Chapter Text
The mission had been simple.
That was what they always said. Simple. Clean. Retrieve the device, return to base, debrief. Three steps. The kind of operation Scarlett had run a hundred times in different cities with different handlers watching from different safe houses — always the same architecture underneath. Go in. Take the thing. Come out.
She had gone in.
She had found the device in eleven minutes — small, unremarkable, a dull metal disc no larger than her palm, sitting in the centre of a locked case. She picked it up.
And then the world came apart.
There was light — not the light of an explosion, not the clean clinical light of a facility corridor, but something cold and absolute, a white that was not a colour so much as an absence of everything that was not white. It lasted less than a second. It lasted forever. And then it ended, and the floor beneath her feet was not the floor she had been standing on, and the air in her lungs was different — older, carrying something she had no word for — and she was somewhere else entirely.
______________
The copper bathtub in Mycroft Holmes’s London residence was a sanctuary of steam and silence. Sherlock Holmes, recently extracted from the grime of Newgate, leaned back in the water, eyes closed. He was mentally dissecting the conversation he’d just had with Mycroft about Oxford—a "gift" that felt suspiciously like a leash.
Then, the world tore open.
A localized burst of white light, silent and searing, illuminated the room. Sherlock snapped his eyes open, his hand going for a towel as a figure materialized on the tiles.
She didn't stumble. She landed in a low, tactical crouch. She wore a suit of a strange, dark material that clung to her like a second skin, adorned with utility pouches and reinforced padding. To Sherlock’s eyes, it was anachronistic—a garment from a century not yet born.
"Sherlock?" Mycroft’s voice called from the hall. The door handle turned.
The woman’s head snapped toward the sound. In one fluid motion, she rose and drew a small, dark cylinder from her belt.
"Stay back," Sherlock commanded. He stood, wrapping the towel around his waist, his gaze locked on the woman. "Mycroft, don't enter just yet."
Mycroft pushed the door open anyway, stopping dead at the sight of the woman. "Good God."
The woman didn't look afraid. She looked... ready. Her eyes moved from Sherlock’s face to Mycroft’s umbrella, then to the lock on the door. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and thick with a cold, Russian edge.
"Gde ya?" (Where am I?) She corrected herself immediately, the Slavic vowels sharp and guttural. "Who are you?"
"London. 1878," Mycroft replied, his voice dropping into his professional 'Foreign Office' tone. "And you are clearly a long way from home. That attire... that posture. Who do you work for? The Tsar?"
"I work for no one," she spat in her natural Russian accent. She lowered the cylinder slightly, her thumb still hovering over a trigger.
Then Mycroft asked, "Can you tell us where you came from?"
"No," she said.
A beat.
"Can you tell us who sent you?"
"No."
"Can you tell us anything at all?"
"She won't tell you anything, Mycroft," Sherlock said, stepping closer. "But in this year, a woman dressed like that will be in a cell at Scotland Yard before the sun sets. We can take her under our protection.”
The woman looked at the door, then back at Sherlock. "I can blend. I can forge what I need."
"You need a status that bypasses Mycroft's curiosity," Sherlock countered. He saw the 'Red Room' influence without knowing its name; he saw a person who had been used as a tool. A sudden, protective instinct took hold. "Marry me. As my wife, you are under my protection, not the government's. It gives you cover, and it gives me a mystery worth solving."
The woman—Scarlett—looked at him for a long moment. Then, her face smoothed into a terrifyingly perfect mask. Her posture softened, her shoulders dropped, and when she spoke again, the Russian accent was gone. It was replaced by a flawless, melodic British lilt that sounded like a daughter of the gentry.
"That seems a rather bold proposal for a man in a towel, Mr. Holmes," she said in her perfect fake accent.
Mycroft blinked, genuinely startled by the transformation. "Extraordinary."
"Only when we are alone," Sherlock whispered, acknowledging the Russian secret she carried. "The mask stays on for everyone else."
She looked at him.
Sherlock looked back. He had not stopped looking at her since she arrived, and the quality of the attention had not changed — not threatening, not intrusive, simply complete in the way of someone whose looking is itself a form of thinking.
"Your name," he said.
She considered. A name was the smallest possible unit of information. Refusing it would tell them more than giving it — it would confirm she was calculating, that she had things to protect. The first lesson of deep cover: give the small things freely. It makes the large things easier to keep.
"Scarlett," she said.
"Just Scarlett."
"For now."
______________
They were married the next day. A small church. A register. Ink drying on cold stone.
Scarlett stood at the altar beside a young man whose name she had learned just yesterday in a bathroom she had arrived in by accident, in a century she had not meant to reach, and made vows that were a cover story, and felt nothing about any of it except the clean quiet of a problem temporarily solved.
