A slow and courtly dance
Happy Birthday to 
legionseagle!
This story has been a long time in the gestation. Four years ago, I was listening to Richard and Linda Thompson's song Pavanne, which Richard explains is "about a terrorist, and it's a woman, and her name is Pavanne". (From the tense atmosphere on the stage, I imagine that the performance in the link dates from the time when the Thompsons were breaking up.) I had a fancy to write a sort of love story for Pavanne and Mycroft Holmes. But while I was brooding over it, marysutherland had an idea with a similar premise (though it moves towards a different conclusion) and wrote it as a 221b. So I thought I'd better wait a decent interval before writing my version, and I hope nearly four years is long enough; it does mean that canon dropped a hint which I was able to use in the final stages, though I expect to be Jossed soon enough.
I highly recommend marysutherland's story Cold Steel Woman, although I haven't read it for four years - I am looking forward to going back to it, but thought I'd better wait until I'd finished this.
Though the character in the song is called Pavanne, the dance which it mentions is spelled pavane, and that's what I chose as my title. In case my description in the opening paragraph is hopelessly confusing, you can see a couple demonstrating the basics of the pavane here. See, even Mycroft could manage that legwork.
I should warn potential readers that, although this is set in the Sherlockverse, Mycroft is the only character from that canon who is featured.
Thanks, as ever, to fengirl88 for encouragement.
PAVANE
Pavane: a stately dance of the sixteenth century. Take one step forwards with your left foot, then bring your right foot up to join it. Take one step forwards with your right foot, bring your left foot up to join it. Take three steps, left, right, left, then join your feet again. Repeat, but this time move backwards. You're holding your partner's hand; sometimes you both move forwards, sometimes both move back. Sometimes you circle around each other, one moving forwards as the other goes back.
Mycroft Holmes has sometimes thought of the pavane as a metaphor for diplomacy. A series of slow, precise steps with another party, moving in various directions, building up into an elaborate pattern.
Sometimes someone trips, or misses their step. Often it's through their own stupidity; sometimes they're forcibly removed from the floor. The two aren't mutually exclusive. But it's inconvenient; there's a delay until a new partner emerges and masters the steps, and the dance can regain its shape.
Violent death tends to distract the dancers. A chargé d'affaires lying dead in a Parisian casino, the Chinese ambassador shot down arriving at the presidential palace in Khartoum. These deaths have been happening too often: apparently random, apparently unconnected, but sufficiently jarring to demand Mycroft's attention. He studies reports and watches hours of footage, any record of the victims' last days, looking for some detail the official investigations have missed.
That's where he first catches sight of her: a tall, elegant figure with a fall of ash-blond hair, gliding through an embassy reception, her face away from the camera. That time, he barely notices; she's just one of a thousand details he files away. But then he glimpses her again, walking down a street on another continent. Still no face, and wearing trousers this time, yet even so, there's something in the set of her shoulders; he's sure it's the same woman, and she chimes with an earlier memory.
He's spotted her a third time, with dark cropped hair, before he pulls that old memory into focus. The funeral of Paul Vasey, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence; Mycroft was several pews behind the principal mourners, studying the back of the girl sitting beside the widow. He had been about to investigate the rumours about Vasey when the man's sudden death made it unnecessary. Or so he had thought.
Now he has a name, it's easy enough to call up pictures of her face, and to scrutinise those pale eyes looking warily at the world. Paula Vasey, she was, but she dropped Paula at university to go by her second name, Anne. And then she dropped university to become a photographer - in time, a highly successful freelance.
The skills of a photographer and those of a sniper are not so very far apart. Not only does she have a keen eye for a shot; she has a sharp sense of where cameras might be positioned, and instinctively turns away. Though her equipment will be checked at the borders, once she's past security it probably isn't difficult to carry her more lethal tools in the same bags. She's good at alibis; invariably (too invariably) she can be placed on a photo-shoot a hundred miles or more from the scene of an assassination. But cameras lie, and so does she.
She might have been the perfect weapon, under his control. Control, however, is just what she defies. There's no political ideology linking her targets; though each death suits some government or terrorist group, they fall across the spectrum. She's a freelance, in this as in her cover job, and no doubt she's paid well. But it doesn't take a Freudian to see that she's killing male authority figures, over and over.
