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Chapter Text

From the private blog of John Watson:

Sherlock rang about a quarter hour after I’d gotten Rosie off to daycare, and I think I’d have talked to a car accident scammer or a siding salesperson to get out of cleaning the flat, which I just had time to do before my afternoon shift, but when I pulled out the mobile it was him. I let it ring twice more, so I wouldn’t seem too eager.

We’ve patched things together, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same. I was an arse to him after Mary died; I worked out in therapy with Ella that a lot of that was my guilt over being secretly glad that he was the one who lived. (I never told even Ella about the string of dreams I had when he first came back, right after the shock of seeing him alive had forced me to realise what I really felt – dreams where it was Sherlock seated across from me at the Landmark, looking expectant while I fumbled in my pocket for a ring).

We both know now what Mary’s real reasons were for being with me, but some of the things I said can’t be unsaid. He curled up in a protective shell for a long time, and I don’t suppose I can blame him; nowadays he’ll call me with “a good one for the blog,” get Rosie a gift punctually for every birthday (I don’t know how she’s four already), spend time talking with me at Molly’s Christmas parties (she throws one every year for people who “don’t have anyone to spend Christmas with”). That’s been mostly that.

Hudders finally had her hip replaced – the NHS moves slowly, but it gets there – and I swear it took ten years off her age. I know that Sherlock took care of her as if he’d been her own son, and when I came round during her rehab, helping her manage the steps down to the street and pacing alongside her Zimmer frame (she’d count off the steps, every day ten more than the one before, up and down in front of Speedy’s) she’d talk about how she missed having me there. “But I suppose you wouldn’t want a little girl growing up round all that chemical stuff, and the gunshots, and the Met calling at all hours,” she’d sigh, meaning she really wanted me to show up at the door with Rosie the next morning.

I wanted to do that, too. But it wasn’t mine to ask.

So my heart jumped up like the stupid thing it is when he said “This one's probably not for the blog, John, but given your taste for the luridly overdramatic, I thought you wouldn’t want to miss it.” Could I be there at nine? I’d be there five minutes ago if you wanted.

And yeah, I can write that because this is a private post. My eyes only. Call it notes for the public version, if there ever is one.

A quandary of prodigious moment, involving the fate of the Earth and the Divine Plan, Sherlock had quoted to me before the pair arrived. He usually didn’t have time for nutters, so there had to be something special about these two.

“We understand,” said the more affable of the two men, “that you are exceptionally skilled at discovering crimes, and tracking down missing persons, and – that sort of thing.”

Had he been living under a rock? From his clothes, you might have thought it. He wasn’t a small man exactly, but there was something cosy and roly-poly about him. He seemed obscenely benevolent for before lunchtime, and he was dressed like a refugee from the BBC costume shop, with a waistcoat more worn-out than the Baker Street carpet.

Maybe he just didn’t watch telly or read the tabloids. Sherlock’s been a household word in Britain for years now; he may have a strand or two of grey in those curls – I don’t like to be seen staring too hard, it could just be the light – but he basically looks like the same smartarse that got plastered over the front pages back in the oughts until I wanted to get my hands around Murdoch’s throat.

“I am,” Sherlock replied, “simply the best at these things.”

“Reckon you’re the one we want, then,” said the other man. You’d never think they had a thing in common. The same kind of lean, expensive dash Sherlock’s got: trousers that fit like a coat of paint, messy-just-so hairstyle that looked like twenty minutes every morning – so red it couldn’t be real, but you couldn’t see any roots – one of those watches that gives you barrels more information than you can ever use, and an apparent need to do anything with the sofa but sit on it like a normal person. He didn’t smile, and he wore wraparound shades in the same price point as the wristwatch.

“And your friend’s name – ?” said Sherlock.

“Ah – this is my colleague, Crowley, Anthony Crowley.” Cuddly Fluff had already handed over a visiting card in sepia fountain-pen script, as if it were eighteen-ninety-five, introducing himself as A.Z. Fell, Bookseller, Occult and Rare Volumes A Speciality.

“So, what sort of problem do you have for me? I warn you ahead of time, it had better be at least a Six.”

“If you are assigning numerical values to importance, I believe it would be fair to call this one a Ten Thousand.”

 “I am all ears. What happened?”

“He lost – “

“We lost – “

They both spoke at once, hesitated, and then Cuddly Fluff went on: “A child has been lost.”

“Boy, girl? How old? John.” Sherlock nodded at me, the cue to open my laptop – I already had – and begin transcribing the conversation.

AF: Eleven. He’d be eleven.
SH: And when did he go missing?
AC: Er, would’ve been eleven years ago Wednesday.

I was sure I’d heard that wrong, and I could tell Sherlock was too.

 “You lost. A child. Who had just been born,” he said after several seconds. Ella calls this Active Listening, which is better than saying what the fuck. “And in the intervening eleven years what steps have been taken to find him?”

AC: Well, none actually.
AF: You see, we thought we had the correct child, but he apparently wasn’t, so now we need to get the real one back.

Real? I had to break in at that point. I mean, all I could think about was Rosie. If I’d adopted her or whatever these two were talking about, and found out years later that somehow I didn’t get the baby I’d put in for – well, it’s not like ordering a custom Mini. She’d still be my kid. “You have a child, but he was supposed to be a different child?” I guess I sounded sharp. What did they propose to do with the one they had? Restock him?

“Was this some sort of complication about an adoption?” asked Sherlock. “I’m well aware that that involves massive amounts of paperwork – ”

“Doesn’t everything,” muttered Grouchy Sunglasses.

 “ – there would be medical records, DNA testing – “

AF: Well, yes, but the records have been lost. There was a fire. We made enquiries in person.
SH: If you have raised a boy to the age of eleven, I cannot fathom your reasons for wishing to replace him with another one now.
AC: Well, we didn’t raise him.
AF: Yes we did.
AC: Oh, well, Harriet looks in sometimes. More now than when he was younger.

(Grouchy Sunglasses had an audible Sarcasm Font. I thought of asking him to teach me that.)

SH [increasingly baffled]: With. Whom. Has he been living?
AF: His parents –
AC: We were workin’ for ’em. Making sure he grew up right. Godfathers, like.
SH: So when they adopted him –
AF: Oh, dear, no. They thought he was theirs.
AC: Bit of a cock-up at the lying-in hospital.
SH: They made you godfathers.
AC: Actually, was his nanny – I mean, the wrong boy’s nanny, all right? Only we thought he was the right boy –

When Sherlock clutches his head, I know the case is at least an Eight.

SH: This is not helping. John, ask Mrs. Hudson if she would kindly make a large pot of very strong coffee –  

“She’ll say she’s not your housekeeper,” I interrupted, still typing.

“Yes, she will. Then she’ll do it.”

“A spot of tea for me, if that’s possible,” said Cuddly Fluff. Grouchy Sunglasses just glowered.

“And then,” said Sherlock, “we will start over, and you two will begin at the beginning.”

“And we know he is destined to set off the Last Battle. Unless we prevent him. As my card says, I specialise in books of prophecy, and I’ve been following up – well, a number of prophecies that might help us to locate him, but I’m not certain I can puzzle them out in time.”

