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maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
She'd taken to going by 'M' names lately - her employer seemed to like her imitation of his own title, or at least his thin mouth would turn up at the ends in a wan impression of a smile whenever she passed him his morning coffee and the rushed barista's writing of her chosen persona was a 'Miranda' or a 'Melissa.' It was so rare these days, to see him smile, that she ran through her mental gamut of suitably complex 'M' names and at this point had resorted to depressingly simplistic monikers. Today 'Margaret,' in honor of the Iron Lady, had been indulgently shortened by Mycroft himself. Well, if it put that half-smirk back on the boss's face 'Maggie' could live with it for a day.
His task for her, in the intricate web meant to catch the murderer of the younger Holmes, was to trace the footsteps of the man they were calling the 'Third Sniper.' Shortly after 'The Fall,' as The British Government's staff were carefully phrasing it, all of Moriarty's schemes, from the trained gunmen to the criminal mastermind's own disappearance, came tumbling out into the internal government awareness. And today Maggie intended to shut them all back into the cold and silent vault where they belonged. She'd traced the marksman who technically didn't exist in any government records to a dingy penthouse apartment off the Thames in Bayswater, central London. Today, she planned on ensnaring him and resolving this entire mess; a trussed up and gagged answer to where Moriarty was hiding would surely merit Mycroft's second best grin.
But when she broke in the door in all of its chipped paint and rusted lock glory, Mags didn't find quite the villainous lair she'd anticipated. Sure enough, the man from her mission briefing was stiffly propped up against his headboard, asleep (loose dark hair, strong military bearing on the body of a surprisingly delicate man, mature and brooding features encompassing shadowed eyes.... 5'11" early thirties, well buried identity with a harsh childhood and a dishonorable discharge justifying the early lines that framed his rugged jaw). But no matter what she tried to do, Margaret couldn't objectify this sniper down to the pieces that mattered to her boss. Sitting there as he was, looking for all the world like a man who'd been spread out languidly by sleep and jolted harshly awake by that universal reality of nightmares and subsequent paranoia, Sebastian Moran seemed utterly pitiful.
She tried to think about how it was an entire third this man's fault that the younger Holmes was dead, gone, buried, but something about his weary face prompted memories of the isolated and adrift pre-Sherlock John Watson, not the maniacal grin of Jim Moriarty. To tie him up and drag him forcibly away would be impossible, now.
"You've come to take me away, right? You want to know where he is? I'm afraid I won't be of any help - he's gone, and nothing I can say will help you find him. He's really gone this time. Dead." The man on the bed spat out his words like boulders hurled at an unseen enemy; he didn't seem to have seen Maggie, but Sebastian's voice succeeded in its intended goal. She snuck further into the edge of the stone wall, listening to the water rushing past far below her feet where part of the outer wall had crumbled.
"I don't miss him, but dear god... If it meant I wouldn't have to live like this I'd have killed a hundred Watsons to get him back," was Moran's next missile, lobbed into the emptiness of the room.
Choosing her words carefully and diplomatically, Maggie replied, "Not the best admission to make to someone whose job it is to care about your probability of becoming a terrorist threat." Her characteristically humorous disposition made even that sound like flirting. To step out of her admittedly useless hiding place was difficult, but it needed to be done at some point. Odd - normally she'd be more in control of a situation like this. In this instance, a small and typically repressed voice in the back of her mind was whispering that this case might require a different strategy.
She rounded the corner and met Sebastian Moran's eyes, having known instinctively that they'd be raised to meet her own. But when neither party made any attempt to instigate the violence their words and objectives would have implied, identical grins began to rise on both faces.
Mycroft would be displeased.
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and
After their initial symmetrical smiles, Maggie gave up on Plan A, plan do-what-the-boss-said-and-just-catch-him-already, mission 'Make Mycroft Happy.' Sitting down on the slim man's bed, she quieted his shocked exclamations until they faded down to merely a guarded expression around his brown-black eyes.
