Philadelphia

[willow_41z]

Title: Philadelphia
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the BBC's characters or plots.
Word Count: 848
Warnings: Blood, mild gore, violent onscreen death and cavalier attitudes towards it
Summary: Two colleagues, a loose end, and an empty house.
Beta: lastwordy-mcgee.livejournal.com/

Her boss hated to travel. He preferred to orbit between his flat and his office, with occasional unavoidable side trips to other parts of the city to deal with missing documents, work stoppages, and family problems. She'd never known him to travel farther than the M25, even in times of extreme crises. He'd videoconferenced for the Copenhagen summit, and sent her to New York to deal with the British Petroleum problem.

Still, some things had to be handled personally. Hence her presence in the deserted house just outside of Leicester.

She brushed a piece of debris from her sleeve. A new message popped up on her mobile, followed by two more. She glanced at the sender, dismissed them without reading them, and shifted position to make herself more comfortable against the wall. Blood trickled down her chin from her lip; she felt in her blazer for her handkerchief before remembering. Leaving it outside, over the dead man's face, had seemed the decent thing to do at the time, but now she wished she'd kept it. She blotted the blood with the back of her hand. She'd underestimated him, the first time they'd met, and had the months-old scars to prove it. She'd learned from that, learned to regard with the proper respect a man three stone heavier and a head taller than her, with ten years of military training to boot. Their first meeting had apparently not had the same effect on his respect for her. The second meeting had fixed that.

Another message; she dismissed it, and adjusted her position again, wiping sweaty palms on her skirt before picking up her mobile again. There: footsteps, too light to be familiar. She slid her mobile into the pocket of her blazer as she straightened. The door opened, someone ran inside, and then slowed immediately. She ducked around the corner.

“Seb?” A light tenor voice. The footsteps came closer as she listened, crossing into the hall... “Seb.”

“He's not coming,” she called down the stairs, and ducked as a bullet thudded into the wall above her head before she'd finished speaking. She circled round the landing, leaned out, aimed carefully, and fired twice. The first missed; the second hit his arm.

He cried out, the gun clattered to the floor-- and then the front door closed. Heavier footsteps advanced across the front room. She leaned around the corner, cautiously, just far enough to see the silhouette below. The newcomer paused magisterially in the doorway, and looked round. “Hello,” he said pleasantly.

She couldn't see the other man, but she heard rustling below, cloth on wood, and she went to the back window to watch the exit, tensing-- if she knew he almost certainly had another weapon, then surely her boss did, but--

“My name is Mycroft Holmes,” he continued. Then, a single gunshot. She recognized the caliber, and relaxed.

She waited a moment, then another, before coming down the stairs, gun still in hand just in case. When she entered the back room, her boss was straightening up from crouching near the body on the floor. In his right hand was a gun. He turned and regarded her carefully. “Any problems?”

She holstered her own gun. Objectively speaking, the amount of blood was relatively small, but the mess on the floor still turned her stomach. “I see why you keep lackeys to do this. I wouldn't want to make a practice of it,” she admitted, her voice not quite steady.

He frowned, as if puzzling over a neat academic problem. “Quite,” he agreed, his own voice perfectly even. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, glanced down at the floor, and handed it to her. She wiped her mouth gingerly, and touched a tentative hand to her ribs; she'd have bruises there, soon.

His eyebrows went up. “Shall we?” he indicated the door. They turned their backs on the body, and left the house.

She texted the local constabulary, notifying them of the address, and Mycroft's own people, who were waiting about five minutes up the M1. Then she opened her inbox, scrolling through a series of increasingly angry and desperate messages from Dr John Watson. Where is he? What happened? I heard the shots and the explosion. Where? WHERE? If you don't tell me what happened I'm going to take apart every A&E in the city looking for him. What was troubling was not the content, but the five-minute silence since the last one. She switched to another window, this one a live video feed from a hospital room, trained on an abraded, burned, unconscious figure; a number of monitors were conveniently turned toward the camera. She studied it, and tilted it so her boss could see the screen. One eyebrow arched delicately, and he nodded, once; the thin lines on his face became slightly, almost imperceptibly, less sharp.

Sherlock alive, expected to remain so, she texted back. Sending driver now, eta 3 min. Link to live video feed to follow. She hesitated, then added: James Moriarty dead.