We’d gone over, twice, how Grumpy Sunglasses had dropped off a foundling at a lying-in hospital to be looked after, and it smelled fishy as hell, but they didn’t tell different stories and they didn’t change them. Years around Sherlock had taught me that most people who’re lying regroup and revise their narrative if you look like you’re not buying something, but if some of this was bollocks, they’d at least rehearsed it first. It got madder by the minute, but the longer they went on, the more Sherlock sank into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of his face, that position that tells me he’s opening the doors to his Mind Palace so he can make connections to whatever’s in there. I imagine it as something you’d build in Minecraft, which, by the way, I’ve played a lot on long dull nights. My second bachelorhood is full of excitement, I can tell you.

AF: You see, the child was – is – very special.
SH: Special how? Disabled? Talented? Euphemisms aren’t helpful.

(Had that dressing-gown faded since I first saw it? It felt as if I was sitting in on our first case together.)

AF: By reason of heritage. His Father, you see –
SH: You knew the father? I thought you said he was a foundling.

(First flaw in the story. Now we’re getting somewhere.)

AF: Not personally, no –
AC: And you wouldn’t want to.
AF: It only meant he had an important destiny.
AC: Only we were doin’ our best to talk him out of it.
AF: In an effort to prevent the end of the world and everything in it. We’ve both gotten quite fond of the place, you see.
AC: So we thought, best strategy, get taken on in the parents’ household –
AF: – only to find the boy we’d been looking after wasn’t the right one at all.

(The longer they talked, the more I noticed how they finished one another’s sentences, how the skinny bastard’s gyrations on the sofa always pointed him toward the other bloke, almost protectively. It was an instinct I recognised.)

SH: And these adoptive parents, who are apparently unaware they’re adoptive – John, are you getting all this down?

“I’m just the secretary,” I muttered.

SH: Who are they? The parents. Of this, ahem, wrong boy.
AF: Americans here in the diplomatic service. Thaddeus and Harriet Dowling.
SH: Thaddeus Dowling. I’ve heard the name.

(Sherlock has a way of saying “I’ve heard the name” that means more than it sounds like it does. My ears perked up.)

SH: So you detected the discrepancy – how?
AF: He would have been – made aware of his destiny on the date of his eleventh birthday. It’s the prophecy, you see.
AC: And instead he just went on behaving like an insufferable little tosser. Wrong boy, no question. So Azira – so we had the idea of poppin’ up to Tadfield and havin’ a butcher’s.
AF: Which is when we learned about the fire, and the lost records, and so on. The boy we know would have been confused for another child born in that hospital on the same date, but we’ve no way of learning who that might be. And we really have to find the right child, and, well, do something about him before everything goes pear-shaped.

That seemed to be the end of the narrative. Cuddly Fluff’s hands were in some sort of a death struggle in his lap and he was biting his lip, while Grouchy Sunglasses glared grouchily through his sunglasses as if he were personally affronted by everything in the flat. I saw him shooting a death glance at a peperomium that Rosie had insisted we give Uncle Sherlock last Christmas, which was sitting in the window looking about medium dead. Sherlock sank further into the wing chair, until his bottom threatened to slide off the cushion.

“I’ll take the case,” he said without opening his eyes or unsteepling his hands. “My usual retainer, as we discussed on the phone. Kindly give my associate here all the particulars – the correct full names of everyone you know to be related to either boy, contact information if you have it for them, any alternative contacts for yourselves, and the names of anyone else who may have information about the matter. I  will begin enquiries immediately. I will be in touch.” He fell silent. I knew they were dismissed, though I’m not sure they grasped it.

“Thank you,” said Azira-something-stammer Fell. “It’s very urgent. He’s already certain to have named the dog.”

“Dog?”

Sherlock, deep in his Mind Palace, ignored my question. I typed down the completely baffling footnote that followed, about how we’d most likely find the boy with an utterly terrifying dog named something like Ghoul or Mutant or Scrofula, and showed them out.

You learn a bit by seeing how people behave when they leave Baker Street. These two seemed to be already bickering about something by the time they got on the pavement – the sitting-room window gives a good view, just a little of it’s blocked by Speedy’s awning – and headed for an antique Bentley parked right across the street, in front of a hydrant. It looked like half a million quid and about as old as Cuddly’s outfit, and there was an orange clamp on the rear tyre.

Except a moment later, there wasn’t. I don’t generally imagine things, but I was having a lot of different feelings right about then. They got in, still bickering, and drove off.

Chapter Text

Continuation of the private blog of John H. Watson, M. D.:

“I can’t believe you took the case.”

“Yes, it does seem quite fantastical, doesn’t it? Armageddon, with the full accompaniment of the Four Horsemen.” He was texting, but then Sherlock is always texting. The phone had been pinging like a backup beeper for the last five minutes.

“They’re both either barking mad – “

“Folie à deux. I thought of that. They seemed like two people with a close bond.” Ping.

“So why aren’t I referring them for observation, instead of taking notes?”

“Because,” he said, finally rising, “I received a separate enquiry earlier about this American diplomat Dowling. I gather there’s talk of him being vetted for the next Secretary of State – “

“They’ve been going through them like a bowl of crisps.”

“There appears to have been an incident at his son’s birthday party earlier this week, involving misappropriation of a security team member’s sidearm and a shot fired. It’s the sort of thing that’s taken rather seriously in some quarters. This morning” –  Sherlock was shedding his dressing gown as he spoke, pulling on a jacket, checking his hair in the mirror  – “when the persons investigating attempted to follow up, they were told that he’d abruptly cleared his schedule for a trip to the Middle East with his wife and son. At a time when the region is especially unstable. Apparently it had become quite urgent that he visit Megiddo tomorrow morning.”

“But that’s the wrong boy.” Now I was talking as if I believed it all.

“Someone else might not know that.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Megiddo, John. Not a Biblical scholar, I see. The site of the last battle that ends the world, according to another John. Revelations 16: 16. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. Sounds like a nuclear blast, doesn’t it?

“Well. That’s reassuring.” I checked my watch; just time to get to work. “Some sort of Doomsday cult?”

“I require more information. It is a capital error to theorise in advance of the data.” He shrugged on the Belstaff. “The NHS might have electronic records that the fire spared. Look up anything you can about this lying-in hospital and the town where it was located. Send me whatever you find out.”

“Where are you going?” I almost reached for my keychain to lock the door of the flat, until I remembered I didn’t have that key on it any more.

“I,” he said, “as punishment for my many sins, will be going to Whitehall for lunch. By which I mean Civil Service coffee and then some of the dried-out Eccles Cakes that can always be found in the left-hand drawer of my brother’s desk. One must suffer for one’s art.”

That explained where the separate inquiry had come from. Mycroft. Well, better Sherlock than me.

 We eavesdrop on an office in Whitehall:

“These parties fit the descriptions you texted me. Are they the ones who called on you?”

Mycroft Holmes, aka the British government, aka (if a certain demobbed Army surgeon were to be consulted) that git, shuffled through a folder which had just been deposited on his blotter and passed a glossy colour photograph across to his brother. It showed a verdant scene in Westminster, with the arching Blue Bridge of St. James’ Park in the background. The two men who had called at Baker Street that morning were toward the left of the frame, walking along the lakeshore, caught in an animated moment that suggested a contentious conversation.

“We routinely photograph the idlers at the lake shore in the park,” said Mycroft. “It’s been done for decades. It’s long been known that agents of foreign governments use the spot as a rendezvous, and we don’t do anything to disrupt it. It gives us an album – a gallery of bad actors, as it were. I review the images whenever they are updated.”

