Chapter Text
John
He glances at the text seconds before Greg finds the tyre track. Slipping his phone back into his pocket, he jogs to catch up with his friend, who is summoning him from several paces down the shoulder.
It isn’t definitively from the vehicle that took Sherlock, but it’s the best lead they’ve got and the first thing in hours that’s made even a modicum of hope bloom in John’s chest. He jumps into Greg’s cruiser and they tear off in the direction that makes the most sense.
Mycroft’s stayed behind in London to scour his sources, and as soon as John calls him, he switches his focus to monitoring his expansive network of cameras, guiding Greg and John as they follow the trail of what looks to be a mid-size white-and-primer SUV, upwards of a decade old. With Greg at the wheel, and Mycroft in his comfort zone pulling their puppet strings from a distance, John acts as the point of contact, coordinating the search.
It isn’t until they’re on a relatively-long stretch of uninterrupted highway that he remembers the text. He switches from Mycroft’s text thread to the mystery message he’d received earlier, which was simply a photo of a pair of purple shoes.
For a split second, he’s confused, and then understanding blooms. Rosie has been absolutely awful lately about taking people’s phones and messing with the settings, snapping a dozen selfies of the inside of her nose, or placing random calls. Though the photo is blurry and off-center, definitely the work of a toddler, John recognizes the shoes as belonging to Carrie, the child minder. Rosie must have been playing around with Carrie’s phone and somehow sent the photo to the last number that had called -- John’s, when he called to ask Carrie for her services today.
Mystery solved, John returns his mind fully to the task at hand: locating Sherlock. He keeps his eyes wide open and his mind fixed on the task. He can’t afford to miss a single clue.
Sherlock
Without looking, without visibly altering his attention or the angle of the phone, Sherlock snaps a photo of the purple shoes and sends it to John’s number. He can think of half a dozen more effective ways to let John know the babysitter can’t be trusted, but none that will take less than the six or seven seconds he’s being given unattended while Seth follows one of his directions. He's locked into the notes app, without the time to circumvent Seth's safeguard nor to draft a proper message were be able -- but the camera app is pinned and can still be accessed.
Sherlock is typing on the phone to give Seth guidance on staging a clever, locked-room murder in the cabin. Of course he hopes not to be playing the starring role -- perhaps he can recast Seth for that particular honor -- but at the moment, he has a far more important objective than saving his own life.
Eyes trained on Seth’s handiwork, resolutely not so much as twitching towards the phone, Sherlock relies on his memory of the make and model of this particular device -- cheap, a few years old, dinged and scratched but clearly handled carefully most of the time -- to delete the photo, dearly hoping that it actually sent.
“Oi, what are you typing over there?” Seth stalks over and Sherlock hands him the phone, complete with the next direction for his own demise typed out in black and white on the notes screen.
It’s almost a shame, Sherlock thinks, to waste such a lovely setup on a murder he hopes to prevent rather than to solve.
John
The second text appears as the car rolls to a stop next to a small, abandoned house several miles out of the city. They’ve been searching for hours, and the digital trail has gone cold. It’s going to be up to Lestrade’s police work and John’s own instincts to find Sherlock now.
The second text is from Carrie and just reads, “Let her sleep or keep her to her routine?”
It’s early afternoon and is about time for Rosie’s normal nap to be over, but with her sleepless night, she must be resisting being roused. Wincing, he responds, “Try to keep her to her routine so she’ll sleep tonight. So sorry, I know that means she’ll be a bear.”
Then he scrolls up, mindfully, to look at the photo his daughter took earlier, to steady his nerves with a reminder that at least one of the twin foundations on which his world is built is safe.
But the photo isn’t there.
“John!”
It takes him a minute to drag his eyes from the screen. When he does, he jogs to join Lestrade where he’s investigating something behind the decrepit old house.
“This looks fresh,” Lestrade says, indicating what looks to John’s eye to be drag marks. He feels a return of his earlier nausea when he thinks about what, or who, might have been dragged.
