-Emily-
~~~~~~
I groan, pulling the blankets around my sorry self and reaching for another tissue. I sit surrounded by them – a cornucopia of crumpled paper – and cups of half-drunk water. John insisted hydration was key, and, given my previous solution had comprised lying inert on the Baker Street sofa in a miasma of misery and blocked sinuses, I had little choice but to follow orders. I sniff dejectedly, sinking back into my sheet cocoon. Death is preferable to the choking head cold that keeps me tight in its grip.
My return to Baker Street was unsettlingly uneventful. I'd succeeded in slipping upstairs in my stained jeans and borrowed shirt-bandeau, managed to bypass John – sleeping on the sofa with Addy curled at his feet – and navigate the dark surroundings. I'd turned the corner with every intention of getting dressed and catching up on some much-needed sleep, but was abruptly halted by Sherlock, who was sitting on the corridor floor, back to the wall. He was surrounded by newspaper cut-outs, at least twenty of them, bearing headlines with capitalised proclamations: Yakovich, Iris Killings, Schoolgirl Missing, Moriarty, Philippines, Massacre. Sherlock was sorting them into piles. He looked up briefly as I stood there, guilty and reeking of sex and whiskey, raised an eyebrow, then turned back to his work disinterested. We didn't discuss it again.
I sigh, bored beyond coherency. There's nothing to do, nothing we can do regarding Millie's hospital abduction. I reach for my laptop and, tucking the loose strands of hair behind my ears, pull up three tabs. They show the hospital security footage, recorded by three individual cameras; our little tragedy, in all its pixelated glory. I rewind it for the umpteenth time, click play, watch the familiar order of events play out. Millie is wheeled from the room by the imposter nurse. Ivan pauses, bends down beside our unconscious bodies, holds his palm out to our mouths, checks our breathing. Satisfied we won't be making a comeback any time soon, he stands, ignores Addy's silent screams and promptly exits. If I continue watching, I see what my eyes did not: Addy's howling alerts a junior doctor, who finds the three unexpected casualties and sprints to get help. We are swiftly packaged up in our own stretchers, strapped down and pricked with needles, stabilised, rushed to the toxicity wing. A part of me wonders if Ivan chose snake venom deliberately, knowing that this particular hospital had the facilities to provide us with the antidote. I smile, bitterly. I shouldn't be so lenient.
I bring up the second tab. The nurse is seen wheeling the stretcher down the corridor, past an unassuming reception, past the ICU and the X-Ray department and the laboratories. She stops by the delivery doors, checks over her shoulder and presses the button that lifts the metal barricade. Millie disappears. Five minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, and Ivan – hands in his scrub pockets, surgical mask obscuring his face – follows the same path, exiting the building.
The third tab rubs salt in the proverbial wound. Millie is manoeuvred into the back of a waiting ambulance, parked between two lorries, by three men. Ivan appears just as the last adjustments are being made. Quickly, and with clear irritation, he scribbles on the back of four cheques and hands them out, before wrenching open the ambulance door and climbing into the driver's seat. The vehicle reverses, then lurches out of the delivery bay, out of sight.
That is the last retrievable footage of Millie Shon. I should know. I've scoured every piece of taped drivel from every functioning security camera in the vicinity, and nothing – Ivan must have mapped the cameras in advance, because the required vehicle change occurred out of the government's watchful gaze. I sniff again, and close all three tabs.
The door opens without warning. I look up, startled, and am surprised to see Sherlock emerge from his bedroom. He hasn't left his personal laboratory in days. John and I have tried unsuccessfully to draw a response from behind the closed door; Mrs Hudson provides the food, which is left on a plastic tray and touched infrequently. He's taken Millie's abduction personally. Seeing him now, in the flesh, is a miracle in itself.
Sherlock comes to a halt in front of me, pale in the yellow light. He's a little haggard – his hair mussed, his shirt purple and creased and chemically bleached at the cuffs – and he's holding something in his left hand. I regard him with some confusion. He's looking at me with a very strange expression on his face: it's deadpan, save for a slight curl at the corners of his mouth, and there's a fevered glint of anticipation in his eyes, a point of colour at each slanted cheek.
