Chapter Text
Thursday 28 November 2013
9:08 p.m.
— Are you available? SH
— Not really, what’s up? JW
John kissed Mary again idly and waited for a reply.
— Maybe nothing, never mind. SH
That was ... odd. “Never mind?” Since when did Sherlock—
— No, tell me why you asked JW
— I’m undercover and something’s off. SH
— What? How? JW
— Not sure. But there’s definitely something SH
— What? JW
— What, Sherlock? WHAT? JW
Christ alone knew why Sherlock had sent an incomplete message. Was he under attack? As the minutes ticked by, possible catastrophes cascaded through John’s brain, with Sherlock more helpless and more tortured in each one.
Finally, another message arrived.
— Could be dangerous. SH
Ha. If Sherlock was defaulting to an old running joke, it definitely wasn’t anything serious. Bastard had got his heart rate up, though. Again.
— Well, you’re a big boy, looked after yourself for 2+ years JW
— Right. Sorry. SH
— Don’t need me JW
— Wrong. I always need you. SH
— John? SH
— Sorry. Yeah, no. Can’t do it. Get Mycroft to send you a minion JW
— Will do. Sorry to interrupt. SH
“That His Nibs who keeps pinging you? Something wrong? You’re frowning.”
Mary’s expression was a bit sour, as though John’s kisses had gone distracted and unsatisf—Oh. They had.
“Sorry.” When had he started having to apologise to everyone around him all the bloody time? “He says he needs me. He’s never said that before.”
Mary’s entire face froze, which was interesting. Why? Sherlock hadn’t really interrupted anything serious, just some light snogging in front of the telly.
“Well, give it an hour and text back,” she answered, so indifferent she didn’t even ask about Sherlock needing him. Did she think John wasn’t really useful to Sherlock in his work? (Was he? Had he ever been?)
“Give it an hour”: It felt like an order, or a challenge. Either way, entirely obligatory.
The hour crawled by, with the old-fashioned wall clock ticking intolerably slowly, intolerably loudly, perfectly audible over the interminable Jane Austen modernisation Mary had chosen.
At last it was 22:17.
— You okay? JW
— In a manner of speaking. SH
— Minion on the way? JW
— Too risky. SH
— Need a hand? JW
— Too risky. SH
— Well, check in in the a.m., will you JW
No reply. If Sherlock was disgruntled, he’d just have to get over it. John didn’t live in 221B anymore, wasn’t at His Lordship’s beck and call now, never would be again. The man would have to learn to share him.
Not that John actually wanted to be shared. No, Sherlock had shown the limits of John’s importance when he’d faked a bloody suicide in front of him, then gone haring all over the globe for two years on a grand adventure while John nearly died of grief. With some effort he could charitably overlook Sherlock’s horrible, farcical performance at the Landmark—of course the self-proclaimed sociopath would never know how to treat any emotional moment with gravity, or even simple humanity. But that day in the train car, when Sherlock had deceived him into forgiveness by pretending not to know how to disconnect the bomb—that had been the last straw.
Well, the next-to-last straw. The really last straw had been his uncontrollable hilarity at John’s solemnity, distress, and heartfelt pardon. The utter cock. “Oh your face, your face—! I totally had you!” Well, fuck Sherlock Holmes with the business end of a—never mind. But from now on the man could get himself out of his own fixes.
In the morning he’d almost forgotten about Sherlock’s message string of the night before. Mary had made it pleasant to get into bed, and pleasantly easy to drift off after. He’d had a night of deliciously uninterrupted sleep, and how rare those were.
Friday 29 November
Breakfast was nice, domestic. He saw Mary off to work and settled in for a leisurely and unambitious day off.
Taking his second cup of tea to the sitting-room, he looked for his phone. Sure enough: a message from Sherlock, from 7:37 a.m.
— If I don’t make it you were SH
And nothing else.
Jesus wept. That was hours ago, and the man couldn’t even be arsed to send a reassuring follow-up after.
— I was what? You okay? JW
— Sherlock? Answer me, please. JW
— Right now. I need to hear from you. JW
Three minutes later, John was ringing Mycroft’s secure line.
“Yes, Doctor Watson, Sherlock is on a job for me at the moment. Why do you ask?”
John gripped the mobile so hard his fingers ached. “Because to go by the texts he sent me last night, he might be in trouble. And now he’s not answering mine.”
“What did he say?” Mycroft’s urbane voice went sharp. John clearly had his complete attention now.
He gave a shortened run-down of Sherlock’s erratic texts, ending with the valedictory fragment from the pre-dawn hours.
“Thank you for telling me. He’s been very—irregular—about reporting in, since he returned; he’s got too accustomed to working alone, having no one to back him up, and consequently, answering to no one. Contravening every rule of security work.”
