the sex today."

"Ah." Sherlock interlocked his hands coolly behind his back. "William Sherlock Scott Holmes."

"What?" Mary raised a humored brow.

"That's the whole of it…in case you haven't decided on a name yet."

John smiled and wrapped his arm around Mary. "Uh no, Sherlock we're not naming our daughter after you."

Sherlock smiled at the two, genuinely smiled. "It's a girl, then?"

"Yes!" Mary told him brightly, reaching for her stomach. "It's a girl.

"Congratulations." He nodded in their direction with another small smile. "Maybe I should have gotten the mobile in a different color…something with…ponies?"

The Watsons gave him a look and shook their heads with a chuckled. "No, Sherlock, the mobile is perfect," Mary reassured him. "And when this cot gets put together it'll be the first thing to go in it."

"Excellent," the detective said, and then he glanced down at the crib clutter. "We'd better get to work then."

It was nearly ten o'clock when the cot was finished, and to everyone's surprise it was actually done correctly. There were no extraneous parts that never found their way in, no crooked beams, no stuck wheels, and the mobile looked lovely hanging over the cotton-candy-colored bedding. "Well that wasn't so hard," Sherlock stated contently, returning some of John's tools to the tiny shoe box he kept them in.

John nodded in agreement. "Looks good, I'd say." He scanned the rest of the nursery. So far, the cot was finished and placed on the east wall by a rocking chair Mrs. Hudson had given Mary, there was a wardrobe on the opposite side of the room, and the chest in which John had been keeping the baby clothes that he and Mary had bought or been given by excited friends was positioned by the window on the adjacent wall. "We still got a lot of work to do in here…Christ, why'd I wait so long."

"Because you were holding a grudge against your wife," Sherlock answered obviously, not noticing the sideways look he received from John.

"Yeah, thanks mate." He turned off the dim lamplight and headed out to the kitchen, Sherlock following close behind. When they reached the kitchen, John pulled a water bottle out of the fridge and attempted to change the subject. "So, did you still want to take a ride over to that widow's house tomorrow?"

"Widow?"

"Yeah, the one that emailed you about her missing cat."

"Oh that one, no. Can't. I have to go see Mycroft tomorrow about the Moriar—"

"Shh!" John urgently stopped him and then held up his finger, listening to the silence in the flat for a moment.

Sherlock's brows sloped down in confusion. "John, what are you—"

"Just shut up for a second!" he reiterated in the same exaggerated whisper. He listened for a couple more seconds and then took his finger down. Still speaking in a hushed tone, John abashedly admitted, "I haven't told Mary about the Moriarty video Mycroft received a few days after the Magnusson thing."

"What do you mean you haven't told her? How could you not tell her?"

"Because, she only has a few more weeks to go and so far she's been great with keeping her blood pressure down. I don't want to take any chances, not now. And she's going to be stressed out as it is the closer we get to her due date. So, I didn't think it too smart to tell my nearly nine months pregnant wife that the biggest criminal mastermind London has ever seen who had an unnatural obsession with you has somehow resurrected himself. She can finally relax about Magnusson; I don't want her to have to worry about Moriarty now of all times. Especially since, if you remember, he's the guy that actually acts on the information he gets and doesn't give a shit about the lives he takes in the process. That's why I didn't tell her."

Sherlock stayed silent, studying the man in front of him who was now visibly disturbed by the thought of Moriarty being back. "Well, I suggest you tell her, and soon. That video is going to be leaked to the public. Probably within the next two weeks."

"What?!" John's eye practically jumped off his face. "How? Mycroft can't let that happen!"

"Let it happen?" Sherlock bemused. "He's orchestrating it."

Now John had to lean against the counter for support. "Sorry?" he said, trying to remain calm and not strangle the messenger.

The detective sighed and tactfully eyed his friend, trying to decide what his next statement would be. "John, I'm going to tell you something and I need you to be level-headed. None of that 'I'm about to be a father and I'm a nervous wreck over it' anxiety, please."

"I've not been a nervous wreck."

"You check Mary's pulse when she's sleeping."

"How'd you know about that?"

"I catch you sneaking checks on it every hour, why shouldn't I assume you also do it when she's asleep."

"Yeah, alright, just say what you need to say," John forfeited, not wanting to entertain his friend any longer.

"You'll stay calm?"

"I'll do my best impression of calm." He was almost positive what Sherlock was about to say would not leave him calm at all.

"The Moriarty video is not real…it was manufactured," Sherlock revealed, watching for the twitches in John's face to signal his outrage level.

John didn't react though, he appeared to be mulling over the information he had just been given. "Manufactured?" Sherlock nodded. "By whom?"

"Someone we know…and for a reason that isn't what you think."

"Why can't you just come out with it? Stop giving me these little taglines. What's going on, Sherlock?"

"Molly made the video," the taller man blurted finally. "She made the video and sent it to Mycroft in order to convince the powers that be to terminate my sentence for killing Magnusson. I asked her to do it, and if anyone finds out about that, I will take full responsibility. Mycroft is aware that it is a fake and is onboard to use it to diffuse the sentence."

"Well…" John purled to himself. "Holy shit."

"I know you're probably upset that once again I went to Molly instead of you, but it was necessary. I couldn't drag you into this, not with Mary being so close to the Magnusson case. The trail would easily lead back to you and who knows what secrets could be spilled about her."

"Sherlock, I'm not mad you had help from Molly…" John said, realizing that Sherlock wasn't seeing the big picture. "You're committing another crime here…a huge one. What happens when everyone realizes that Moriarty is still dead? He is…still dead, right?"

"Of course he is, you can't fake shooting yourself in the face." Sherlock scoffed to himself and took a seat at the kitchen counter. "And Mycroft's already taken care of those details. Tomorrow he's going to go through the finalized plan with me."

John was silent for a long time, trying to wrap his head around all of it, though he was so tired at this point it really wasn't happening for him. He sighed and finally spoke. "Are you sure you have this figured out? You're going to be okay doing this?"

"Yes." Sherlock was confident in his answer and John knew that he couldn't say anymore. The Holmes brothers had put a plan into action and attempting to stop them or even fact check them was futile.

"Alright…I'll let Mary know what's happening."