One bullet

[marysutherland]

BBC Sherlock

Rating 12 (violence)

Spoilers: for The Reichenbach Fall

Betaed by the wonderful Small Hobbit

Pudupudu asked me at the SHAM2012 meetup to write Mycroft and Sherlock hurt/comfort. There may be slightly less comfort in this than she was hoping for, but that's Sherlock for you.

His death was going remarkably well, Sherlock thought. Too well? No, he thought, exactly as it should do. He'd got the jump right – good thing too, or his death would have been non-reversible. And Molly had proved to be much more competent with dead people than live ones – explained a lot about her career choice, now he came to think about it. Even the marginally Secret Service were pulling their weight. Mr Budd, MI5's in-house stylist, had somehow tinted Sherlock's hair and eyebrows a remarkably realistic if unflattering auburn, as well as ruthlessly taming his curls. In a badly-fitting suit and unfortunate shoes, he now cut a gawky, awkward figure, the kind people's eyes travelled over quickly at parties in order to find someone worth fantasising about.

In his new passport photo he'd also managed a particularly vacuous gaze, the look of one of life's little men. Fitted with someone who was happily going off on a coach trip of Scenic Switzerland. Where Martin Crieff would disappear and a man with access to a well-stocked Swiss bank account could set to work.

Anthea walked into the briefing room, gave him one rapid, unimpressed stare and resumed her focus on her Blackberry.  "Your coach leaves from Victoria at eight thirty p.m.," she announced in a bored voice. "A car will take you down there and drop you off in an hour. I presume you've checked your suitcase and the contents are adequate. Anything else you need?"

"I've got everything," he said, "so you can let Mycroft know I'm ready for the fond farewells now. Doubtless he'll feel the need to give me some heavy-handed advice on the correct etiquette for the deceased."

"He won't be coming," Anthea replied, without looking up.

"Some more pressing engagement? Oh no, couldn't miss the opera just because my little brother's killed himself. Got to keep a stiff upper lip, you know."  He hadn't wanted to get Mycroft involved in the plan at all, but he was the only person who could arrange fake passports at such short notice. It was irritating that he was so indispensible sometimes.

"Mr Holmes is very busy tonight. An important operation."

"Tea with the queen? Chatting up President Putin or whoever's in charge of Russia this week?"

Anthea looked up at him then, and for once there wasn't a vacant smile on her face, but an impression of concentrated fury.

"I had a message about an hour ago, that he was out of surgery." The posh vagueness in her voice had vanished too, leaving a trace of her original Scottish accent.

Sherlock opened his mouth to say: liposuction or hair transplant, and closed it again, because suddenly this wasn't a joke anymore.

"What happened?" he asked.

"You told us John would be Moriarty's only target, to concentrate on protecting him."

It had seemed obvious that Moriarty would attempt to use John as a weapon, just as at the swimming pool. He hadn't expected the threat to the others as well.

"Moriarty said John, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade," he replied hastily. "He didn't, he didn't say anything about Mycroft."

Anthea nodded. "He wasn't a primary target. But one of our agents followed Dr Watson to Baker Street from Barts, and she spotted a face she thought she recognised there. She couldn't leave her assignment, of course, but she phoned Mr Holmes. He was attending a reception at the Wallace Collection, and we didn't have anyone immediately to hand in the area..."

Mycroft had been ten minutes walk away from 221B and one of Moriarty's bullets. He hadn't thought of that, hadn't worried about Mycroft.

"What did he do?" he yelled. "He's no good at legwork, he knows that."

"He didn't attempt to intervene. He went to Speedy's, to keep a watching brief on matters until a full team could get there. He was sitting there drinking a cup of tea and organising a response when Erik van Est, disguised as a workman, left 221A." Anthea came to a halt, blinking back tears.

Mycroft would have stuck out like a sore thumb, of course, at Speedy's, but what else could he have done, Sherlock thought: there was no other obvious observation point on the street. It probably hadn't seemed impossibly dangerous. A hitman didn't shoot people at random, their role was to be unobtrusive. That was what the client was paying for, of course. Unless they knew their client was unstable and treacherous, a man who'd kill his own associates if they let him down...

"Van Est spotted Mycroft and thought Moriarty had sold him down the river?" he said.

"We think that's what happened," Anthea replied. "He let off one shot, from a distance, and then ran off. Mr Holmes – Mycroft – was hit in the abdomen. No vital organs damaged, but he lost a lot of blood."      

"He's survived surgery?" Sherlock said. He needed facts right now, cold hard facts.

"Yes. He's in University College Hospital, in a private room."

"I need to see him."

"I can't allow that," Anthea replied firmly.

"What do you mean?"

"In Mr Holmes' absence, I am in charge of this operation. He is unconscious and likely to remain so for some time, but he's not been fatally wounded. You have a coach to catch shortly. It would be disruptive and possibly even dangerous to postpone your trip. There is a schedule to maintain."

"You said an hour till I need to leave for Victoria. Half an hour in UCH would be possible. No-one's going to recognise me like this. And I'm sure you want to go and check on him yourself, be on hand when he does wake up."

Anthea looked at him thoughtfully. "Five minutes," she said at last. "No arguing, no silly stunts, nothing to draw attention to yourself."

"Ten minutes," he said, and she nodded and then said. "Bring your luggage. You'll go on directly from there."

***    

Mycroft looked smaller than usual, diminished, as he lay on the hospital bed, plugged into the complex machinery monitoring him, keeping him alive. Another fine mess you got yourself into, Mikey, Sherlock thought, the childhood nickname rising unbidden to his mind. Still, at least you won't get fat on hospital food.

No, that wasn't why he was here, to laugh at Mycroft. Timing, as John would say.  He wished John was here. John would know what to say. And he'd know how people survived being shot. Sherlock just knew about how people died from gunshot wounds.