Male authority figures. He knows his research will attract her attention, and he hasn't tried to hide his tracks; he wants her to see him, he's courting her, drawing her into their own dance, circling around one other. He doesn't believe she will shoot him before they've talked. She owes him that much curiosity for his interest, for the effort he's put into tracing her career. And she's beginning to flirt with him. Odd items arrive by post: a postcard, inscribed "Sic Semper", from the Ford Theatre in Washington; an invitation to a photographic exhibition, including some of Anne Vasey's work. Mycroft went to the exhibition, but she wasn't there.
Then, finally, two photographs in an envelope. One shows a single row of wooden chairs with rounded arms and padded seats, stretching to the end of a long room, the Long Room. Having identified Lord's, he quickly recognises the second as the clock tower on ground's north corner - captured at night, the time illuminated by a floodlight: ten o'clock.
He orders a car to St John's Wood for half past nine.
Mycroft approaches the Lord's Pavilion from the pitch, making his way through the members' seating, like a batsman at the end of his innings. He has brought a couple of tools in case he needs to force the door, but finds it swings open at his touch. He looks around the darkened Long Room, which appears to be empty, apart from the ghosts of famous cricketers that hang on the walls, along with eighteenth or nineteenth-century children posing with bats. So he seats himself in one of the chairs, and gazes out at the pitch, until he hears soft footsteps and she sits down beside him.
"I'm sorry," he says quietly.
She laughs. "You're sorry?"
"Your father. I was about to investigate. But we should have caught him sooner."
"What was it to you?"
"On a practical level, it made him a security risk." Paul Vasey's death had saved him from having to launch an inquiry. At the funeral, he had tried to read the story in the girl's defiant shoulders: holding herself together as the ordeal drew to a close, certainly, but was the ordeal her father's sudden death, or the years spent living in his house? No matter, it had ceased to be Mycroft's business, or so he had thought. Now he knows he should not have left that loose end.
"Ah, security." She nods. "The national interest."
"It's not too late for you to join this side of the fight."
She laughs again, louder. "You're planning to make an honest woman of me?"
"Not honest, exactly. That can be a handicap. But you could act for the greater good. You're worth so much more than a common mercenary, or a blinkered fanatic."
"You think that's what I am now?"
"No. I think you're killing the same man, again and again. But you'll never be satisfied, because it's not him. He died of natural causes, didn't he?"
She bites her lip. "I had plans. I would have done it. But I spent too long steeling myself - I wasn't expecting him to drop dead just like that. He didn't suffer."
"No. Justice wasn't done."
She snorts. "Don't tell me you're the dispenser of justice, Mr Holmes. You're no better than anyone I've worked for." She rises to her feet, a gun in her hand.
"Ah. So you're not going to waste your chance, this time. Out of curiosity, is this business, or just the end of the dance?"
"No. This is between ourselves. The only way it can end."
The shot deafens him for a moment, delaying the realisation that it's her body that's contorting and falling. He jumps up, trying to catch her, to save her from hitting the floor too hard. He holds her as she gasps up blood, and feels it spraying his jacket. It doesn't last long. She dies in his arms.
"How unexpectedly sentimental of you, brother mine."
Mycroft looks up at the woman standing under the portrait of W.G. "I don't recall inviting you. To what do I owe the honour?"
"Perhaps I'm sentimental too. After all, what would Mummy have said if I'd let a strange woman put a bullet in you?"
He lays Anne Vasey's body down, and stands. "And perhaps you're working for somebody who didn't want her talking about a job she'd done for them."
The woman grins. "Could be both. You never give up, do you?"
"Give up what?"
"Trying for recruits. You must be desperate if you've moved on from siblings to your own assassin."
He sighs. "It was worth trying. For your information, I'm wearing a bullet-proof vest."
"You haven't put on as much weight as I thought, then. But not much use if she shot you in the head."
The doors bang, and the Long Room fills with armed police, most of them shouting "Drop the gun!" She does.
"Is this her?"
"Good evening, Inspector MacKinnon. This is Grace Holmes. I suggest you arrest her for the murder of Anne Vasey, who's the one on the floor."
"You wouldn't!" says his sister.
"Yes, I would. Goodbye, Grace."
He sits down again as they march her out. Soon an ambulance will come for the dead woman. For a few minutes, however, they are alone. She was right; their odd courtship could only end with one of them dead. But for a short while, perhaps, both of them had felt a little more alive.
He leans down and whispers: "We should have danced."