It was cover. That was all.
She told herself that clearly, in the precise internal language she used for things that needed to stay clear.
Walking back through the grey London streets, she kept three feet of distance between herself and her new husband and said nothing.
He said nothing either.
But she was aware — in the peripheral, automatic way she was aware of everything — that he was watching her. Not with suspicion. With something she did not have a category for yet.
She filed it, and kept walking, and did not look back.
______________
Sherlock was already at breakfast, reading with the focused intensity of someone not actually eating the food in front of him. He looked up when she entered. She crossed to the sideboard and poured tea and did not sit.
Mycroft appeared in the doorway already wearing his coat.
"We are visiting Mother," he said. "Get dressed. We're going to pay our respects to Mama."
Sherlock set down his page. Scarlett watched both of them — the weight that arrived in the room with those words, old and particular to them.
"Will she come?" Sherlock asked, not looking at her.
"She goes where you go," Mycroft said. "That is the arrangement."
Sherlock pushed back his chair. "Ten minutes."
"Seven."
________________
The carriage ride to the asylum was silent, save for the rhythmic clatter of hooves against the cobblestones. Inside, the atmosphere was thick with Mycroft’s disapproval and Sherlock’s buzzing nervous energy. Scarlett sat perfectly upright between them, her hands folded in her lap. To any observer, she was a poised, quiet bride; to Sherlock, she was a coiled spring disguised as a lady.
"Remember," Mycroft said, his voice low and authoritative as the carriage slowed. "Mother is... fragile. Do not overwhelm her with the reality of your 'situation,' Sherlock. And you," he turned his sharp gaze to Scarlett, "keep the mask on. No Russian. No knives."
Scarlett didn't blink. "Understood," she said in her flawless British lilt.
They were led through the cold, sterile corridors of the asylum by a somber orderly. The air smelled of lye and suppressed grief.
"Mr. Holmes, we've moved your mother to a bigger room," the orderly said, opening a heavy oak door.
The room was bathed in grey light. A woman sat by the window, her back to them, looking out at a garden that offered no peace. She looked small—diminished by the weight of her own mind.
"Sherlock?" she whispered, not turning around.
"Hello, Mother." Sherlock stepped forward, his usual bravado vanishing. He looked vulnerable, his movements uncharacteristically soft.
As Sherlock moved to his mother’s side, Scarlett stayed back by the door with Mycroft. Her eyes didn't soften; instead, they became incredibly sharp. She wasn't looking at the woman's face; she was scanning the corners of the ceiling, the shadows behind the wardrobe, and the pulse point in the mother’s neck.
"My darling, were the three months hard?" the mother asked, finally turning. Her eyes were glazed with a feverish intensity. She noticed the light-haired woman standing like a sentinel by the door. "Who is that? Why is she watching?"
"This is Scarlett, Mother," Sherlock said, gesturing toward her. "She’s... my wife."
The mother’s breath hitched. She looked at Scarlett, and for a moment, the two women locked eyes. Scarlett offered a small, practiced dip of her head—a perfect Victorian greeting.
A pause. "Come here, child."
Scarlett approached. Cordelia took both of her hands. She looked down at them — saw the scar at the left wrist, old and smooth — and said nothing about it. She simply held the hands.
"Take care of him," she said quietly. "He does not take care of himself."
"I understand," Scarlett said. Cordelia turn back to look at Sherlock.
"She has secrets in her eyes, Sherlock," the mother whispered, her voice trembling. "Like the others. They’re listening to me. A whirring all the time. They can hear everything I say."
"No one is listening, Mother," Sherlock insisted, though he glanced back at Scarlett, who was now staring intently at wall to the right.
Suddenly, the mother gripped Sherlock’s arm, her fingers digging in like talons. "There’s a man with a bird claw! And he’s coming back for me. You have to promise me something! Stay out of trouble. I won't lose you too!"
"I promise," Sherlock said, his voice cracking. "No more trouble."
Scarlett’s hand moved instinctively to the hidden seam in her skirt, her body tensing as if a physical threat had actually entered the room. She didn't see a madwoman; she saw a target who felt hunted.
Mycroft stepped forward to intervene, his face a mask of bureaucratic stoicism. "That’s enough for today, I think. Mother needs her rest."
As they began to exit, Scarlett lingered for a second. She leaned toward the mother, and for the first time, her British mask slipped just a fraction.
"Nichego ne boytes'," Scarlett whispered, her voice a low, Russian ghost of a sound. Fear nothing. The mother gasped, her eyes widening as if she’d heard a language from a dream.