John felt a jab of remorse. Sherlock had asked for backup, and been snubbed in favour of a snogging session on the sofa with Mary, when John could get her attention from the telly. What if Sherlock really had been in difficulty? In danger? Christ.
His anger at himself came out, naturally, aimed at Mycroft.
“Why’s he working already anyway? Didn’t he just save Britain for you? Doesn’t he get a rest, some transition time, to get back into his London life again after years away?”
On the other end Mycroft was exhaling audibly, probably to suppress a withering reply.
Yes, that must have been it, because when he did speak again, it was with exaggerated patience.
“I asked him, Doctor Watson, because I needed him. The plot to bomb the Houses of Parliament, as grave as it was—the current situation could be ten times worse, endangering far more people. Not to mention the world order, such as it is.”
John’s stomach did something he knew to be medically impossible, but which felt indisputable.
“But why him? You’ve an army of spies, haven’t you? Why does it always have to be him?”
It appeared that he was shouting. Shit. He really had absolutely no self-control on the subject of Sherlock Holmes. The cock.
Again, Mycroft’s silence went on long enough to be a message in and of itself.
“Because he’s the only one I can trust completely. And because he is the best.”
John might share the latter sentiment; he hardly remembered the time when he could still share the former.
His own silence seemed to have communicated something to Mycroft, who sighed and said, “Thank you for alerting me. I’ll get someone in there immediately. Goodbye.”
Like a character in a television drama he rang off without waiting for John’s own goodbye. For fuck’s sake. Drama queens, the pair of them.
Another hour crawled by, and still no text from Sherlock. John swung between terror and anger, making occasional detours through tedium, resentment and nostalgia. He tried to start any number of routine tasks but couldn’t settle, and found himself circling the kitchen island like a shark, willing his mobile to light up.
In a corner of his brain normally sealed off, he’d confined the deadening sorrow of Sherlock’s death. The desperation of those months, that first year. His visit to Sherlock’s grave on the first anniversary of his suicide, when he spoke aloud again to the gravestone and said that Sherlock had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, that he missed him, that he’d never forget him even though he was still furious with him for what he’d done.
The second anniversary, he’d gone there again to say, “I forgive you. I know what it is, now, to be in so much pain you’ll do anything to make it stop. Literally anything. I just wish I’d known that was how it was for you. And I was wrong to call you a machine. You were never that. I’m sorry, and I forgive you.”
Well. At least that had been an unforced forgiveness. And he’d got to know Mary better, and trusted her with his grief, and begun to look forward to things again. Spending time with someone uncomplicated, someone restful—it wasn’t dull, as Sherlock would undoubtedly have said; it was restorative. And he’d tried to lock up his mourning behind a door made of deliberate avoidance, and distraction, and distance.
Over the past few weeks, cracking open that door had made him furiously angry with Sherlock again. Every time.
This time was different. This time there was danger, and the madman had asked him for help, and John had said no. Why?
You got him back. You begged him to stop being dead, and he did. You sodding ingrate. You could at least make it worth his while to have come back, instead of punishing him, ignoring him. Going out of your way to make it clear Mary’s your priority. Endangering him.
He couldn’t have said how he found himself in Mary’s car, pelting toward central London, and Mycroft’s office.
Hours later, being chauffeured to the Norfolk coast far to the northeast of London, John reviewed Mycroft’s pompous tutorial on the rationale of enabling the legal and illegal sales of arms worldwide.
“It’s a delicate balance, between the worldwide trade in weapons of war and our governments’ earnest desire that they never be used. Their value lies in being usable, not in being used. They’re more like diamonds than like consumer goods. But they must be sold: if peace were ever to break out it would beggar the arms industry, paralyse the world economy, and destabilise the global balance of power.”
Mycroft’s voice was a tattoo needle drilling into his still indignant brain.
“And the armed forces of the world? Fighting fit and ready to protect national sovereignty? Territorial integrity?”
“Precisely like the weaponry: they must be functional, in order to ensure that they not have to function. But they are more delicate to deploy, more costly to maintain, and more complicated to motivate.”
John gritted his teeth: the old story. War as a money-machine for the unscrupulous, nothing more. Valour, service, and sacrifice—all just puppetry, and Mycroft a jaded puppetmaster.
He let the familiar disillusionment drop, merely asking, “So you risk your brother’s life to keep this delicate balance going, do you? Why bother keeping him off drugs then, if you’re just going to throw him to the wolves on a regular basis?”
Mycroft winced: a palpable hit. “We haven’t the time for this conversation, Captain Whetstone.”
“Whetstone? Seriously?”
“You’ve had no time to practise for this role. Best keep close to a name you’ll answer to automatically. Now listen carefully. Sherlock is impersonating Kenneth Winthrop, an assistant to the permanent under-secretary in the Foreign Office and undercover agent for MI-5. There’s a traitor in the FO, and Sherlock is replacing the real Winthrop, who was tracking the man’s contacts.