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.
legionseagle!
This story has been a long time in the gestation. Four years ago, I was listening to Richard and Linda Thompson's song Pavanne, which Richard explains is "about a terrorist, and it's a woman, and her name is Pavanne". (From the tense atmosphere on the stage, I imagine that the performance in the link dates from the time when the Thompsons were breaking up.) I had a fancy to write a sort of love story for Pavanne and Mycroft Holmes. But while I was brooding over it, marysutherland had an idea with a similar premise (though it moves towards a different conclusion) and wrote it as a 221b. So I thought I'd better wait a decent interval before writing my version, and I hope nearly four years is long enough; it does mean that canon dropped a hint which I was able to use in the final stages, though I expect to be Jossed soon enough.
I highly recommend marysutherland's story Cold Steel Woman, although I haven't read it for four years - I am looking forward to going back to it, but thought I'd better wait until I'd finished this.
Though the character in the song is called Pavanne, the dance which it mentions is spelled pavane, and that's what I chose as my title. In case my description in the opening paragraph is hopelessly confusing, you can see a couple demonstrating the basics of the pavane here. See, even Mycroft could manage that legwork.
I should warn potential readers that, although this is set in the Sherlockverse, Mycroft is the only character from that canon who is featured.
Thanks, as ever, to fengirl88 for encouragement.
PAVANE
Pavane: a stately dance of the sixteenth century. Take one step forwards with your left foot, then bring your right foot up to join it. Take one step forwards with your right foot, bring your left foot up to join it. Take three steps, left, right, left, then join your feet again. Repeat, but this time move backwards. You're holding your partner's hand; sometimes you both move forwards, sometimes both move back. Sometimes you circle around each other, one moving forwards as the other goes back.
Mycroft Holmes has sometimes thought of the pavane as a metaphor for diplomacy. A series of slow, precise steps with another party, moving in various directions, building up into an elaborate pattern.
Sometimes someone trips, or misses their step. Often it's through their own stupidity; sometimes they're forcibly removed from the floor. The two aren't mutually exclusive. But it's inconvenient; there's a delay until a new partner emerges and masters the steps, and the dance can regain its shape.
Violent death tends to distract the dancers. A chargé d'affaires lying dead in a Parisian casino, the Chinese ambassador shot down arriving at the presidential palace in Khartoum. These deaths have been happening too often: apparently random, apparently unconnected, but sufficiently jarring to demand Mycroft's attention. He studies reports and watches hours of footage, any record of the victims' last days, looking for some detail the official investigations have missed.
That's where he first catches sight of her: a tall, elegant figure with a fall of ash-blond hair, gliding through an embassy reception, her face away from the camera. That time, he barely notices; she's just one of a thousand details he files away. But then he glimpses her again, walking down a street on another continent. Still no face, and wearing trousers this time, yet even so, there's something in the set of her shoulders; he's sure it's the same woman, and she chimes with an earlier memory.
He's spotted her a third time, with dark cropped hair, before he pulls that old memory into focus. The funeral of Paul Vasey, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence; Mycroft was several pews behind the principal mourners, studying the back of the girl sitting beside the widow. He had been about to investigate the rumours about Vasey when the man's sudden death made it unnecessary. Or so he had thought.
Now he has a name, it's easy enough to call up pictures of her face, and to scrutinise those pale eyes looking warily at the world. Paula Vasey, she was, but she dropped Paula at university to go by her second name, Anne. And then she dropped university to become a photographer - in time, a highly successful freelance.
The skills of a photographer and those of a sniper are not so very far apart. Not only does she have a keen eye for a shot; she has a sharp sense of where cameras might be positioned, and instinctively turns away. Though her equipment will be checked at the borders, once she's past security it probably isn't difficult to carry her more lethal tools in the same bags. She's good at alibis; invariably (too invariably) she can be placed on a photo-shoot a hundred miles or more from the scene of an assassination. But cameras lie, and so does she.
She might have been the perfect weapon, under his control. Control, however, is just what she defies. There's no political ideology linking her targets; though each death suits some government or terrorist group, they fall across the spectrum. She's a freelance, in this as in her cover job, and no doubt she's paid well. But it doesn't take a Freudian to see that she's killing male authority figures, over and over.