Still, he isn’t so quick to put away the phone this time. Something is nagging at him. Something about the shoes, but also not about the shoes. God. He needs Sherlock, dammit!
“Greg … Did you happen to notice what shoes Rosie’s childminder was wearing this morning?”
Greg gives him a strange look. “Oddly enough, no, I didn’t. You’ve been hanging around Sherlock too long if you expect me to notice that at a time like this.”
John types a quick message to Mycroft asking him the same question. Something still isn’t sitting right about the sequence of messages on his phone, but he’s got a fresh trail to follow and at the end of that trail might be Sherlock. He pockets the phone, only to pull it straight back out when he feels it vibrate with the return message.
Green Asics with aftermarket yellow laces and a significant amount of wear on the outer tread, indicating supination. Why? MH
John stops so suddenly that Greg nearly runs right into him. “John?”
“It wasn’t from her phone.” The thing that’s been bothering him finally clicks, and he scrolls backward to his main message screen. Sure enough, the photo of the purple shoes wasn’t sent from Carrie’s number. It was sent from an unfamiliar number with no text history. Stupid! How could he not have noticed sooner? He only opened the message from the notification that popped up. He never looked, never scrolled, never thought.
“Greg, I think Sherlock sent me a clue -- in fact, I think he sent it hours ago.” He shows Greg the phone. “Those are the childminder’s shoes -- not the ones she wore today, but the ones she normally wears. I recognise them because Rosie loves them. I thought -- I thought Rosie must have snapped a picture of them, she’s always stealing people’s phones, and sometimes she hits the wrong buttons and sends things to people -- she once texted gibberish to Harry that had her thinking I was having a stroke -- another time I had to convince 999 I wasn’t a prank caller, it was just my daughter having a lark with my phone -- but this didn’t come from the childminder’s phone! Shit, shit, shit, he sent it hours ago and I didn’t even --” He slams his fist into the nearest tree trunk.
“John!” Greg steps squarely into his path before he can have another go at the tree. “You have to fill in the blanks here,” he coaches. He’s wearing his professional voice, usually reserved for calming witnesses. His eyes stray only once to the superficial damage John’s just done to his hand, then fix firmly on his face instead. “Calm down and tell me what it means.”
Calming down is not an option -- the other stone of John’s foundation has just been cast into danger with the first -- but John is still a soldier. Adrenaline surges, steadying his hand and laser-focusing his mind. “This text with the photo of the purple shoes, it’s from Sherlock. No one else would know of Rosie’s fixation. No one else would know to send it.”
“I don’t understand. Why would Sherlock --”
“Because wherever he is, Carrie’s been there. She’s been there enough she’s left her shoes there. It’s a comfortable place to her, a safe place, and that means she’s involved in Sherlock’s kidnapping.” His voice goes thin and breathless. “Greg, she’s involved and she has my daughter!”
Greg is already in motion before John finishes speaking. A step behind him, John fumbles to dial Mycroft’s number while running, but the signal is too spotty for a call to hold. He sends a text, praying it goes through, praying he’s wrong, praying one of them gets there in time.
Mycroft
Child minder involved with kidnapping. Get to Rosie. Please hurry.
The machine of Mycroft’s mind has always been programmed to see the big picture. Maps from above, players on a board, patterns diagrammed by linked coordinates. It’s why he will always be better at manipulation than London’s other premiere expert - his brother - and also why he will never quite be able to solve crimes as swiftly as Sherlock does. Mycroft sees systems of crimes, how the data trends up or down relating to political appointments or economic trends or legislative initiatives. Sherlock, meanwhile, sees two frayed threads amongst the thousands of fibers that make up one single twist of a multi-braid rope. The brothers have always been compatible opposites -- compatible here meaning that they both run on the same basic operating system, not that they coexist without conflict.
Never that.
In motion before Dr. Watson’s phone will even manage to trigger a read receipt, Mycroft is already analyzing several systems simultaneously: his own staff’s organizational design, inscrutable to everyone but himself, and how best to mobilize the cogs within the machinery of it; London’s traffic patterns and signal timings, charting the most efficient route to minimize the distance between himself and the threat; plausible deniability for whom and to what degree for those involved, should he have to disappear the babysitter; and two or three possible safeguards to throw into place if the child is harmed and Mycroft has to deal with the fallout in his brother.