Sherlock scowled. “Who are their handlers?”

“We have never connected this pair with any suspicious activity, other than their consistent meeting at a spot favoured by foreign actors and those who believe they have secrets to sell. But if they are looking for a child for whom they mistook the Dowling boy, something is on foot here.”

“The hair’s longer on Crowley, but that’s him. When was this taken?”

“2008.”

 “No known contact with any criminal or hostile entity?”

“Not unless you count the sort of people who demand pay for not beating you up or setting fire to your business. Who appear to have had a thin time of it with Mr. Fell. More about that in a minute. But have a look at this, Sherlock.”

The elder Holmes brother circled around the desk and set another photo in Sherlock’s hands.

“This would be from the Nineties,” said Sherlock. “The London Eye’s not built yet.”

“Exactly so. And there are our gentlemen, feeding the ducks.”

“Fell’s wearing identical clothing. And they don’t appear to have aged whatsoever over two decades.”

“Then there’s this.” Another photo, this one with the faded, browning colour emulsion that tells you it’s been around for a generation.

Sherlock frowned slightly, turning the photograph over and angling it into the light. “This was taken in the Eighties. The Genesis tee-shirt here, and the spiky hairstyles on the young people.”

“And on your Mr. Crowley there. The leather jacket is a nice touch.”

“These are tampered.”

“Photographs from my department are never tampered.” Mycroft set down a last black-and-white snapshot with a deckled edge, this one taken from the lake shore, in which Crowley, in a turtleneck jumper, slouched on a bench while his companion perched at the edge of it, looking distinctly uneasy. The battered waistcoat and tartan bowtie were the same. A stamp on the back dated the image to October, 1968.

“Eliminate the impossible,” said Sherlock. “These can not be the same men.”

“It is equally impossible that the photographs have been doctored.” Mycroft replaced them in the folder and set it on the desk, pacing with his hands behind his back, back straight as a lamp standard. “We know who Fell is. He lives over a bookshop in Soho which he owns outright, dating to the early nineteenth or late eighteenth century and valued in the seven figures, and somehow he’s achieved a total remit of taxes for both the property and the business. A failed attempt to purchase the building in the early oughts involved the hire of several of the Peckham Boys as persuaders, all of whom subsequently turned themselves in for unsolved crimes and one of whom eventually entered seminary.”

“I seem to have little to offer you here.”

“Mr. Crowley,” Mycroft went on as if his brother hadn’t spoken, “lists his occupation with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs as consultant. In what field is unclear. He lives at a Mayfair address where the cheapest flat currently rents for six thousand a month. The antique vehicle registered in his name may be the sole one of its kind still on the road. And the case remains the same however far back we can trace the records.”

Their eyes met.

“I believe, brother mine,” said Mycroft, “that we are in a predicament.”

Encrypted message from John Watson, M.D. to Sherlock Holmes:

Tadfield’s a little past Oxford. Here’s a link to a map.

It’s one of those Picturesque English Villages, good place to raise your kids, pond, War Memorial, little cottages. Lots of photos online in Pinterest and people’s old Flickr accounts. Two significant entities nearby: an American airbase north of the village [link from militarybases.com], and just outside it the Tadfield Manor Training And Conference Centre. Kind of place where you drag your staff for a business retreat and make them do team-building exercises. The online brochure has quite a lot about how historic it is, used to be a convent and for a while a maternity hospital run by the nuns, so I think we’ve confirmed what they gave us about the scene of the mixup. Nothing about a fire, but commercial brochures always leave that kind of thing out.

The nuns were an order called St. Beryl’s, but I can’t find a single saint by that name on the church calendar. There’s a Berlinda and a Brandina and a Buriana, but no Beryl. And the NHS didn’t really get electronic records working right till long after 2008, so there’s nothing in their system relating to the hospital, even if I had permission to access individual patient files.

Another odd thing I found. Checked the almanac, since I remembered how you’ve poked holes in people’s stories by proving they described the wrong weather for a date. If you search on Tadfield + Weather you get reams of newspaper filler about the village where the weather’s always perfect. [ PDFs attached ] Like Camelot. Only rains after sunset in the summer, autumn colours always brilliant, snow at Christmas. Guess how far that dates back.

You got it. Eleven years.

Slow day here at the surgery, have to probe one more arsehole and prescribe for an ear infection. All right if I call round when I'm done and you can tell me what went on with Mycroft? If you can, of course. I’d have to bring Rosie, but she’ll be too knackered to be much trouble, and I think she’s fond of her mysterious Uncle Sherlock. I had to lock up the toy keyboard you gave her at Christmas, and only get it out when I can manage with the din, but her eyes got all big and round when I told her you played the violin and now she wants to do duets.

Continuation of the private blog of John H. Watson, M.D.:

“Look how happy plant is,” pointed Rosie as soon as we got there. The peperomium I’d seen looking half-dead in the window was now lush, striped a vivid purple, and trailing over the sill. I couldn’t think Sherlock had nipped out to replace it, and anyway, the dust around it wasn’t even disturbed. Well, that was odd.

I was surprised he’d told me to come ahead. He was sticking to business, and I was careful to do the same, but it was comfortable being in Baker Street with Rosie, and without clients there. Like the old days, except for the sticky fingers (he’d gotten Jammie Dodgers) and the absence of Hudders, who’d gone off with her sister for the weekend to tramp about the Cotswolds, now that she could. If I squinted I could pretend I’d never left.

“Mycroft seemed oddly surprised that I brought you into this,” said Sherlock as he brought a damp flannel from the bath before Rosie could get raspberry jam over everything. “He knows I don’t trouble you nowadays for anything but the truly curious case, but this was one on the face of it.” I kept my face as neutral as possible. Don’t you know I’m perishing of boredom, Sherlock? Don’t you know what I’d give to meet your eyes, laughing, after a narrow escape or a mad dash across half of London? Trouble me for anything.

It seemed that ship had sailed. But for the moment, it felt good to imagine it hadn’t.

“So we – “ I was very conscious of saying we, as if I were on a team with Sherlock and his prig of a brother –  “know that this American boy was born on the right date – “ It had been a simple search of the UK Registry of Births, which isn't exactly meant to be an open directory, but Mycroft’s people could do it on their coffee break.

“And one other male infant was confirmed born on that date, in that hospital. His name is Adam Young, and his family still lives in Tadfield. The father’s a very ordinary drummer for a tool and die company, and the most arcane thing he can be connected with is a classic car club. Our clients would of course have been able to learn that, if they had access to Mycroft’s resources.”

“So what are we meant to do? I mean, those two are a bit dodgy. Best guess, they’re impersonating people who used to hang about in St. James’ Park. Reproducing their movements. No bloody idea why, but it’s just creepy. Those photos can’t be of the same two men.”

“Mycroft appears to think they are. I have found him to be many things in my lifetime, but never delusional.”

“Well, whatever their game is, we -- you can’t just ID the kid and send them off to do whatever. Fell said do something about him. What if they want to hurt him? I mean, what if someone were – stalking Rosie like this and tried to harm her?”

“Oh, that’s simple, John. I would kill them.”

Well. That was a thought.

“There’s another – rather fortuitous – complication,” he went on. “One other family in Tadfield has an adopted son whose birthdate of record matches, though the registry doesn’t give the location of birth or ID the natural parents.They’re working back from the adoptive family, name of Johnson.”