Once they were back in the hallway and the door was locked, Mycroft turned on Scarlett, his face flushed with anger. "What did I tell you about the accent?"
"She is hunted," Scarlett said, her Russian vowels returning, cold and hard. "I recognized the look. Your mother is not just sick, Mycroft. She is terrified. Someone put that fear there."
Sherlock looked between them, his mind already racing, connecting the 'man with the bird claw' to the lethal woman standing before him. "She's right, Mycroft. She knows what a mark looks like better than either of us."
Mycroft adjusted his lapels, refusing to concede. "We leave for Oxford imminently. Focus on not getting into trouble, not the ghosts in Mother's head."
Scarlett looked back at the closed door, her hand resting on the hilt of the blade she wasn't supposed to have. She didn't know who the man with the bird claw was, but she knew one thing: if he came, he wouldn't find a helpless woman. He would find a Widow.
_______________
The journey to Oxford was a study in silence and secrets. As the carriage rattled rhythmically, Mycroft sat primly, engrossed in government ledgers, while Sherlock stared out at the passing countryside, his fingers tapping a restless beat on his knees.
Scarlett sat opposite them, her back perfectly straight, her hands tucked into a muff. To any passenger walking by, she was the picture of a dutiful, quiet bride. But beneath the heavy wool of her traveling dress, her muscles were loose and ready. Her eyes never stayed on the scenery; they tracked the movement of the people outside and the shadow of every building they passed.
Mycroft's voice was firm when he started to speak. "University College was founded in 1249... I tried Balliol... then Merton..." A pause, slightly too satisfied. "Sadly, dear brother... none of the founding colleges would take you."
Sherlock smirked faintly. "So I suppose I'll have to put up with the clumsy modernity of 1458 then."
"Now I've got your foot in the door," Mycroft said, "time to start taking advantage of your advantage."
Sherlock stopped walking. "There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?"
Mycroft smiled — tight, knowing. "You'll thank me for it one day. Ah — Smudger!"
The stone spires of Oxford loomed over them, ancient and imposing. As they stepped onto the quad, a porter—Mr. Smudger—approached them.
"Mr. A. Sherlock Holmes?" Smudger asked, holding out a bundle of heavy, coarse fabric.
"That’ll be me, sir," Sherlock said, reaching for what he assumed was his scholar’s gown.
But the fabric was wrong. It wasn't the flowing silk of a student; it was a rough, stained apron. Sherlock held it up, his brow furrowing in immediate realization. Scarlett stepped closer, her eyes scanning the garment, then the porter, then her brother-in-law.
"Mycroft," Sherlock said, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous growl. "Why is the head porter proffering an apron?"
"You're a smart boy, Sherlock. Work it out," Mycroft replied with a thin, satisfied smile.
"I’m to be a porter? Not a student?"
"Oh, no," Smudger chuckled with . "You’ve got to work your way up to be a porter. You’re a Scout."
Sherlock looked at the apron as if it were a death warrant. "I’m a Scout? And a Scout does?
Smudger chuckled again,“whatever he’s told?"
"I’m here to serve and not to learn?" Sherlock’s eyes flashed with a mix of fury and humiliation.
"Oh no... you'll learn, all right." Smudger was already walking off. "Come on, son. Shitters aren't going to clean themselves, are they?"
Scarlett moved then, her hand resting briefly on Sherlock’s arm. It was a gesture of "support" for the benefit of the onlookers, but the grip was firm—a silent command to maintain his cover.
"Vse v poryadke," she whispered under her breath, her Russian accent a jagged contrast to the scholarly air of the quad. It is fine.
She turned to Mycroft, her face instantly shifting back into her melodic British mask. "It seems my husband will be very busy, Mr. Holmes. I suppose I shall have to ensure our quarters are kept... secure... while he attends to his new duties."
Mycroft nodded, pleased. "Quite right, Mrs. Holmes. See that he stays out of trouble."
As Mycroft turned to greet a passing professor, Sherlock looked at Scarlett, the apron clutched in his hand.
"A Scout," Sherlock hissed. "He sent me to the greatest university in the world to scrub floors."
"Is good," Scarlett replied, her voice low and Russian again now that Mycroft was out of earshot. "Scouts are invisible. No one watches the man with the bucket. You see everything. I see everything. We are ghosts here, Sherlock. Use it."
Sherlock looked at her, the sting of the insult fading as his analytical mind caught her drift. He put on the apron, the rough fabric scratching against his neck.
"Invisible," Sherlock murmured, a slow, dark smile beginning to form. "Yes. I suppose there is an advantage to being the help."