“Winthrop’s colleague has been using his position in government to broker sales of conventional, chemical, and biological weapons from other countries to the worst of bad actors, both foreign governments and rebel groups. That is beyond the pale of what you call the ‘delicate balance.’ No member of government can facilitate—indeed, we must obstruct—the access to illegal and illegally-sourced weapons by parties who will have no check or restraint on using them to wreak catastrophic harm.”
“Why is Sherlock taking this man’s place to identify the traitor’s contacts among legitimate arms dealers trading lawfully in legal weapons? And how’s he meant to do it?”
“If you were making illegal arms deals, where would you hide? Obviously, among those trading legally.” Mycroft was making a visible effort not to sigh, and John tried to appreciate the sacrifice.
“Sherlock is there because Winthrop died of a heart attack three days ago. The autopsy revealed nothing suspicious about his death. When his—life partner disappeared, though, we were concerned: the two events in conjunction were ominous. But in fact we’ve since verified the safety of his partner. It appears Winthrop’s cover was intact, and our goal is again to identify his quarry’s contact. Or contacts.”
“And Sherlock’s there alone.”
“Yes. Winthrop’s partner was meant to accompany him, which is helpful: we can send you in, in his stead.” Mycroft sounded pleased at the tidy transition.
“As Winthrop’s life partner.” This was hallucinatory.
“Well, no. Unfortunately, there’s no chance whatsoever that you could pass for that man. But we’ve now replaced his name on the reservation, and you and Sherlock will have to feign ... the greater intimacy and intensity of an illicit relation.”
“Wha—what?” The prospect had just, incredibly, got worse. “Why would Winthrop be at an event like this with a romantic partner? Seems unnecessarily conspicuous.”
Mycroft nodded. “That was partly the point. He’s bait for one of those contacts: even if he can’t spot them, they might make contact with him, make overtures to him. We wanted him to have a visible pressure point for blackmail.”
“Blackmail? Ha! If they knew it was Sherlock, they’d have known that was a bust.” It came out a bit more sourly than he’d intended.
“Why would that be?” Mycroft’s tone was acid, but then again it usually was.
“Pfft–! As if Sherlock cares enough about anyone to make them leverage for blackmail.”
Mycroft’s carefully curated default expression—partly supercilious, partly bored—collapsed into something more like offended incredulity. His jaw actually dropped.
“What? He boasted himself of not caring, said it ‘wasn’t an advantage.’” John heard himself sounding a touch defensive.
Mycroft stood abruptly and leaned his weight on his fists, on the desk. “Perhaps you should discuss it with him, then, when you see him.”
John wasn’t used to seeing Mycroft this incensed; he sat down again slowly, visibly regaining his composure and returning to the topic at hand.
“It’s only acting, Doctor Watson.”
Sudden bitterness flooded him. “Acting. Something Sherlock considers so far beyond me that he—” He couldn’t go on.
But Mycroft seemed to understand. “I know this is galling. But you asked to help. Please, put the greater good first here: I know you to be fully capable of that.”
With that, a team of handlers had erupted into the office to whisk John away to arrange his wardrobe, hair dye, briefing, mobile phone, and of course weapon.
Dark brown hair, practically Sherlock’s colour; brown contact lenses; the military cut of a private pilot’s uniform. John felt a stab of nostalgia for the military demeanour that came flooding back with the uniform: authoritative tone, confident delivery, economical movements. The power of the military posture alone, the clarity of the chain of command—the loss of all of that had left him unmoored when he’d been invalided out into civilian life.
He was still twenty minutes from Blakeney, staring out the limo window at the marshy landscape barely visible in the early dark, when his mobile vibrated.
— He’s back at the site. You should see him soon.
And he sagged back against the upholstery with relief. He hadn’t been fully conscious of his own rigid tension until it seeped away.
He’d just finished rereading his briefing document and deleted it when the car pulled up at the sumptuous, tasteless entry of a pseudo-exclusive luxury resort. (“So suitable for a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,” he could just hear Sherlock sneer.)
The reception desk in Italian marble, a dozen shades of ivory.
The haughty concierge, in a uniform that looked disconcertingly like the one John was wearing.
And a stooped, hesitant figure, pleading plaintively with the manager for a new key: “I’ve lost mine, you see, and you’ll need to recode the room and issue me a new key card, security is vital—”
John stepped smartly to the desk and took the flustered guest’s hand, pulled him down for a quick kiss on the mouth.
“Sorry I’m late, love. You’ll never believe—but I’ll explain later. —You there. Excuse me. We’ll need two keys for my—friend’s room. I’ll be down later to check in properly.”
Sherlock looked dazed, though that might be part of his performance as Winthrop, and said faintly, “I was afraid you weren’t coming,” with a sincerity that John couldn’t doubt for a single second.