“Oh, an unusual name. That helps.” None of it made sense, but somehow everything felt more serious than it had that morning, with the angelic-looking man perched on the sofa talking utter bollocks and his grumpy friend flinging three legs and five arms in every direction while he did it.

“So, until we understand more, I will tell our clients we are awaiting information. And there’s one more thing,” he went on quietly. “It wouldn’t have shown up in those appallingly bucolic travelogues you sent. We don’t know yet if either Tadfield boy’s family has any connection to the airbase nearby. Except. Joint Airbase RAF/USAF Tadfield is home to a remote relay station in the United States Missile Defence system. It’s due for deactivation, but in theory, in the case of an error in the primary network, it's possible to abort a nuclear first strike from there -- or to launch one.”

Now we were both looking at Rosie, who had her back against his chair, watching cartoons on my phone. It’s probably ruining her brain but she loves Pete The Cat; she had earbuds in and you could see her keeping time with the songs. I don’t know what Sherlock was thinking, but I was thinking that she deserved to grow up. I’ve seen enough of what it means when generals and Premiers and ministers beat the drums and start contesting who’ll get the upper hand, like a footy match. My shoulder talks about it in wet weather, and just now it was making a prediction.

She must have felt our stares, because she pulled out the earbuds and said “Uncle Sherlock? Da says you play the fiddle.”

“Yes.”

“Will you play for me?”

“John.”

He meant I was to get the violin. It was eerie how everything was returning, the way he only had to say one or two words for me to know what he needed from me (please tell me he still needs something from me ). Rosie watched rapt as he lifted it from the blue velvet lining, plucked the strings to tune it, rubbed rosin on the bow, and launched into, of all things, a bouncy song from Moana. We’d rented that around Christmas and she’d played it until I was going mental – had she still been singing incoherent bits from it when he dropped off her Christmas present? She clapped and tried to sing along, and after a while he veered into improv of his own, the tune growing slower and more soothing.

I hadn’t heard him play since Mary died, hadn’t been allowed a  glimpse of the volatile heart beneath the façade of the thinking machine. I closed my eyes, and all the things I’d said to him were unsaid, and Rosie and I lived in Baker Street, and she got her lullaby every night.

She was sleeping soundly when I took her on my shoulder and carried her down to the car. I could see him in the window as I pulled away, still holding the violin.

Chapter Text

Subsequent entry in the blog of John H. Watson, M.D.  

Saturday promised blustery. There was that buffeting breeze that you know is going to blow up rain, and that meant Rosie’s play date would be indoors, but she still looked forward to it, and she also pestered about when we’d go see Uncle Sherlock again. Soon? Tomorrow? (I think that’s the only “soon” she has a concept of.)

When I checked the weather on my phone I had a rash of texts.

The image was of an ID card in the name of Lavista. It showed a sour-looking man with disturbingly whiteless eyes under a straw-blond hairpiece that looked like a haystack, and claimed he was on faculty at Tel Aviv University.

It looked as if someone still thought the Dowling boy was important. The question was who, but Sherlock didn’t answer my return text. 

The tag end of the breakfast show was full of elbow-in-the-ribs bits about UFO sightings, what appeared to be a mass hallucination on board a cruise ship, and some arsehole in Luton insisting it had rained fish overnight. I got Rosie’s little game bag packed, got her shoes more or less tied, and was about to hit the remote when I saw a standup with Tadfield on the chyron – R. P. Tyler, Tadfield Resident –  and a geezer holding the leash of a decrepit dachshund, glaring down at a cordless mic as if it’d personally offended him.

“There’s been rash of reports about bizarre events clustered around Tadfield this morning,” said the reporter, “and I’m in the village centre talking to Mr. R. P. Tyler – “

“Am I live?” he said in a reedy old-man voice.

“You’re on mic, Mr. Tyler.”

“Well, what I want to say is, I pay my rates, and I don’t expect Shutzi here to be terrified by little Asian men coming out of the ground. We used to have stricter immigration laws in this country, and – “

Right then the feed cut out. After a few minutes of dead air the studio anchor said “We seem to have lost Myra Blakely. Stay tuned for Saturday Kitchen.”

I told Mrs. Patel that I’d come back for Rosie around two (she still goes down for a nap about three, most days) and got back on the laptop. The wind was picking up; the flat I moved to after Mary died (I couldn’t stay in that flat) is old and the windows buzz in the frames in stormy weather. There are stains in the paintwork and on the lino, but Rosie likes to find shapes in them.

I can’t compete with Mycroft when it comes to hunting down falsified I.D.s or archiving photos, but life around Sherlock taught me some things, and one of them is to look for patterns in things that don’t belong. UFOs don’t belong. Gurkhas coming out of the ground don’t belong. Mackerel dropping from the sky don’t belong, and if cruise ship passengers were having mass hallucinations, maybe someone was taking that worldwide. I know a good bit about the chemistry of delusional behaviour, and more than I want to about tactical gases that make people see a phosphorus-daubed Rottweiler as a gigantic hound, thanks to Sherlock (I don’t have friends, he’d shouted at me on the footpath outside Baskerville). If foreign actors were turning this technology on us – if there were some scheme on foot to affect, say, the personnel at the airbase with chemical warfare – it would make sense, but the nature of the hallucinations was nagging at me. I’d call Sherlock when I’d made something of it. It sounds pathetic, I guess, but I still wanted to impress him.

The rains of fish – and now blood – turned up in web pages about the work of one Charles Fort, who apparently specialised in bizarre events for which no one seemed to have preserved evidence. I kept running across the online edition of something called the New Aquarian , one of those California productions that tells you which Ascended Master you should follow according to your Sun sign and numerological cohort, and everything that turned up from the news shows and Twitter feeds (I filtered for #rainoffish and #UFO and #tibetans and #spacealiens) seemed to have a place in one of their issues. There are people who can believe all these things at the same time. I get them at the surgery every so often, after they’ve tried to cure a Pott’s fracture with herbal tea and crystals.

I jumped when the phone rang. “Doctor Watson?”

Fell. That anxious, petulant cadence was recognizable even when he was only pronouncing my name. I’d given both of them my phone number – mistake, probably, but Sherlock can go radio silent when he’s really focused. “Good morning, Mr. Fell. What – “ I walked away from the laptop, as if he could see through to it – “can I do for you?”

“Well, you see, I couldn’t get through to Mr. Holmes – it simply goes to voicemail – “ 

He sounded as if he’d been crying. My hair prickled up, but I managed to sound as calm as if I were dealing with a panicky patient.

“He’ll call you when he has something.  I’ve worked with him” – I used to work with him – “for a long time. I know how he operates.”

“Oh dear me, no, I wasn’t trying to apply pressure. Quite the opposite. You see, circumstances have become so – so urgent that I fear I’m going to have to take the kind of direct action that I had really hoped to avoid – what I mean is, I have to ask him to drop the case. Immediately. Please tell him to keep the retainer I paid – I simply wanted to talk to a live person, so that I knew I’d gotten through. I deplore these voicemail thingys – I really have to go now, time is very short.“

I stared stupidly at the mobile in my hand for half a minute, then tried to ring Sherlock. But as the gentleman had said, he wasn’t answering.

Rosie didn’t look like a nap waiting to happen when I picked her up at Mrs. Patel’s. She always gets excited playing with Priya; they make up scenarios that they seem to mutually understand but I don’t, they’ve almost got a secret language. I felt a miserable wave of helpless protectiveness.

