Perseverance (4/7)
BBC Sherlock
Rating 15 (swearing, implicit slash)
Summary: Greg has Mycroft's number, but what will it take to make him phone it?
This was inspired by Second Skin's Persuasion, and started off as a prequel and remix of that. It has ended up much, much longer...
Note: The chronology of Series 2 is notoriously dodgy. This fic assumes that Scandal takes place in April 2010-Summer 2011, Hounds in Summer 2011 and Fall in Spring-Summer 2012. There are spoilers for Scandal and Hounds in later parts.
Betaed by the wonderful Small Hobbit.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The first time Greg phoned Mycroft was the day after the bomb squad got called to a swimming pool in east London. They found a bomb jacket there like the ones they'd been defusing recently, but no-one inside it. The pips bomber - Moriarty - had not quite struck again.
When Greg's furious texts finally got Sherlock to turn up at the Yard, John wasn't with him. Greg strongly suspected that meant Sherlock was planning some serious lying and didn't want a man with John's transparent face by his side when he did so.
"I haven't had any more phone calls from Moriarty," Sherlock said blandly. "Probably just lost interest, found some other game to play."
"He was counting down the Greenwich pips and there's still one left," Greg protested.
"Innumerate as well as destructive?" There was something slightly forced about Sherlock's quips today, not his usual reckless indifference about good taste. Greg scowled and wondered how far he could push Sherlock; he couldn't risk him going off in a strop if the bomber was still around. Maybe time to try one of the old tricks. Sometimes if you made enough stupid statements, Sherlock was prepared to tell you something, just to contradict you.
"Why would there be a bomb jacket at the pool if he wasn't going to use it? No sign of it being Moriarty's base, and we didn't find anything else significant there."
There was a momentary gleam in Sherlock's eyes which meant they'd missed some vital piece of evidence at the pool, but all he said was:
"Maybe Moriarty just mislaid it. Never leave your bomb unattended or it may be mistaken for a bag and removed and destroyed."
"Can't you just be helpful?" Greg snapped. He knew he shouldn't be losing his rag, but the last victim had been a kid, and Moriarty had blown up the old woman, and what the fuck was he up to now?
"Surely it's obvious about Moriarty?" Sherlock said. Greg put his head in his hands and didn't say anything, because you weren't supposed to beat up suspects now, let alone your own consultants. There was a long silence and then Sherlock went on:
"I solved his puzzles. Three out of five; four out of five if you count the Connie Prince murder, as I think we should. He wasn't going to win the game, so he's taken his ball and gone home. I'll let you know when I hear from him again, Lestrade, but for now, I have more urgent things to do."
Sherlock was up to something again. Well, if he couldn't get anything from him, there was only one option left. Once Sherlock had gone, Greg pulled out his phone. He had a nasty feeling as he did so that somehow the contents of his trouser pockets had shifted. Shit, he'd probably let Sherlock near enough him to lift something, hadn't he? A quick check didn't turn up anything missing, but that meant nothing. There was something wrong, and it would doubtless come back to bite him sooner or later.
***
An uninterested Sloany-sounding woman on Mycroft's number told him that Mycroft was currently out of the country, so Greg didn't expect him to turn up that afternoon at Scotland Yard, striding into the room and enquiring briskly what the problem was.
"Trying case, I take it?" Mycroft said, looking Greg up and down. "And very disruptive to family life, doubtless."
Mycroft looked tired but calm, buttoned up in his smart suit as usual. Greg abruptly realised that he looked a complete mess. Angie's recent good mood hadn't survived him getting a big case right at the start of the Easter holidays, mucking up all her plans. She'd taken her resentment out on his clothes: his shirt today looked like it had been left crumpled in a ball for a week, and then briefly rolled in mud. And either Angie had also managed to shrink his trousers in the wash or he was putting on weight. He supposed it wasn't surprising what a week surviving on doughnuts and takeaways would do.
Sod it, he told himself, it didn't matter. Mycroft had a job to do and so did he.
"How much have you heard?" he asked. "You lot always want to know about terrorists, don't you? Though I don't know whether this nutter counts or not. His name's Moriarty and he's been strapping bombs onto people and getting Sherlock to solve crimes for him."
It wasn't a terribly coherent summary of the case, he supposed, but Mycroft just nodded and said:
"We believe we've located the man."
