Chapter 6

"Sherlock! Sherlock, are you alright?"

Sherlock groaned in response to John's familiar worried tones, as his head throbbed. He felt rather as though he had spent the night in merry libations, but that didn't seem right- he had not drunk alcohol since his university days. Alcohol dulled the senses, and damaged his weapon, his mind.

So obviously, he had been drugged, but by who? And for what purpose?

He opened his eyes just a crack, and was startled to see a familiar wall with a smiley face shot into the plaster.

221B Baker Street!

Sherlock swung to a sitting position, opening his eyes fully, and immediately regretting it, as although the light in the living room was generally fairly dim, the window was wide open, and the sun was shining directly in his eyes.

He cast his mind back, but all he could remember was being captured by Valentine, and then being held in a cell. He knew he had managed to escape the cell, that he could remember, but after that, nothing.

Blankness.

He turned away from the horrifying brightness and looked towards John, who was sitting in his habitual armchair, wincing at was what clearly the pain of his own headache.

"Do you know how we came to be here?" Sherlock asked.

John's already present grimace deepened. "I was hoping you would have the answer to that. Last thing I remember was doing sit-ups in Valentine's cell."

The conversation might have continued in that vein, were it not for the knock on the door.

John stepped over to open it, and Mycroft, looking worse than Sherlock had ever seen him, stepped through, accompanied by a woman in a suit with a blackberry who was not the woman that John usually referred to as Anthea.

Odd. Sherlock would not have thought that Mycroft would have tired of that particular assistant yet, and the last he had seen of her she certainly did not seem to be preparing to take any sort of leave of absence.

"Whatever happened to the other one?" Sherlock asked. "I thought you said that she was irreplaceable."

Mycroft's expression, already grim, grew grimmer.

"Needs must," he said shortly, but Sherlock knew Mycroft better than anyone, and he could read every micro-expression on his elder brother's face, and the very slight note of enforced calm in his tone.

Oh. So the assistant was dead then. If Sherlock and Mycroft had been different people, then this might have been the moment that Sherlock offered his condolences, but he found it odd at how resigned Mycroft seemed over the whole affair. Like he had been preparing for his assistant's inevitable demise.

Sherlock had not detected any signs of an impending terminal illness, but then, he supposed it might have been an aneurysm or something. Maybe now he would bother to find the woman's real name so that he could do some hacking and track down her death certificate to see what the cause had been.

There was a strained moment of silence, before Sherlock lost patience.

"Well, what do you want? Spit it out, Mycroft."

Mycroft sighed. "Turn on the television."

John reached over to do so, like the ridiculously agreeable sort he always was.

"What channel?" he asked.

"Any channel," Mycroft said calmly. Blandly. Chillingly.

Sherlock's natural intuition, always strong, warned him that whatever was about to appear on that screen would be fascinating.

…

"Buggering shit," John breathed.

"You're starting to repeat yourself," Sherlock said absently as he stared raptly at the images playing on the small screen, analysing every detail, as he had for the last thirteen minutes.

"Holy bloody fucking hellfire," John continued, the white of his sclera visible all the way around his irises.

Normally, Sherlock might have snapped at him, but right now, Sherlock was wondering if he himself didn't need one of those orange shock blankets.

"Mycroft, what the fuck happened?" John asked, finally managing a coherent question.

Sherlock listened, but didn't turn his eyes away from the screen.

"Richmond Valentine happened," Mycroft said heavily. "He engineered what can only be described as a doomsday plot. He kidnapped the two of you because you fit the profile of influential people that he thought might be important to put the world back together after he broke it."

Mycroft continued to speak, and Sherlock realised then, that Mycroft knew something. Mycroft knew something, and he was here, speaking to them, telling them what had happened, because he knew something.

"The gaps in our memories," Sherlock said, interrupting his brother mid-sentence. "You know what caused them."

Mycroft was silent.

It was as good as a yes, and so Sherlock took it as one.

"You're not going to tell us who rescued us. You know who it is, but they don't want us to know," Sherlock guessed.

Mycroft's silence continued, his countenance entirely blank.

Sherlock nodded to himself, and opened his mouth to make further hypotheses, but John spoke first.

"They don't want us to know because they're some kind of shady secret agency."

Mycroft blinked.

Sherlock almost gaped at his brother's slip.

(Mycroft must be even more rattled than Sherlock had initially estimated.)

Mycroft's lips quirked somewhat ruefully. "I always underestimate you, John Watson. Perhaps one day, I will learn not to repeat that mistake." He straightened, and looked both of them in the eye. "Do not attempt to find out who they are. The trail is cold, and any attempt to run them to ground will make James Moriarty look like the sideshow at a children's carnival. I cannot emphasize how little they would care to play games with you Sherlock. At best, you would develop more gaps in your memory. And I would so hate to see them damage that mind."

And with that warning, he left, taking his assistant, who had spent the entire time tapping away at her phone, pretending to ignore them, with him.

Leaving them, standing in the empty flat.

"We should check to see what happened to Mrs Hudson," John said, after a moment of silence.

(Sherlock resisted the urge to cringe. As formidable as he knew Mrs Hudson to be, he had his suspicions about the likelihood of survival of an elderly lady with a bad hip in the midst of four minutes of unrestrained near-universal homicidal violence. From the way that John was clenching his jaw, Sherlock could tell that John too had his reservations regarding their landlady's survival.)

"Yes," was however what he replied, "we certainly should."