Traffic was snarled. Rosie was blissfully unaware as she singsonged “And den the turtle Tintin let the effumps climb on his back, and den dey lifted de whole world up, and he went swimming in de stars – “

I said something you’re not meant to say around four-year-olds as the light changed for the second time without letting me through, and then the mobile in my pocket pinged.

I dialled him. “Sherlock, I’m in a bloody traffic snarl, and it’s starting to rain” – it was, in sheets that swept along the pavement like blowing curtains – “and I’ve got Rosie in the car, it’ll take – “

“Bring her. It’s the best way to keep her safe.”

Is there a Dad Thing that takes up residence in your brain when you hear that first pissed-off wail? I’d been less afraid under fire than at the idea that Rosie needed to be kept safe from anything. “What happened?”

“I heard from one of my operatives – “ 

“You’re still paying Wiggins?”

“He’s at Uni for Chemistry, John. This is a pensioner named Shadwell – I keep him on a little retainer, he’s got an outfit called the Witch Finder Army, which I suspect is just him – “

“Sounds half way round the twist.”

“Presciently said, but he spots all sorts of oddities that most people are too busy averting their eyes to notice. He’s a bit like panning for gold, and I just got a nugget. It would appear I’m not the only one to engage his services. He rang in a hurry to say he was getting on a scooter with, so far as I can tell, his lady friend and another patron of his – don’t ask me how they all fit on – whom he refers to only as ‘the Southern Pansy,’ and whom he apparently exorcised a few hours ago in a bookshop in Soho, if that sounds familiar – “

“Bloody hell.”

(I glanced at Rosie, who was bouncing in her safety seat, but she seemed no worse off for hearing a swear.)

“And it’s meant to be about the imminent End Of The World, and I’m sure you can’t guess where they’re headed.”

“Tadfield,” I said hollowly. Something thumped on the windscreen and slid off over the hood. I saw a finny tail before it disappeared.

“Drive very quickly,” he suggested.

 He was waiting under the skimpy awning of Speedy’s. I slowed down, looking for a parking spot; he had the door pulled open, a honking Vauxhall swerving past us, before I quite realised what he was doing enough to come to a full stop. Rosie squealed joyfully as the door slammed. In half a dozen steps his hair had been drenched, and the Belstaff smelled like a wet dog.

“M40 West,” he said. “M25’s solid red on the traffic map. Break laws.”

“Sherlock. I have a child. In the car.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

It was hard to break any laws the way things were crawling, but I found some; a half mile further on the sheets of rain were abruptly gone, though I swear a frog bounced off the fender. “Do you mind telling me what we’re doing?”

“I’d have thought that was obvious,” he said. “First priority, we’re getting out of London while it’s still here.”

“O. Kay.” 

“Not a drill, John. For once, I hope I’m wrong, but I want you and Rosie outside Greater London. We’re not going to be able to phone this one in, in any case.”

I was about to ask what he meant by that, then saw my chance and made an illegal turn that got us headed onto the Great West Road, only there was a police roadblock, and to make it better Rosie was wiggling her way out of the safety seat. I don’t know how she does that, all I needed was a citation for child neglect, and I reversed up onto the pavement and got turned around somehow while she waved her arms and shrieked with delight.

I don’t really remember a lot about the next quarter hour, except that at one point I passed an overturned lorry and Sherlock was doing that thing he does, where he’s thinking and he makes gestures as if he’s moving counters around on a board; that I glimpsed Rosie mimicking the gestures in the backseat, where she was now completely untethered; picked up the M40 finally, ploughed off onto the shoulder a quarter mile short of where it crosses the Orbital, and blew past another roadblock with my foot on the floor.

“Da drives fast!” shouted Rosie, leaning between the front seats. I could smell the chocolate she’d doubtless been eating at the Patel’s, no wonder she was so jacked up, and said “Sherlock. Do I have time to strap Rosie back in.”

“Fast,” he said, echoing her. He was still drawing shite in the air with two fingers. As soon as I got well outside the Orbital I pulled to the verge and got out, somehow got control of forty pounds of ballistic four-year-old, and told her she’d have Marmite with her tea if she was good (she’d been on a fad with Marmite lately, god knows why). I was untangling the straps and buckles, keeping half an eye on the road for checker cars, when something blanked out all the sound from the motorway.

It was like being pushed by a gigantic hand. A hot hand without any substance but enormous power, sending me staggering into the driver’s door, the edge of it digging into my bad shoulder – that was going to be fun driving – and then a bigger billow of heat, and when I turned everything behind us was in flames.

“Christ, Sherlock, they did it!” I yelled. He was still sitting there, diddling his fingers, except that he was also looking in the rearview.

“No, they haven’t,” he said, took his sweet time getting out, and shaded his eyes.

“Big fire!” yelled Rosie.

“No,” Sherlock repeated, the rhythmic whish of passing traffic chopping his words. “That’s the M25 on fire. As far as the eye can see. No, I don’t know how.”

There was nothing visible but a wall of flame, shadows in it, shapes of lorries and cars but none of them moving – no, one was – it got bigger, heading straight in our direction. I grabbed Rosie and covered her with my body, and then it passed us – the bloody Bentley, how many are there left on the road, engulfed in thundering flames like a comet, and I caught a bare glimpse of sunglasses behind the wheel as it passed.

Sherlock had hit the ground too. He brushed gravel off the Belstaff as he stood.

“Crowley,” I said.

“Headed for Tadfield too,” he nodded. “I expected.”

“Well, could you possibly tell me what else you expect?”

“That they’re both still trying to stop it,” he said. “Only they can’t. They don’t have the abort codes.” He stepped back towards the passenger door. “But I do.”

Chapter Text

Continuation of the blog of John H. Watson, M. D.:

“We’ll need to get onto the American airbase. With any luck we can patch into their launching system from there. I don’t suppose you have your service revolver with you,” he said as he buckled in.

“Sherlock,” I repeated. “I have a child. In the car. I do not carry a gun around my child. It’s at home in a combination safe at the top of my wardrobe.” 

“Unfortunate,” was all he said.

“Mycroft,” I said when we were several miles further down the motorway. “Gets the American abort codes.”

“You don’t think he’d leave it in the hands of that reality-show star they elected, do you, John?” He had that tone he gets, when he sounds as if he’s been watching you push a door marked Pull. “Or write them down on the back of the day’s Financial Times once he got them?”

That eidetic memory of his. I knew that codes like that changed every day. Sherlock would be his brother’s natural filing cabinet – nothing to steal, nothing to copy.

“I didn’t wait for permission. He’ll have read my text by now. If he hasn’t called the base commander, we’ll handle it the way we got into Baskerville. It’ll mean showing his hand, but we’ll worry about the Americans later.”

The Bentley’d long since become a candle flicker at the edge of view, then disappeared. How it was still going was anyone’s guess. I kept the Fiesta at the top RPMs she could manage, listening to Siri’s occasional suggestions, which Rosie echoed in some dialect only known to her. So far as I could tell she was having the time of her life.

Time and Life. Not things I wanted to think about just then, but what else could I think of? I felt the unreality of a dream that’s also more real than anything, thinking that everything I'd known all my life might be going to end. That London and everything in it might not be there in a countable number of hours. Goodbye Priya, goodbye Mrs. Patel. Goodbye Westminster Chimes, goodbye Angelo. Goodbye the little corner of the play park where Rosie likes to pretend she has a house and draws the outlines of the rooms in a bare patch of earth.