Mycroft couldn't be dying. Logical deduction: if Mycroft were dying, there would be medical staff here trying to prevent it. Mycroft was in a "serious but stable condition". At least they hadn't said: "he's in a comfortable condition," because how could anyone be comfortable in hospital? How much did it hurt being shot? He'd been shot at, but never actually shot. John would know. Maybe he should phone John and ask him. John had told him once that if you were about to die, what you thought was: Please God, let me live. He'd have to tell John that if you were about to fake your own death what you thought was: Please God, let this work.

He was standing here at Mycroft's bedside and all he could think about was John. Mycroft would probably understand, though, he knew where he was on Sherlock's list of priorities. But even so, Sherlock still had eight minutes remaining. He ought to do something, he supposed.

He pulled up a chair and sat down by the bedside, tried to make himself comfortable. He wondered if he should hold Mycroft's hand, but that didn't seem like the sort of thing that Mycroft would want. And then he remembered what you were supposed to do, with coma patients, with the dying. The last sense to go was hearing. If he talked to Mycroft he might hear him, even if he couldn't reply. Surely the ideal conversation to have with one's brother.

The room was secure; Anthea would have made sure of that. So the first thing to do was update Mycroft on the practicalities of the situation.

"I'm alive," he said loudly, and it sounded worryingly like a boast. "My plan worked and Anthea's arranged for me to leave the country temporarily. If I need any further assistance I'll let you know."

He hesitated and then added: "In return, if you need undercover work done, I am prepared to carry out a certain number of operations. Although my main focus, obviously, has to be on bringing down the remainder of Moriarty's network. Don't worry: he is dead. I checked extremely carefully."

What next? The thing he had to imprint in Mycroft's brain at the subconscious level, the message that he must never forget.

"Look after John," he said, and then added out loud the words that he'd thought he'd never tell anyone. "He's a possible suicide risk. That's why he kept his gun in the first place. Take it from him if necessary." Probably a futile warning. Mycroft would have worked out about John long ago, keeping tabs on his therapist as he did. And even if Mycroft did get hold of John's pistol, short of caging him up, there was no way of keeping John away from high buildings in London. There were other complications, as well, of course.

"It'll be hard because he doesn't trust you any more. I couldn't explain to him what was happening, in case he worked out what I was planning to do."

He needed to say more, to make it clear that he had understood Mycroft's reasoning, even if it had been erroneous. That was what you did, wasn't it? Show someone where they had gone wrong, so they could get it right next time. Mycroft had done the same to him – for him – a few months ago in a plane full of dead people.

"You didn't think it was dangerous telling Moriarty about me, because he didn't understand about people. All he knew how to do was to threaten or bribe them. He thought in crude, inaccurate catchphrases: the Iceman, the Virgin, the Pet.  Not a subtle man. You presumed he wouldn't be able to use the information you gave him to bring me down. You – we – didn't realise the power of the tabloid press." 

What Moriarty had known, of course, was how to give information to the right people, to those who could work out how to exploit his and Mycroft's weak points. To the cunning, unscrupulous Kitty Riley. And before that to Irene Adler. He didn't want to think about Irene, but he ought to tell Mycroft about her at least.

"Irene Adler's not dead, by the way. I saved her life and helped fake her execution. I don't know if you'd worked that out, or if we'll be able to make use of her in the future. But I'll tell Anthea all the information I've got about her, in case it comes in handy."

Too late for information sharing, probably. If he and his brother had learned to talk to one another, how much trouble could have been avoided? He'd offered the Bruce-Partington plans to Moriarty, rather than return them to Mycroft, and Moriarty had strapped John in a bomb-jacket to use as a bargaining chip. He'd solved Irene's puzzle without bothering about why she wanted the information, and he'd nearly wrecked Mycroft's career. If Mycroft had told him about the keycode Moriarty was supposed to have, he'd have been suspicious, asked questions rather than taking it for granted. Time for the hardest thing he had to say, for both of them.

"Moriarty fooled us both. There is no keycode, there never was. Moriarty broke into all those places with bribes and threats, as usual. I, we, thought the newspaper revelations were intended to distract me from chasing the keycode. But it was the other way round. The keycode was to distract me from the newspaper revelations. So I wouldn't bother trying to clear my name till it was too late. Till there was no way to go but down. He was so clever, Moriarty, he ran rings around us."

He paused. Should he really be telling a seriously ill man – maybe even a dying man – this? Would it sap Mycroft's will to live? And then he suddenly remembered Molly's face as she'd tended the corpse of the bogus Sherlock. The pain and compassion he'd seen in her eyes for someone for whom there was nothing more to come, except the decay of their bodily shell.

"But you know what, Mycroft?" he almost yelled. "Moriarty's cleverer than we are and he's dead. But we're not. So maybe it is us winning after all."

His ten minutes must be almost up, he realised, and looked down at his watch to confirm it. He had to finish before Anthea returned, he couldn't talk in front of her. What else was there to say? In the silent hours before dawn he'd formed in his mind the farewells he wouldn't, couldn't say to the others, except in the silence of his own mind. A few words to Lestrade  – Greg – You're not a bad detective. Just don't let the bastards grind you down. An imagined hug with Mrs Hudson as he told her firmly: Make sure you take care of yourself. I want you safe when I come back. And the simple message he wished he'd been able to give John in their last phone call: I'll miss you so much.

None of them seemed right for Mycroft. You couldn't undo thirty years of hostilities in a sentence. He could hear Anthea's heels tapping their distinctive rhythm down the corridor now. He had to say something...

"Get well soon, Mycroft," he announced, in the icily commanding tones that he'd learnt to mimic so early on. "I still require Big Brother watching me."  And then he got up and walked out of the room to take up his new identity.