"There don't appear to be any visible injuries," she started, running deft hands, used mostly for typing and coffee-getting but becoming accustomed to the occasional secret mission, over his face and arms.
As Maggie slowly and soothingly went over Sebastian’s body, the nervous tension in his strong shoulders slowly melted away. She’d been correct in her assessment that he’d sustained no physical wounds, but clearly the last few weeks of running and hiding (from her and her boss, a part of her rebelliously whispered) had taken their toll. The distant smudges and shreds of darkness that haunted his face ought not to be there naturally.
“Why are you doing this for me?” he asked, his voice now fading into the edges of sleep. That proved something, that he could relax to this level with her there. Was this bone-deep exhaustion from a time before the chaos and wandering of the last few weeks? She of all people knew how it felt to be overworked by the higher-ups.
To nudge at that solidarity and sympathy, she answered his question with one of her own: “Was that protection of his worth it?” A tease in her tone, typical of Maggie’s demeanor, demonstrated to Sebastian that he ought not to be offended by either how vague her words were or by how bluntly she cut right to the heart of Moran’s crisis.
No further words were shared, but none were needed. Maggie, satisfied that Sebastian wasn’t wounded but still in turmoil about this turn of events, pressed a chaste kiss to his forehead and sung brief promises of return and aid. “Soon, soon.”
The following days were filled with covert visits to the run-down flat above the Thames, where the river slowly ate away at her guilt over betraying her employer, even as Sebastian’s growing openness calmed her and kept her returning for more.
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
Backing through the doorway so as not to spill the identical cups of cinnamon sugar lattes inscribed with the indubitably informal 'Milly' on their respective sides, Mycroft's assistant heard her employer quietly clear his throat. He followed this polite sound with a soft sigh, and the out of context statement, "An underrated joy in life is a really good umbrella."
"Are you alright, sir? Should I perhaps call for Gregory-"
"No-" her boss interrupted, "I can't... He ought not to see me like this." Mycroft's head was bowed, and a curled wisp of hair fell across his pale forehead and paler eyes. He did indeed appear distraught, Milly thought - more so than usual, even in these days. She'd thought he'd been getting better.
But as he sat, twirling the trademark umbrella in his dominant hand, Mycroft clearly intended to say something. He cleared his throat again and began a few abridged sentences that ran back on themselves and went nowhere. Milly'd seen this happen only once before, but she knew better than to interfere. To leave and return to her other duties would give him time to recover she hoped, praying that the small abandoned noise behind her as Mycroft's office door closed was imagined, and not real.
'Other duties' at this point consisted of the purposeless task of finding a location she already knew and capturing a fugitive she had no intention of imprisoning, so Milly signed herself out and went home to pack.
Milly arrived at Sebastian's dingy flat, a nondescript backpack filled with supplies on her back and a tingle of nervousness still in the depths of her stomach. Not putting surveillance on him at this stage was a risk, but she'd chosen to trust this man who ought to be her enemy, so she might as well do it thoroughly. As she raised her hand to knock, it swung open, revealing Seb standing there, waiting for her with a vaguely timid smile on his face. The two of them left the dilapidated building behind, and strode down the cobblestone streets along the river. Knowing their destination better than her companion, Milly took the lead, pulling Sebastian along behind her.
They knew each other well enough at this point for Milly’s sudden blindfold not to alarm Seb, and he merely grinned under the dark strip of fabric. Once released (in the carpeted safety of a fourth floor flat) Sebastian Moran was struck by the domesticity of it all... it felt comfortable and homely to Milly, hence why she’d chosen it. The river still ran past beneath large windows, and the sparkle off its depths reflected in Seb’s eyes as he turned back to her.
“Thank you,” the warmth in his tone was palpable, even as it mixed with his bemusement, “but... what have I done to deserve this?” They both knew he wasn’t only referring to the rooms around them.