There was something in the road ahead, and I swerved at the last second. A half-melted, charred fender. A couple of miles further on there was a big smear of tyre rubber, still steaming and stinking, and not far on from that a hub cap inverted in the road like an empty basin. I slewed around it and Rosie clapped.

“Go faster, Da!”

“She takes after you, John,” said Sherlock, and his voice was oddly soft. “Born to it.” He turned to look back between the seats.

“If I ever need another assistant,” he said, “I might call you.” 

“What’s ‘sistant, Uncle Sherlock?”

“It means – “

The turnoff for Tadfield was ahead. Siri had cut out a few miles back, and I remembered that the road to the airbase was through the village but not quite where to turn. There was an old party gimping through the village centre, the pensioner I’d seen interviewed on the news that morning. I pulled over.

“We’re trying to get to an airbase around here,” I said.

“Not another one,” he snapped.

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“It’s that turn up there, you’ll see the sign,” he said. “Protestin’ somethin, are ye? Bikers, daft beggar with a car on fire, now you, half a mind to make a complaint of child endangerment.”

“Right, and you’re a sodding bigot,” I said.

“John?” said Sherlock, seeming to waken from something.

“Never mind.”

We took the turn. There was more debris scattered on the macadam – an entire door panel, a window, a licence plate right at a curve in the road –

I was on it before I could brake. A whole section of the car frame, kissing my transmission and grinding metal on metal, seat belts straining, Rosie squealing. The steering-gear seized. We veered off the pavement, lurched once, and fetched up in a shrubbery.

Siri chose that moment to come back online, informing me that in one hundred yards, your destination will be on the left.

A cascade of notification sounds came from Sherlock’s phone. He pulled it out as I unstrapped Rosie, you have. One. New voicemail, and then the ringtone and Mycroft’s voice on speaker: “Sherlock. Are you at Tadfield?”

He was already striding towards a chain-link fence ahead, the Belstaff flapping. “Almost – “

“Sherlock. I've received a message through back channels. The situation has evolved. Do not, do not attempt to drive onto the airbase.”

“No fear,” I muttered, catching him up with Rosie on my shoulder. “ Mycroft! If you can hear me, my car’s bloody demolished and you’re telling us to stand down – “

“Sh,” said Sherlock, and pocketed the phone.

The gate stood open. From here no one was in sight, but I could hear distant voices -- children’s voices, of all things (“Playpark?” said Rosie). The sky was darkening again, and just as Sherlock put out his hand – stop right here – a zigzag of lightning punched down, close enough that I could smell the ozone, blinding afterimage inside my eyelids, thunder pulsing so that I would swear I felt the air split and come back together.

There were more raised voices, too far away to tell what they were saying, and something started to lift the hair on my nape. Even Rosie finally quieted and hung on tighter. I felt heavier, and the world got blurry and there was a high-pitched whine in my ears. The ground rippled underfoot; Sherlock’s hand was on my sleeve, tugging me down, and I knew what it meant when the Bible says their tongues shall cleave to the roof of their mouths, because despite what Sherlock says I do know a verse here and there. I’d never felt fear like this, not in Afghanistan, not in that lab in Baskerville, and all I could think was I’m going to lose you again and I haven’t spoken, everything's ending and I’ve never said it, but my breath wouldn't come and the world stood still.

And there was A Voice. I couldn’t make out words in it; it just sounded like all the sick, murderous rage that had ever existed on the planet - all the vanity and resentment, the well-nursed hates, all the blind, stupid cruelty and malice that we want to keep from our children forever. A pit had opened to the heart of the earth, and I was falling into it and it was inside me.

Then a boy was shouting, the world was rearranging itself, and it was all right, everything was all right, everything would always be blissfully and blessedly all right. I found myself laughing; laughed even harder as a puttery little Morris Minor, of all the anticlimactic things, shot past into the open gate. Rosie was in my arms saying “Da, you’re squishing me,” I tried to form Sherlock’s name but it didn’t come out clearly though I love you did, and Rosie said “I love you , Da. Can we do that again?”

We used the shrubbery the way shrubberies sometimes get used when you’ve been on the road for a few hours – Rosie thought that was amazing, too – and collapsed rubber-legged in the grass, I don’t know for how long, until it occurred to me we had to get my car out of there somehow.

Both our phones were bricked. While we were discovering this fact, the Morris rolled back off the base – “Better not,” said Sherlock when I moved to wave to the driver – and not long after, a sputtering, farting Vespa and one of those Japanese cars there’s a club for. Wasabis. Three kids walking their bikes followed, their little safety lights fireflies in the dusk.

“Did you have a prang?” said one, somewhat unnecessarily, looking with considerable awe at the carcass of my Fiesta. He was eating a chocolate bar, which looked to have been squashed to pieces in a pocket, and getting a good deal of it over his face.

“There’s a garage in the village, but they’re closed,” said the one in glasses, not very helpfully.

Chocolate looked thoughtful. “Maybe Adam could fix it,” he said. “He fixed everything else.”

“Only Adam’s had to go home with his Dad. He’s in the doghouse,” said the girl.

“Not really in the doghouse,” explained Glasses helpfully. “Dog’s in the doghouse. But Mr. Young’s very cross.”

“We’ll get on,” I said. They pedaled off.

“Well,” said Sherlock. “I believe that settles the question of which was the right boy. Though I would judge that whatever’s put Adam Young in the doghouse, we can eliminate initiating the End Times.”

I had another go at calling Breakdown Recovery. The phone was still dead. “Electromagnetic pulse,” Sherlock said. “It can accompany tectonic movement and seismic activity.”

“We don’t have earthquakes in England.”

“We don’t have tornadoes, or storm systems involving amphibians either, but some almanacs may have to be revised.”

Two indistinct figures came trudging wearily through the chain-link gate, which gave an unoiled creak.

“Leave it, Aziraphale.”

“If you open a gate, you shut it behind you. It’s common rural manners.”

“Who’re they -- " 

“Mr. Holmes. Dr. Watson.” Fell seemed unsurprised, or perhaps too exhausted to be surprised.

Chapter Text

It was dark by the time we reached the village centre. It seemed like the kind of place where you might find the last phone box in England, but I didn’t see one. 

By this time Cuddly Fluff had offered to carry Rosie. I couldn’t see where it hurt to let him; that moment of reckless joy back at the airbase had erased all my misgivings about anyone, and even though I knew evil hadn’t left the world, somehow it seemed very far away. I took the battered cardboard box he'd carried out of the gate -- I was a little afraid to ask what was in it -- and we put one foot in front of another while Rosie chattered about wanting a dog and a bike.

There was a pair of benches, one at either side of the road near the War Memorial, flanked by the red circle-and-bar signs that promise a bus, sooner or later. Fell set Rosie down on one of them, and she began to walk along it like a gymnast on a beam, high on the kind of adrenalin your body stops making some time between preschool and puberty. Sherlock moved to hold her hand for balance.

Grouchy Sunglasses plunged onto the opposite bench, limbs falling in all directions like scattered sticks. I set down the box and sat next to him. His face and hands were grime-streaked, and he smelled like scorch and sulfur.

“Thought he told you two t’leave It,” he said.

“Yeah. Well, world ending. Couldn’t just fuck off to Mars, could we?”

