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It's only a suspicion, and maybe a stupid one. But she just can't let it go.
John's acting so strange, and yet.
Mary recognizes it. Because not a lot of things rattle John, throw him off his game, shake his smile and make him fumble. She can do it, if she tries. And Sherlock Holmes can do it, dead or alive.
People he loves, she supposes.
He's been acting a little odd for a while now, but it had abruptly worsened again, jumped up into downright bizarre.
He's distracted, fumbling, running off out of nowhere with no explanation and no contact, and now he's here, with two glasses of wine and a dish.
Whatever the case. It's a silly, fanciful suspicion. But that dish sits there--she thinks she recognizes it as toad in the hole, an English dish, and it's a hell of a leap, but she can't help but make it in her head.
He hurries off again, making excuses even as he brushes right over his odd behavior, his apparent expected company and still warm food, and she's left alone in his apartment, staring at a dish of toad in the hole.
Mary steps forward, heels clicking on the floor, loud in the otherwise silent flat. Looks down at the dish, then into the darkness of the hallway, towards John's bedroom.
She takes a breath. Either she's about to sound ridiculous for an audience of no one, or her suspicion will be proven correct.
Projecting her voice, intentionally making it as non-nonsense and firm as possible with confidence she doesn't feel, she says, "You can come out now, Sherlock."
There's a beat of hushed, dead silence.
She feels ridiculous, talking to a dead man. Talking to thin air. And yet. And yet.
She holds the silence. Taps her foot as if impatient. Stares daggers into the dark.
"I know you're there," she snaps, even though she doesn't, she doesn't, she just isn't sure, but she has to try, "So please, don't insult my intelligence."
She's about to add or test my patience when--
"I would never, Mary," says a familiar voice in the dark, soft and gentle and curling just slightly around the accent, the age, and Sherlock Holmes steps quietly out of the shadows.
She swallows, shocked despite herself. But quickly schools her expression and raises an eyebrow at him, crossing her arms. "Not dead, I see," she says coolly. She nearly winces at how it comes out. It isn't that she isn't glad. But with all her suspicions confirmed, the bitter truth that he had faked his death, that he had been responsible for John's grief and traumatic brain injury and had just left... Not to mention the effect, however inadvertent, he'd had on her marriage... There's a bit of bite there. Well-deserved bite.
Holmes spreads his hands out as if in surrender. "Not quite," he says, almost sheepishly. And then, stepping closer cautiously, he says, "I suppose I should give you the same offer I gave Watson."
Her eyebrows shoot up. "Oh?"
"If you want to hit me," Holmes says, a heaviness in his voice, in his eyes, "I shan't stop you. I could hardly blame you."
"You're an idiot," Mary says. "Especially if you said that to John."
Holmes blinks, as if taken aback, but then only tilts his head. "I do mean it," he says.
"Yeah, never said you didn't," Mary says. "Why are you back, then? If you're not back back? Having John run around behind our backs and lie?"
"I never actually said he mustn't say anything," Sherlock points out, but he's back to that annoyingly cool-headed amusement, soft-spoken and sure. Flicker of vulnerability gone like it hadn't been there at all.
"I'm sure there was an understanding," she says, almost cutting, and he concedes the point with a dip of his head.
"...It's necessary," he says finally, when she just gives him a long hard stare for a moment. Holds up his hands as if in surrender even as he walks slowly to the counter. He gestures to the still-warm dish, the empty glasses of wine. She wonders which of them set those up. "Toad in the hole?"
"No thank you," she says. Refusing to let him change the subject, "Necessary?"
"And complicated," he says. "But I wouldn't have come if I didn't have Watson's best interests at heart."
"And John's best interests include having him run off mid-work day without telling anyone where he's going?" she says, crossing her arms.
"In the long-term?" says Holmes. "Yes."
"Why," she says.
He sighs heavily. "I cannot tell you," he says. "Not in so many words. Especially not before him."
"Of course he doesn't know," she says. "Why would you tell him everything, like that you planned to fake your death." Her voice raises at the end without her permission, and she has to take a breath. She is not letting him provoke this reaction out of her, let alone with so little. She is not. "Do you know how badly your death affected him?" Not the least to say her, by proxy, but she can hold a lot of feelings at once. Anger for herself, anger for John. Anger at John.
"I do," he says quietly.
"How about the hallucinations? The--" Mary almost gives away too much, almost spills out something of hers, but she doesn't. His eyes look dark and understanding and serious anyway.
"I do," he echoes, still quiet, still serious.
"Then you better know how you coming back is gonna effect him, too," she says. "And you better figure out what that looks like going forward, cause if you take off again and take him with you, he might not have somewhere to come back to."
Sherlock looks at her again, expression unreadable and eyes dark. Almost sad.
"I am sorry," he says, quietly. "For how it--happened, before." There's more there unspoken--and damn, Mary realizes she keeps thinking of him as Sherlock when she'd been trying not to. She had never been close with him, certainly not like John was, but past that tangled knot of emotions that came with the circumstances of her divorce, of that time John had been away, she understands why John likes him so much. He's brilliant and interesting and odd, all things John loves. Hell, she likes him. And they clicked, John and Sherlock, in a way a lesser woman might be jealous of. (After all, it had never been sharing she couldn't abide, not when Sherlock made John so happy, not when she understood why John lit up around him. It had been not getting to share at all.) She didn't hate him, even if she felt a lot of anger. Even if she'd had low moments where she'd thought uncharitable things. She doesn't hate him, and she's glad he's alive.
But where does that leave them now?
"Yeah," she says, more resigned than bitter. "Me, too."