"Thank God!" Greg said, slumping down in his chair. And then reality kicked in hard. If Mycroft had something the Met could actually use, he'd have brought it to him before now.
"Is there anything we can charge him with?" he asked.
"You'd be sued for wrongful arrest if you did so. I assure you, now we know how seriously this young man should be taken, we will be keeping a very close eye on him. But his operational methods make him very hard to connect directly to any particular crime."
"So what's he up to now? Is he...is he gonna be back?"
"I suspect so," Mycroft said, and he smiled a tired smile. "But not, I believe, in the immediate future. His interests seem to be turning overseas. A matter for the Service, rather than the police. So I think for now, it's time for you to take a break. Go home and rest, Greg. Leave Moriarty - and Sherlock - for another day."
***
The second time Greg phoned Mycroft was in the summer, a few hours after his wife had said she was leaving him.
Well, in theory Angie wasn't leaving him. She was just taking the kids off to France for the summer holidays. Her parents had retired there - he could almost hear his Nan's ghost saying "England not good enough for them?" - and Angie wanted "a proper visit". Six weeks in a village in Provence, sunshine, a swimming pool, and satellite TV so Cathy wouldn't miss her favourite soaps. The last holiday they'd have as a family, she said, before Paul went off to university. And then, the night before her and the kids were due to fly out, she dropped the bombshell.
"You know you always say it's a nightmare trying to arrange leave in the school holidays?" she said as Greg got the suitcases down. He winced, because Personnel were being obstructive, and he still hadn't got confirmation about when he'd be able to join them.
"I think you shouldn't bother coming this time," Angie went on, folding up T-shirts. "Mum and Dad can help entertain Cathy, and the other two will be fine with just me there."
"Are you saying you don't want me to come at all?" he said. "I thought...I mean obviously I can't be there for the whole six weeks, but I still reckon I can manage ten days or so."
Angie had smiled a sweet, nervous smile then, and said, "I just want to have a proper chance to be with Paul, not have him drag you off all the time to go and play sport. And I need some time on my own as well, to think about things."
"What things?" he asked, and it came out hostile, angry. Well, didn't he have a right to be pissed off about this?
"I'm forty-five, Greg," Angie said, in a tight voice, "and Paul's leaving home, and in a few years all three of them will be gone. I need to work out what to do next, think about what I want to do."
Not what we want to do, he noticed. But he could see the warning signs in Angie's face, and he knew if he pushed it, it'd make things worse. They'd get into another of the horrendous arguments they'd been having recently. Maybe it would help things if they had some time apart.
"OK," he said, "if that's what you really want. But if you change your mind, I wouldn't mind coming down. I like your parents, and I always enjoy a bit of la belle France."
The smile Angie gave him then reminded him of why he used to love her, and he thought for a moment he might be making the right decision.
By the evening, it had sunk in properly and he speed-dialled the number he had stored as "M" on his phone. But when the phone was answered by an underling, he put it down. Because was he really bloody paranoid enough to ask someone to run a surveillance operation on his own wife?
***
"What do you reckon?" he asked Sally, the next day, when they were sitting around in his office, not getting anywhere with the backlog of paperwork. "What's Angie up to?"
"You say she's hasn't been over to France for several years," Sally replied thoughtfully. "So it's unlikely she's involved with a local. A stranger would stick out in the village, and she'd hardly want her parents and her kids around if she was having an affair."
"And did I do the right thing?" He knew he wasn't going to get any sensible advice from any of the blokes he knew, but he was bit short on women to ask about Angie. And Sally might be fairly crap at relationships, but at least she was fairly crap in a different way from him.
"If she was saying don't go, then don't go. Nothing pisses me off more than a bloke who doesn't pay attention to what I say."
"But why doesn't she want me there? And is she actually gonna come back at the end of the holidays?" Greg said.
"You really think she's planning to leave you? I didn't think it was that bad," Sally said. "I thought it was just the ordinary bit-fed-up-with-marriage stuff."
"I don't know," Greg said, staring at a print-out of performance indicators and wondering if he could go and staple it to someone's head. "I don't know what she's thinking. I dunno what's happening any more."
"If you two aren't happy together..." Sally began.
"That's not the point," Greg said. "I mean I suppose it is, but it's just...I can't imagine Angie not being there. We've been married for twenty years. It's gotta mean something, hasn't it?"
"Maybe she can't imagine what it's like, either," Sally said slowly. And then she paused and said, "You know Dave's wife went away for a week last month?"