His mouth set. He seemed about to say something, decided not to, looked across at Rosie.

“Cute kid,” he said. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“I like kids,” he said. “Was the kids saved us in there, you know. Them, and a bloke who can break computers.” He watched as Rosie babbled to Cuddly Fluffafell, the opaque dark lenses never leaving her, or perhaps fixed on his companion.

“You two been together long?” he said.

“She’s only – oh. You mean Sherlock. Um, not together together.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Azirafluff was now doing something in the neighbourhood of Rosie’s ear, and a coin clanked onto the pavement. She giggled, now do Uncle Sherlock. Sherlock obligingly allowed a pound coin to be clumsily prestidigitated out of his shirt pocket.

The world I knew had just almost ended, and I was tired, and there didn’t seem any reason to not say things. I had to say them to someone, because I never had, not even to Ella. “We could’ve been, I think, only we – well, he let me believe he was dead once, bloody gutted me, and when he showed up alive I was a git about it. He was only trying to protect me.”

“Know the kind of thing,” said Sunglasses.

My cheekbones hurt with the tears that I would not, would not let out. “Then he was almost killed and I was a git about it again. So I can’t tell him how much I lo – ” I bit my lip before I could make a tit of myself.

Sunglasses nodded. “Said a load to him that I’d take back if I could – both said things to each other, guess – then thought for sure he was gone too. Worst moment of my life, and I’ve had a lot’ve moments, I can tell you.”

“But you worked it out,” I said.

“Dunno. Might do, now.” Fell was playing Airplane with Rosie, and I could have sworn she was actually floating above his hands, giggling. “Been safer for us both if I’d walked away. Tried a couple times. But I never could quit him.”

“Same here,” I said. “Just – how d’you go back, after you’ve said all the…?” Fuck. Better stop right there. Sherlock was smiling in the lamplight as Rosie squealed, that beautiful, rare, open smile.

“Things’re different now, reckon. Only, still have our own Head Offices to deal with. Not gonna be happy with us.”

“Because this was meant to be – “

“The big one, yeah,” he said “And we helped stick a spanner in it. Says he’s got a plan, but he would, wouldn’t he? Somethin’ from a book. Always about a book with him, see.” He laughed, a short, humourless grunt, and dropped his eyes toward his long fingers, which seemed to be picking apart something invisible. “Seems like we’ve spent half our lives savin’ each other, turn about. Reckon we can bring it off one more time.”

“Know the kind of thing,” I said.

“Funny, ennit?” he said, looking back towards Fell. “Someone can be a right bastard, and that’s half the reason you – “ he broke off.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I wasn’t imagining it. She was floating. You could see the light from the streetlamp between her tummy and Fell’s palms.

“Look,” I interrupted. “We’re sitting here talking like we’re in a support group, and – You drove a car that was in flames forty miles here from London. My daughter’s over there levitating. Who. What. Are you both?”

He was silent a moment, then said, “Don’t s’pose it hurts. You’d just get sectioned if you told anyone.” Nodding towards his companion: “Angel. Can’t you tell? Big blessed feathery idiot.”

“Angel,” I said. “As in heard on high.”

“That’s the sort’ve thing. Original Guardian of Eden, there. Lookin’ after the humans. Got attached.  Ah, we both did.” His head tilted toward me. “Habit forming, you lot.”

“And you’re – ?”

He was silent, a gradual smile forming on his face that felt somehow dangerous; then he drew his sunglasses slowly down. His eyes, catching the sodium glare from the streetlamp, were edge to edge yellow as Caution signals, split down the middle by slitted black pupils. He didn’t blink. A stylized tattoo coiled over his temple, a tail tapering up into his hairline, the wedge-shaped head of a viper looking ready to slither down his cheek. 

I may not be a Bible scholar, but I remember who else showed up at the Garden of Eden. “So. Your Head Offices. Would be –”

“Dear, the schedule posted here says there’s a bus to Oxford in the next hour,” called Fell. “I expect we can get a connection to London.”

“Reckon it’ll go straight to London,” said Sunglasses, and held up one hand with thumb and fourth finger together in a chef’s-kiss gesture, just as a large, silent black car rolled up.

The window glided down with a quiet hiss. Anthea was at the wheel. “Doctor Watson,” she called. “Get in. I’ll be driving you two home now.”

I stood. “What about our, ahm, friends?” I said. Maybe we’d get some real answers.

“Mr. Holmes told me I was to collect only you and his brother,” she said. “But he asked me to give them something, if they were here – ”

There was the faint sound of a fingersnap. Anthea’s eyes went distant and unfocused, and Sunglasses’ voice came from just behind me. “And who’d your Mr. Holmes be?”

“Oh, Mycroft Holmes,”  she answered dreamily. “He’s more or less the British Government. He's ever so clever. He works in Whitehall. It’s very very secret.”

“Dear,” chided Fell, and there was another fingersnap.

“Oh, dear. What was I saying? My mind wandered.” Anthea rummaged on the seat beside her and extended a brown paper sack, the top twisted in a characteristic way around a bottleneck. “It’s Chateau Barton Saint-Julien, 2016,” she said. “I’m afraid I haven’t any glasses.”

Sherlock had Rosie on his shoulder. She was finally wearing out.

Sunglasses leaned close to me as Sherlock got her into the car. “Tell him,” he said.

I nodded, glancing meaningly over at – at the angel . “You too.”

“Cheers, mate.”

I was half asleep before I fell back against the headrest. Somewhere around the M40 interchange I felt Rosie snuggle in beside me.

“A service is already en route to collect the doctor's car,” said Anthea as she pulled to a stop, her voice reaching me with the distant echo that speech has when you’re on the borderlands of sleep. “Repairs are covered by the departmental budget. Of course, you’re to speak to no one about what happened in the last twenty-four hours. Any of it.” I think I said something rude, and I was out on the pavement in front of Speedy's before I remembered I didn’t live here any more. Sherlock saw my expression. Rosie was in the crook of his arm, drooling over the Belstaff.

“It’s all right, John,” he said. “Come on up.”

He’d turned my old room upstairs into a lumber-room – case souvenirs, disguises and spare garments scattered chock-a-block over the bed and furnishings. I picked up a load of winter clothes, wondered where to put it, set it down, decided I was too tired to give a fuck, found a duvet on top of the wardrobe and dragged it back down to the sofa.

“You and Rosie take my bed,” said Sherlock, sounding knackered as I was. “I’ll sleep out here.”

She made a little whimpering noise as he began to set her down on the bed beside me, and hung onto the Belstaff. In the end he lay down snuggling her, coat and all, and when I woke in the first suggestion of dawn she’d moved over to nestle against me. But he was still there, though the coat was gone, and he’d turned so that his arm was flung over mine. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, and it felt as if I were stealing it, and I didn’t dare move in case he woke and pulled away. I fell asleep again.

Chapter Text

Continuation of the Private Blog of John H. Watson, M. D. :

I woke to voices in the sitting room. Rosie was snoring; I think it was the first time I’d ever woken up ahead of her. Somewhere in the night one of us must have taken off her shoes. We’d slept in ridiculously; the digital clock told me it was close to lunchtime.

Mycroft was sat on the sofa, looking, as always, as if the Baker Street furniture failed to meet his exacting standards. Sherlock had served him tea in the Royal Doulton china and was steaming his own face over an outsize mug that smelled like someone had set a Starbucks on fire.