Milly took a single step closer and leaned up, her hand caressing the soft hair at the back of Sebastian’s neck and catching on old army scars. He must have been very reckless to sustain this many marks, but the pleased way his lips turned up at her touch taught her that he hadn’t lost his humor. She longed to kiss just a bit of that smirk out of him, so she did. They fell together onto the well-placed couch and proceeded to devour each other piece by piece.
Afterward, curled in the sheets of Seb’s new and much cleaner bed, they talked. About everything - the past, the future, the conflict that still haunted their lives and threatened to break their... whatever it was, apart, and how exactly they planned to deal with it.
Moran carefully explained, "There were five of us - Jim, to lead, one to watch, and three to shoot. I was the third, would have been the third to shoot," wary not to say the wrong thing while wrapped around Milly’s drowsy form.
She could hear the remorse in him, or at least could convince herself it was there, audible or not. That, for now, was enough, and they drifted off as the sun set over Battersea Bridge.
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
The next day, she decided to follow up on Seb’s information and actually pay attention to Mycroft’s orders for once regarding this case. In addition to the ‘Third Sniper’ action, which of course, was not proceeding as expected, the dubious death certificate after ‘The Fall’ had to be looked into. She made her way to St. Bartholomew’s - Mycroft’s soft huff of discomfort at the thought of returning to the hospital after that day was plenty to send her there herself. Having spent the better part of the hours after lunch wandering through the harshly-lit halls, she was just about ready to give up on finding the office of this ‘Dr. Hooper’ who had supposedly performed the autopsy in question. As one would expect, as soon as such doubts entered her mind, a pale wood door emblazoned with just the name she was searching for came into view.
A small brunette woman with wispy hair swept barely out of her face had only just opened the door from the inside; seeing a stranger standing opposite, the woman who was presumably Dr. Hooper made the usual opening pleasantries, and ended with, "Oh, and my name's Molly."
"How amusing- so is mine." And so it was; the surprisingly neat name on this morning's Caramel Macchiato for the elder Mr. Holmes attested to that.
They talked into the golden light of the late spring afternoon, as the Barts’ office room began to dim, about all and everything not relating to events that had occurred on the roof of that very building. Every time Molly (the formerly Maggie and Milly, that is) pushed Dr. Hooper in the direction of Sherlock Holmes, the other woman’s words became tight and closed off.
Not knowing where to turn with her confusion over the truth of the younger Holmes’s murder, Molly typed up a letter on her Blackberry, as she sat in the leather backseat of the department’s car, pouring not only knowledge but also unspoken and unspeakably inappropriate emotions into its digital words. For a moment, she considered sending it to Mycroft; then her thoughts shot off in the direction of Sebastian. Something about thinking of those two men in sequence, side by side in the passages of her memory, felt wrong.
She deleted the note.
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone
It was the last day of the month - usually a good day for Mycroft Holmes. He'd take the afternoon off, and she'd handle policy for a while, under the guise of whichever month it happened to be. 'May' had always been an easy one - she could send her boss off into the comforting arms of Gregory Lestrade without even needing to add an 'A' to the end of her title. It was a sign that perhaps she'd been spending too much of her life pandering to the needs of a certain man known only as The British Government that she agonized over whether the simple word 'May' would hurt him this year. A reminder that his brother had been gone nearly a month - a month less four days. But routine seemed to comfort him, and she let the woman behind the counter scribble a loopy m-a-y on the cups of shared white chocolate mochas.
Shortly after May had settled into her desk-side chair to go over the day’s schedule from her Blackberry, Mycroft's emergency line rang with a truly terrible screech, sending May rushing to pick up the receiver. "Office 000504, PA of Agent VR speaking," she got out.
"We have a confirmed sighting and locational track on Watch-list subcategory 42: Snipers, number 003, requesting permission from VR for pick up and transport."