"What?" I say, when the silence becomes unbearable.
"You look appalling."
I glower at him through swollen eyes. "I don't remember asking for your opinion."
"Is it infectious? It looks infectious."
"I hope so." I cough deliberately – the chesty, hacking kind – and Sherlock recoils. "I'm taking you down with me. Tuberculosis and all."
"Do you practice being this repulsive, or does it come naturally to you?"
"It's a talent."
He wrinkles his nose, as if further communication risks imminent infection. I roll my eyes.
"What do you want?"
Sherlock clears his throat and holds out the object; a cautious offering. It is small, oblong and wrapped so hideously in several layers of Christmas-themed paper I can't discern much more.
"Careful. You can't touch me," he cautions. "It's your viral death sentence. Not mine."
Eyebrow raised, I take it from him, ensuring I brush my clammy palm against his fingers. He withdraws his hand rapidly. I grin, he spits something unflattering about disease-ridden prostitutes in his flat. I turn the mystery object over: there are not one, but three variations of Christmas wrapping paper involved in this small atrocity, one green, one red, one silver. At least two rounds of clear Sellotape have been used in bullet-proofing his creation.
"What is it?"
"Open it."
"I'm going to regret this." I lift it up to the light. "Will it explode?"
"If you're lucky."
"Is it a thumb? John said you hoard them."
"It's not a thumb," he says – and then, under his breath, "Besides, I don't hoard them. Hoarding is for recluses with too much time and not enough social interaction." He sniffs, proudly. "My thumbs are a collection. Best in London."
"Whereas you're definitely not an antisocial recluse with too much spare time."
"Is that meant to be a joke?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand."
"Of course you don't." I give the item a testing shake. "It's a thumb. I know it's a thumb."
"Oh for god's sake," he says, impatiently. "Mycroft walks faster than this."
"Fine, fine. I'm doing it."
With some difficulty, I pull apart the hash of Sellotape and Christmas goodwill. A memory stick – cheaply made and plastic – falls out of its paper shell and into my lap. As I puzzle, Sherlock covers his mouth and sweeps the tissues off the sofa, clearing a space: he sits down, keeping the maximum distance between us. I pick up the memory stick.
"What's this?"
"My brother," says Sherlock, his voice muffled behind his hand-barrier. "Well. It's his recent security programme. Currently in development. No one has been able to crack it yet, so I took the liberty of borrowing it for your entertainment. See if you can do it."
I look down at the illicit information.
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you give it to me?"
Sherlock blinks. "It's your birthday, isn't it? I'm giving you a gift. Isn't that what people do?"
I am stunned into silence. Sherlock continues, nonplussed by my reaction.
"I never did see the point in birthdays. I certainly don't want a yearly reminder of the day I fell out of my mother – although I suppose the world is significantly better for it."
I give him no warning: I abandon my duvet protection and lean across the sofa, pushing Sherlock's hand away from his face and kissing his pale cheek.
Sherlock's speech halts abruptly. He gapes at me, horrified, and holds a hand up to his cheek as if grazed.
"You infected me."
"How did you know?"
"You could have the bubonic plague. I'm going to die, and I never published my ash chronicles–"
"Sherlock." He looks at me, unimpressed. "How did you know it was my birthday? No one knows that."
"Your records do. You never told me that your mother tried to sell you to a Chinese labour farm when you were eleven. I found the photos and everything."
"Sherlock, I swear to god–"
He waves off my protests with a hand and says, "Oh come on, the papers were just sitting on Mycroft's desk. They were asking to be read."
"Don't ruin it."
"Ruin what?"
I open my mouth to speak, but am given no chance to vocalise an explanation.