“He was here when I woke up,” said Sherlock without opening his eyes. “Go on, Mycroft.”

The blue mug I’d always used was still there. He hadn’t cleaned the coffeemaker in a while, and the deposit in the bottom of the glass carafe was achieving geological status. No wonder he preferred asking Mrs. Hudson. At least when I lived here the washing-up got done now and then.

“It would appear,” said Mycroft, “that the world narrowly avoided a nuclear catastrophe yesterday, on a par with the 1983 Petrov incident or the NORAD training program error a few years earlier. One moment, intercepted chatter indicated launch readiness worldwide. Then it simply… stopped.”

Only Mycroft could look offended that we’d missed going up in a ball of burning goo, just because it didn’t readily make sense to him. “So I judged that we did not have to show our hand where the American nuclear codes are concerned. At the same time, CCTV on the Tadfield airbase relayed images of extraordinary events. Which cannot now be recovered.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

“You, of course, do not know this. I have been on the phone to every time zone on the planet in the hours since. So I am glad to find you here, doctor. I am quite fatigued, and it makes containment easier.” That thin smile. “Please, drink your coffee.”

I drank my coffee. Definitely time to clean that carafe.

“I have received a note,” Mycroft went on. “It was not delivered by Royal Mail nor handed in by a courier. It was simply present on my blotter when I returned to my office after a brief absence.” (Mycroft would never admit that he uses the WC like a flesh-and-blood human.) “I need not remind you that no one enters my office in my absence.”

He handed across a linen-paper envelope, addressed to him by name, in sepia ink. There was no mistaking the hand.

Thank you ever so for the wine. Terribly sorry about the security cams.

“We also,” he told his tea, “cannot recover images that existed yesterday of fish falling from the sky, or flying saucers, or the inferno on the Orbital Motorway, which this morning is in as good condition as it has ever been.” He recovered the envelope and note. “And save ourselves, no one seems to have any recollection of those events. Even Anthea cannot now recall why she was sent to pick you up in an out-of-the-way village centre in Oxfordshire. And I myself am beginning to forget details.”

(I remembered it all. The lightning splitting the sky, that final desperate moment when it felt as if the earth was going to heave us off its back, I love you, the unblinking yellow eyes gazing over the tops of the sunglasses, tell him .)

“We cannot find the files or photographs. Were their names Craven and Fell? Or Falls and Rowley? Was the taller man’s hair red or black? Was the bookshop in Piccadilly or Hampstead? I suspect that by tomorrow, I will recollect nothing. And so you, of course, will not either.”

He tucked the note into an inner pocket. “That is to say, if you do, you will discuss it with no one. Not even me.”

He stood. “I have had a long night. Fortunately, the world has been spared a longer one. I shall take my leave.” He collected his umbrella and, at the entry door, glanced back. “Did the incident occur at RAF Mildenhall? Or Fairford?” He looked a little more than normally sour, shook his head, and receded briskly down the stairs.

“Well, he’s charming as usual,” I said.

“Do you?” said Sherlock.

“Do I what?”

“Do you remember it?”

Rosie tottered in, blinking. “Your bed’s very tall, Uncle Sherlock,” she said.

“Well, that’s because I am.”

She clambered into his lap. “Can I have Weetabix for breakfast? We always have Weetabix on Sundays.”

“Rosie, love,” I said, rising. “We need to go now – ”

“Why?” interrupted Sherlock, like the absolute bastard he is.

“Well – because – “ I gave up, because I actually couldn’t think of a single fucking reason to leave.

“Hudson will bang on about how it’s not the same without you here. It would be pleasant to present your return to her as a fait accompli when she comes back from her Cotswolds holiday , that is, if you’re willing. We’ll clear out your old room for Rosie, and you can have mine. I sleep on the couch half the time anyway.”

“Sherlock – “

“I remember everything,” he said. “I remember something I heard you say outside that airbase, John, and I dared to imagine that it wasn’t Rosie you were speaking to.” Was his voice shaking? “The world almost ended. Do you know what I regretted most in that moment when I thought it was over?”

He set Rosie down, and stood up. “That I had not done this.”

I had forgotten how strong he is, for someone who never takes any exercise for days on end. He nearly cracked a rib, and my shoulder hurt, but I wasn’t going to mention it.

“I've been trying to say it every way I could,” he said next to my ear. “Other than saying it out loud, so that I wouldn’t have to risk hearing you say No. Come back, John, come back.”

“Hug!” shouted Rosie, meaning she wanted one too. I’d get to that. Just now I was processing the fact that I was finally working my own arms around Sherlock – a bit of a feat, because he barely loosened his own – that there was dampness against my cheek, that he smelt like the dregs of his cologne and whatever keeps his hair looking like he just came in from a windy walk and a day’s sweat starting to ripen, and it was the best thing I’d ever breathed in.

“You know,” I said, “toddlers mean rows night and day, and they shred your nerves, and they get up at all sorts of ungodly hours. And that’s just when they’re well. I’m not sure you want that, do you?”

“Oh, but John. I do. I do.”

Addendum to the private blog of John H. Watson, M. D.

I do is what we both said, about eight months later at the Registry Office, because Sherlock didn’t want a fuss, but Mrs. Hudson tattled on us and there was a party at Molly’s anyway. Rosie got passed from lap to lap and made herself sick on Victoria Sponge, so that was how we spent our first night as a married couple, feeding her beef tea, but all in all, I’ll take it. The next morning I found out why Sherlock knew how much paperwork adoption takes; he left it for me and Rosie to decide. I’m thinking yes.

Hudders took her one morning when Sherlock had been banged up in Baker Street night and day working on a case, and, as his doctor, I prescribed a constitutional walk in the crisp spring air. We were rambling in St. James’ Park when I spotted a distinctive pair, standing on the Blue Bridge, faces turned to the sun, their hands linked on the railing.

Fell spotted me first, smiled, and raised his free hand in a demure little wave.

I waved back. And then we walked on, because we were bound, on pain of whatever Mycroft could think of to do to us, never to talk about what we remembered to anyone, even him.

After several minutes Sherlock slipped his hand into mine. He’s not much of one for public displays, but he likes to do that.

“The shop’s closed,” he said, and I didn’t have to ask which one. “The Bentley was parked in the mews when I happened by the flat block in Mayfair, but it was short work to discover that a unit in that building was on the market. Which explained the two forwarding addresses given me by the person at Intimate Books, next door to the Soho shopfront.”

“Two?”

“The sale and purchase records of individual properties are, of course, public information. It would appear that a cottage in the Sussex Downs, near the Devil’s Dyke, has sold to a couple using the name of Crowley-Fell. Conveyance is on the fifteenth of the month.”

“I suppose everyone looks forward to retirement,” I reflected.

“I could fancy it myself one day, you know – Sussex, a little cottage. Perhaps some beehives.”

“Don’t wind me up. You’d be dead of boredom in a week.”

We walked silently back to Baker Street – those are rich silences, better than any heart-to-heart – and Sherlock poured whiskies while I turned on the telly. One of the afternoon shows was running a bit about how one Marcus “Greasy” Johnson had been the youngest competitor ever to take a medal at the UK Festival of Fishkeeping. Nice, boring, trivial news without an Apocalypse in sight.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know exactly what those two did,” he said, handing over my drink, “but, John, I’m glad the world’s still here, and you’re in it.”

I lifted my glass. “To the world,” I said.

“To the world.”

finis