…

(Sherlock and John were both pleased and utterly shocked to find Mrs Hudson downstairs making scones in her kitchen. She dropped the dough she was kneading and gave the both of them floury hugs that left white streaks. Neither of her tenants cared. Neither of them asked how she had survived. The haunted look in her eyes told them all they needed to know.)

…

As is the case after all catastrophic disasters, although the world had changed irrevocably, the survivors did what they could to dig through and then clear the wreckage, and life went on.

With the Metropolitan Police struggling to cope with the mess of missing persons, what was being termed as "involuntary homicide" and suicides in the wake of V-Day, there was plenty of work for a consulting detective. The struggle was increased due to the police forces themselves being decimated, although fortunately few officers routinely carried firearms, so the losses were far, fewer than those reported from countries such as the USA.

(Gregson was still missing. Lestrade and Donovan had survived. Anderson had not. Sherlock did not voice his opinions of these facts, because he did not wish to disappoint John, and kicking people when they were down was unsporting, or as John would no doubt describe it, more than a bit beyond the pale.)

Little of the work was overly stimulating, but for once, Sherlock did not need John to tell him that saying so would be more than a bit not good.

John, meanwhile, was desperately needed for his skills as a doctor. As possibly the only medical professional in London to have not have recently violently (albeit involuntarily) killed one of his patients, he was in great demand, if only because as an ex-army doctor and a long-term sufferer of PTSD, Doctor Watson was able to keep his head straight, and to assume command of the clinic he worked at, knowing the right words to get his fellow medical practitioners moving at least somewhat in a productive direction. They clung to John like a life buoy, as his island of studied calmness was an oasis in the sea of trauma.

Sherlock only hid his jealousy because he knew that John would have even less patience with it than usual.

Patience was not a thing Sherlock traditionally spent much time cultivating for the sake of his personal relationships, but just this once, he thought, practicing restraint would pay far greater dividends than any brief moment of catharsis he might feel in venting his spleen about the parasites who stole John's time away.

But slowly, slowly, things began to find a new rhythm. There were more people with visible scars, and none without invisible ones, but even in the wake of the tragedy which had decimated most of the technologically connected world, people found ways to keep moving.

Sherlock was too buried in cases to bother pasting on his reflexive sneer, to hide how deep down, he was rather amazed at the sheer resilience of the human spirit, even as people and infrastructure crumbled.

(The only sort of case he refused to take were ones where the prospective client wanted to know who had killed during V-Day, rather than what had happened to their loved ones. The latter cases sometimes provided much-needed closure, and occasionally even yielded damaged but alive people who had gotten lost in the confusion. The former though had the ugly tendency to be based on needing someone to blame. Sherlock refused to support the vengeance against anyone who had killed on V-Day. Everything he had learned since proved to him that there was no way anyone who had not been forewarned could have stopped themselves. If there had been, then there would have been far fewer suicides in the aftermath.)

"Oh, by the way," said Sherlock, "I've solved the Case of the Missing Irregular."

John blinked. "I just had the weirdest sense of déjà vu." He shook himself. "Never mind. How did you find him? Where has he been?"

"Apparently he's working at a tailor's of all things," Sherlock said, shaking his head incredulously. "According to Eggsy, he ran across an old friend of his father's, who offered him a job there. He heard I was looking for him apparently, so he left me a video message in my emails."

(Which Sherlock would not be able to show John, because the email had deleted itself immediately after Sherlock had watched the attachment. Sherlock suspected that John's laptop, never the most secure of devices to begin with, had been hacked. No matter. Sherlock did not need the video to remember every pertinent detail of its contents.)

John nodded. "Well, that's some good news at least. Nice to hear that he survived V-Day."

Sherlock nodded, eyes distant as he considered the fact that Eggsy had been… lying to him was too strong a word for it.

Eggsy, well aware of Sherlock's abilities, had through the camera, looked the detective straight in the eye and fed him a shallow cover story. A shallow cover story that did little to hide the freshly acquired thousand yard stare or other signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that his Irregular had somehow managed to pick up since he had started his apprenticeship. And then in almost as many words, had told Sherlock to please stop digging.

(If Sherlock knew that Eggsy was lying, and Eggsy knew that Sherlock would know that Eggsy was lying, then did it really count as anything but a lie of omission?)

The same request to leave a mystery alone coming from two entirely disparate people in Sherlock's life was too much of a coincidence to ignore, and Sherlock normally would have chased the information down like a particularly stubborn breed of bloodhound.

But on the one hand, in John's words, somehow this related to the doings of a "shady secret agency" and Sherlock had sworn off those as being Mycroft's problem, long before this particular time that his brother had begged him to leave this particular rock unturned.

For once, Sherlock decided, he was going to both pay heed to his brother's counsel and leave a mystery unsolved.

Because just this once, he knew that he and Mycroft would never speak of it.

"Sherlock?"

Sherlock looked up from his musings to see that John was holding his phone.

"Lestrade?" Sherlock asked.

John nodded. "Apparently someone is trying to hide murders in amongst the recent suicides, and the police only realised because one of the victims managed to get away." John's mouth hardened, but his eyes showed a glint of something that looked rather like respect. "Apparently they didn't expect a thirteen year old legally blind girl to be able to get out of a locked basement on her own, so they didn't bother to tie her up."

Sherlock considered this for a split second, and then snatched his coat from where it hung by the door.

"Come on then Watson. Time to interview an 'unreliable' witness and show the police how real detective work is done."

John grinned tiredly, and followed him out the door.

...

A/N: And done (finally)! Thanks for reading, and a special thanks to everyone who left me a review :)