The voice on the other line was harsh and precise, leaving May's words of response caught in her throat, all trace of her usual humor gone. Hazarding a glance at her employer, who had just been packing up to leave, and finding him sitting up slightly straighter in his deep office chair, she bit back the plea from her tongue and merely replied with the code for withdrawal of forces and the institution of a surveillance detail on 'Sniper 003.'
She turned back to Mycroft's perfectly postured form and answered the question already clouding his brow, sighing out the words, "I'm sorry, sir. He....he and I.... I find I am emotionally compromised."
Mycroft watched her in utter silence and complete attention as she finished out the story. Stuttering and grasping for the right phrases in an embarrassingly uncontrolled manner, May explained how she'd concealed the success of her original scouting mission from the rest of the department, cleaned up Sebastian and moved him to a more secure location (or so she'd thought.) The reasons behind her actions didn't need to be explained; even to a man not nearly as intelligent as Mycroft it would have been blindingly obvious. Having finished, she ran a tongue over her dry lips as her employer steepled his fingers under his chin in an unconscious imitation of his brother and considered her.
"Take me to him," he said flatly, his tone emotionless, barren even.
"But, I-" she began.
"Do as I have asked." When Mycroft was too upset to be diplomatic, he became entirely deadly, May knew. However, she was also aware that the softening around his frown bespoke sympathy, and it was hope and not fear that motivated her subsequent actions.
They rode side-by-side in the discrete black car, which took them on May's orders to the comfortable flat in a newer and better-kept section of Bayswater. The dark depths of the Thames still flowed past, now seeming only ominous. But when Mycroft swung open the unlocked door of Seb's new rooms, he merely stood and looked at the smaller man startled into consciousness in the corner chair. "I ought to blame you," Mycroft Holmes choked out in a resigned whisper, "but I don't. You know nothing - knew nothing, even, and I cannot fault you for the actions of my brother, or those of your employer."
Sebastian Moran looked supremely terrified, his shadowed face paled with fear; but he nodded his assent and Mycroft turned away without another word. Looking now only at a suit-clad back and May herself, Seb pulled himself together and sent a silent question in her direction. She motioned him to sit back down and pressed a consoling hand to his shoulder.
Mycroft returned home, May following behind as a flitting shadow of uncertainty. Her boss still hadn’t acknowledged her presence, but they typically went hours between instructions given. Where normally she’d be typing comfortably on her phone, however, she was throwing slightly guilt-ridden glances at the elder Holmes’s back. Instead of summoning May up to unlock his door (she always kept his keys so as not to ruin the line of his suit) however, Mycroft rang his own doorbell impatiently. May’s anxiousness grew.
After mere moments that seemed like much longer, Gregory Lestrade pulled open the door, shock at Mycroft’s sudden appearance and closed-off look quickly showing on the Detective Inspector’s face. Gathering some needed perception of events from this first look, Lestrade pulled his Mycroft into a slow kiss. They exchanged a few close words mumbled between lips, then encircled each other in comforting arms.
May contemplated turning to leave, but the two men leaned away soon after and Lestrade stepped back into the dark confines of Mycroft’s house. Doubt as to her position plagued her still, but her employer was now graced with a gentle look around his eyes, if not a full smile. Seeing him nod to her at last, she turned to leave.
"May-" he called just as she reached the iron railings of the front gate, "Vanilla frappuccinos tomorrow, don't you think? And-" here his voice dropped to a lower register and wavered ever so slightly, "-my blessings, such as they are."
She was strengthened, and the voice that answered, saying "Yes, Sir. Thank you," was nearly back to her usual confidence, with just a tinge of amusement bringing a smirk to Mycroft Holmes's lips.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
Whomever she was, Maggie or Milly or Molly or May, she was always fated to belong to two men. One she loved as she cared for his ridiculous needs and remarkable dependencies; she would follow Mycroft Holmes wherever he went, for he was her brother, her captain, her king. The other, he knew what it was like to follow with complete loyalty and yet no blindness, and he cared for her; she would love Sebastian Moran until they were both lost to the great devouring waves of the sea that are London's battlefield.