"It's strange," continues Sherlock, "how you don't mention your upbringing. I don't just mean in casual conversation. I read your file – your sentence in Bronzefield, all those interrogations. You were asked about it. You never responded. At first I presumed trauma suppression – common in adults with violent childhoods – but I don't think that's it, not anymore. It can't be. You remember everything, don't you?"
"It's not something you forget."
"No," he says, thoughtfully. "I don't suppose it is. How many of you were there? I counted sixteen in the footage."
"What footage?"
"Video evidence. Propaganda. Your mother sold us the disc when you were gallivanting around as Moriarty's pocket weapon."
I laugh, bitterly. "I'm not surprised."
"No disrespect, but your mother is quite possibly the most repugnant, money-grabbing, sickening manifestation of human greed I've ever had the displeasure of encountering."
"None taken. You're being lenient."
Sherlock cracks his knuckles. "Now, correct me if I'm wrong. You were born Emily Schott on the thirteenth of January, the first of two children."
"Yes. I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"Your sister is deceased. You were expelled twice from two separate institutions for violent behaviour towards classmates, the latter of which resulted in the hospitalisation of–"
"He tried to take my lunch," I say. "Little bastard had it coming."
"Don't interrupt, I haven't finished." He begins again. "Your father got in contact with your mother days before you were meant to be collected by social services. He offered to take you off her hands on the condition she told anyone who asked her to lie about your whereabouts."
"She used to tell people I'd been drafted into an academy funded by the police." I turn over the memory stick. "Ironic, isn't it? Wrong side of the law."
"But you served in the police force after your escape?"
"Briefly. I needed cash. And access to a decent hard drive."
"You were trained as a suicide bomber by your father, yes?"
"Not quite. We were the disposable pack fighters. Like pawns. We'd take down anyone who tried to stop us from travelling to the border – airport security, public, guards. It didn't matter if we were caught or killed. That was the point. We were deadly, but replaceable. They tried to drill religion into our heads – it rarely stuck, because some of those kids had been abducted and just went along with it to spare themselves the alternative. You learnt to parrot their spiel with conviction."
"I see. And you taught yourself to hack in this period?"
"I stole a book from HQ. They were trying to learn how to breach American cyber security, spread propaganda, that type of thing. I used to practice when they were asleep."
"And you were never caught?"
"Oh, I was. Still have the scars to show for it."
"You escaped four days after your eighteenth birthday. How?"
I shrug. "I got into a fight. Took out one of our own. I figured they would kill me for it, so all was fair game – I broke into the training facility and stole a crowbar, knocked out the guy at the entrance, hotwired the truck. It wasn't graceful."
Sherlock leans back into his seat, palms together and fingertips touching. "Fascinating."
I sniff, reach for a tissue, and then look up at Sherlock.
"You know, you could have just asked me upfront."
He frowns. "Upfront?"
"Yes." I smile, a little sadly, and wave the memory stick. "You didn't have to bribe me. I would have told you. The whole birthday guise, it was a bit unnecessary."
Sherlock says nothing; a silent confirmation. I place the plastic on the table.
"You keep it."
Without saying a word, he stands and picks up his memory stick. I watch him leave, listen to his bedroom door close. I sigh and close my eyes. Outside, the traffic purrs. I must fall asleep, because when I next open my eyes I'm lying on my side, half-covered by the blanket, and the apartment is very dark and very quiet.
I sit up, stretching, and then I stop. I do a double take.
On the table, there is a boxed cake – red velvet, the transparent window smudged with icing and packaging dented at the corners – and an envelope. I pick up the latter and tear it open. The memory stick falls into my lap. I turn over the card: it's cheap, the sort you pick up for a pound at a corner shop, and the age emblazoned on the front is off the mark by a good five years, but when I open it and read the contents, I find myself smiling in the evening light.
Dear Emily,
This isn't a bribe. The memory stick is yours. I asked Mrs Hudson and she said cake was an acceptable offering, so take the diabetes and enjoy your birthday.
Sherlock.
P.S. If Mycroft asks, John stole the memory stick. And the biscuits.
~~~~~~