The latter is the least discernible and the most concerning of all the scenarios mapping themselves in his brain. The fact is, if anything bad happens to Rosamund Watson, Sherlock Holmes will be inconsolable. And while ordinary people may at times may consider themselves inconsolable, only to be consoled eventually through time and counseling and medication and coping skills, Mycroft’s little brother has only ever allowed himself to be consoled through the destruction of his own mind and body -- drugs, lack of food and drink, risky decisions, passively and sometimes actively suicidal behavior, and, most recently, an unfathomable loyalty to an ill-equipped army doctor. Over the past several years, Mycroft’s wariness about Sherlock’s potential for destruction has risen in direct correlation to John Watson’s foothold in his brother’s life. The problem with introducing elements that society deems “good” into a life like Sherlock’s is that it increases the potential for later fallout, should it all go wrong.
As it invariably does.
Mycroft himself is immune to such external influences, with one notable exception -- of course, his brother -- and the classification of his brother as an external influence is arguable, as the two are inextricably linked by shared blood and early childhood experience. For all Mycroft’s understanding of the bigger picture -- the blueprint of society, the linked networks of philosophy and sociology and brain chemistry and finance, the umbrella of government influence stretched taut and largely unobserved above the soluble vulnerability of ordinary people -- he recognizes that Sherlock’s relationship with John Watson is a fraying rope, and thus, falls squarely in Sherlock’s purview.
Even as potential courses of action spill from the fixed point of now into a thousand possible futures, Mycroft’s body has carried him to Baker Street. He stills his breath and lightens his step, no whisper of warning to precede him up the stairs. He already knows the fate of the babysitter’s corpse, should it come to that, although she’s still alive above him as far as he knows. He has a plan for how to insulate John Watson from total self-destruction if harm has come to his daughter, and he has a plan for how to extricate Sherlock from the path of said destruction, should the first plan fail. He knows exactly how many items in Sherlock’s Baker Street flat can be used as weapons, and where the actual weapons are kept, and how each is prepared, wielded, cleaned, and vanished. He knows the exact degree to which he must lighten his tread on the thirteenth step, lest it groan under his weight.
He does not know why there is a part of his brain that is frightened for Rosie herself.
She isn’t his child, nor any relation to him so far as biology is concerned. Nor does he have any type of relationship or bond with the girl. She is simply John Watson’s child, and has been since the whirlwind of her birth and throughout her mother’s death and the unfortunate events surrounding it.
Earlier this morning, still collaborating with Dr. Watson and Inspector Lestrade in the flat while the baby fussed and tantrumed, Mycroft’s gaze had been drawn to her with unusual frequency. In her growth since he’d last seen her, and in her mannerisms as she tantrumed, Sherlock’s influence in her life was evident. She’d adopted his way of moving and a particular way of looking at the world around her with a surprisingly sharp, aware gaze.
Not only that, but she had stimmed on the rug in the exact way a curly-haired little boy is still doing in a carefully guarded, seldom-visited room in the fortress of Mycroft’s mind.
He is Mycroft Holmes, and he does not see people insofar as he sees patterns of people moving about the city streets as he looks down from above them. He does not gaze upon small children with undiagnosed autism across a worn living room rug and ache with nostalgia.
Except on the occasion of observing Rosamund Watson this morning.
He has a hundred scenarios at the ready, each of those spawning a hundred more. But in his human fallibility, he must acknowledge there is an outcome he hopes for above all others. He wants the child to be all right, for reasons quite separate from what the alternative will do to Sherlock. He wants her whole and safe just for the sake of it. He wants it with a fierceness that steals his breath and steels his spine.
He reaches the top step, lays a hand with absolute silence against the wood of the door, and listens for signs of trouble from within.
His other hand lays against his chest, scanning for the same.