Male authority figures. He knows his research will attract her attention, and he hasn't tried to hide his tracks; he wants her to see him, he's courting her, drawing her into their own dance, circling around one other. He doesn't believe she will shoot him before they've talked. She owes him that much curiosity for his interest, for the effort he's put into tracing her career. And she's beginning to flirt with him. Odd items arrive by post: a postcard, inscribed "Sic Semper", from the Ford Theatre in Washington; an invitation to a photographic exhibition, including some of Anne Vasey's work. Mycroft went to the exhibition, but she wasn't there.
Then, finally, two photographs in an envelope. One shows a single row of wooden chairs with rounded arms and padded seats, stretching to the end of a long room, the Long Room. Having identified Lord's, he quickly recognises the second as the clock tower on ground's north corner - captured at night, the time illuminated by a floodlight: ten o'clock.
He orders a car to St John's Wood for half past nine.
Mycroft approaches the Lord's Pavilion from the pitch, making his way through the members' seating, like a batsman at the end of his innings. He has brought a couple of tools in case he needs to force the door, but finds it swings open at his touch. He looks around the darkened Long Room, which appears to be empty, apart from the ghosts of famous cricketers that hang on the walls, along with eighteenth or nineteenth-century children posing with bats. So he seats himself in one of the chairs, and gazes out at the pitch, until he hears soft footsteps and she sits down beside him.
"I'm sorry," he says quietly.
She laughs. "You're sorry?"
"Your father. I was about to investigate. But we should have caught him sooner."
"What was it to you?"
"On a practical level, it made him a security risk." Paul Vasey's death had saved him from having to launch an inquiry. At the funeral, he had tried to read the story in the girl's defiant shoulders: holding herself together as the ordeal drew to a close, certainly, but was the ordeal her father's sudden death, or the years spent living in his house? No matter, it had ceased to be Mycroft's business, or so he had thought. Now he knows he should not have left that loose end.
"Ah, security." She nods. "The national interest."
"It's not too late for you to join this side of the fight."
She laughs again, louder. "You're planning to make an honest woman of me?"
"Not honest, exactly. That can be a handicap. But you could act for the greater good. You're worth so much more than a common mercenary, or a blinkered fanatic."
"You think that's what I am now?"
"No. I think you're killing the same man, again and again. But you'll never be satisfied, because it's not him. He died of natural causes, didn't he?"
She bites her lip. "I had plans. I would have done it. But I spent too long steeling myself - I wasn't expecting him to drop dead just like that. He didn't suffer."
"No. Justice wasn't done."
She snorts. "Don't tell me you're the dispenser of justice, Mr Holmes. You're no better than anyone I've worked for." She rises to her feet, a gun in her hand.
"Ah. So you're not going to waste your chance, this time. Out of curiosity, is this business, or just the end of the dance?"
"No. This is between ourselves. The only way it can end."
The shot deafens him for a moment, delaying the realisation that it's her body that's contorting and falling. He jumps up, trying to catch her, to save her from hitting the floor too hard. He holds her as she gasps up blood, and feels it spraying his jacket. It doesn't last long. She dies in his arms.
"How unexpectedly sentimental of you, brother mine."
Mycroft looks up at the woman standing under the portrait of W.G. "I don't recall inviting you. To what do I owe the honour?"
"Perhaps I'm sentimental too. After all, what would Mummy have said if I'd let a strange woman put a bullet in you?"
He lays Anne Vasey's body down, and stands. "And perhaps you're working for somebody who didn't want her talking about a job she'd done for them."
The woman grins. "Could be both. You never give up, do you?"
"Give up what?"
"Trying for recruits. You must be desperate if you've moved on from siblings to your own assassin."
He sighs. "It was worth trying. For your information, I'm wearing a bullet-proof vest."
"You haven't put on as much weight as I thought, then. But not much use if she shot you in the head."
The doors bang, and the Long Room fills with armed police, most of them shouting "Drop the gun!" She does.
"Is this her?"
"Good evening, Inspector MacKinnon. This is Grace Holmes. I suggest you arrest her for the murder of Anne Vasey, who's the one on the floor."
"You wouldn't!" says his sister.
"Yes, I would. Goodbye, Grace."
He sits down again as they march her out. Soon an ambulance will come for the dead woman. For a few minutes, however, they are alone. She was right; their odd courtship could only end with one of them dead. But for a short while, perhaps, both of them had felt a little more alive.
He leans down and whispers: "We should have danced."
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.