Oh shit. I show you my relationship mess and you show me yours. He didn't want to hear about what Sally had been getting up to with Anderson.
"Yeah?"
"We thought we could...you know, have some fun together." Sally was looking through Greg now, not at him, and her hands were clenching into fists. "But by five days in, Dave was going crazy. He got drunk and curled up in his bed and wouldn't talk to me, because I wasn't Natalie. He can't stand her half the time when she's around, he cheats on her, and yet he's away from her for a few days and it's like someone's cutting chunks out of him with a blunt knife."
"And that's your idea of fun?"
"No," Sally replied. "It's over. I know I've said that before, but this time I mean it."
"Do you need me to get Anderson reassigned?" Greg said wearily.
"No, it's OK, sir," Sally said, and suddenly she was DS Donovan again, his right-hand woman. "We can work together still, maybe even be friends. Just...not do anything stupid. Anyhow, that's not what I meant. What I meant was maybe if your wife has some time away, she'll realise that she still cares about you. Six weeks is a long time, Greg. Maybe she'll realise she doesn't want to wreck things just because you're going through a bad patch."
"Maybe," he said, and wished that he knew what he actually wanted to happen by September.
***
Greg sat at home on the long summer evenings and waited for being alone to hit him. The way it had apparently hit Anderson. But however much he missed the kids - and God, it was quiet without them around - he couldn't seem to miss Angie the way he should. When she was around, he never knew what to say to her now, anyhow. The stilted phone-calls he did make to France reminded him of just how little she was interested in his life. And he wasn't sure that lying alone in their double bed was any worse than lying next to a woman who didn't seem to want him touching her any more.
He found himself wondering pointlessly when and where it had all gone wrong, as if he could somehow go back and change things. If Angie hadn't had to give up her job as an assistant stage manager in the West End when Paul was born; if he'd got the promotions he'd gone for. If she hadn't had such a bad time when Cathy was a kid and not sleeping properly.
If he'd only realised back in Weston all those years ago that he didn't have what it took to make Angie happy. He'd still never quite worked out what would. You saw someone and you knew they were the one for you, and somehow a few years down the line you realised that it was all much more difficult than that.
Well, it was too late now, wasn't it, to try and fix things? Sally had kept her mouth shut, but it was hard to fool a whole bunch of nosy detectives. His colleagues had worked out what was going on about his holiday and made the obvious deduction. No-one had actually come out and asked if his marriage was over, but they were all clearly gearing themselves up to be sympathetic. Little Molly at the morgue had been the most tactless, as usual: telling him earnestly that she was his friend, and if he ever needed help, any kind of help, he knew where to come.
It was oddly refreshing after that to be with Sherlock, who had obviously decided that Greg's failing marriage was old news and completely irrelevant. And John was so busy rushing after Sherlock that he didn't have time to do more than grin sympathetically at Greg and apologise for the latest scrape they'd got themselves into. And then go off and update his blog. John's blog didn't seem like a joke now, something for the Yard to snigger at, for all the post titles were still terrible. It was starting to get Sherlock noticed, just like Mycroft said it might.
Mycroft. Greg found himself thinking about him sometimes as he lay on his own at night. Even wondered if he should try and get in touch. But what did he say? What was there between them after all, other than a fumble in a car a year ago? His marriage was breaking down, he was officially crap at relationships and he wanted to stumble into something else? Stupid even to think of it. Far better to wait and see what was left when the dust settled. When Angie didn't come back.
***
It was raining the day Angie and the kids came back to England, and the flight was late, and there didn't seem to be time for most of the evening to do more than face enquiries about whether they had enough bread and lamentations over the fact that Paul had left his favourite shirt in France. But then at last Angie and Greg were in bed, and he rolled over and looked at her and said, "Well? You said you needed time to think."
She looked sadly at him, her dark eyes suspiciously gleaming and he waited for her to tell him it was over, for the blow to fall at last. But she shook her head, and muttered, "I can't...I can't just run away from all of this, can I? This is where I belong; I have to try and make it work." And then she was crying and he held her to him, and realised after a while that he was crying too. He tried to believe it was from happiness, but he knew it wasn't. There was no easy way out from the mess they were in.
It meant that the next time he saw Mycroft he still had a marriage that wasn't quite dead on his hands. As well as an extremely dead CIA agent.