A/N: And so I delve into the sad and mushy! I was curious to write a story on Mary Watson, mainly for two reasons: 1) She will have an extremely interesting take on Holmes, knowing more about him than anyone except for her husband, but without any of John Watson's starry-eyed-ness, and 2) She's the single canonical character that I (and other people? c'mon, other people?) have always desperately wished would die in an excess of unendurable pain. Or maybe just go away and not be married to Watson any more. It's not a dislike of her personally... it's just that Holmes and Watson are so much fun, and it's their relationship that is interesting, and she, incredibly nice about it though she was, was always in the way of that.

Since she really doesn't deserve that kind of enmity, I thought I'd try to dispell it. So, in the interests of not judging a person until I have walked a mile in their shoes (or written a story from their POV, as the case may be), here is this.

Enjoy! (and, of course, tell me what you think!)

The Deserters

The room was bare and harsh, and the terrible uncertainty that it had held but not bounded for all of its life as a room seemed to have been ground into the floor by decades of pacing feet, and into the worn arms of the uncomfortable chairs by decades of fidgeting hands. At other times of day, perhaps, or other days, crowds of the waiting and fearful might have made the horror bearable, by bouncing it back and forth between them through the tense air, relieving just a little their various single-minded consciousnesses of what news the next doctor that came through the swinging doors might bring. But today, the horror was still and heavy, and compacted into a single throbbing hailstone in a single stomach, under a single aching chest. Today, Mary Watson was alone.

The door swung. It confused her a moment, for the only door in her mind was the door that led into the rest of the hospital, and the surgery where John was living or dying. But no, this was the outer door, that let in the real world, where the phantasms were transparent, and the snowy wind diverted her roiling thoughts.

It was a man, who hardly paused to pound his snowy feet on the threshold before he had her by the shoulders and had torn her from her seat. He was shouting down at her, and the dark bags under his eyes were more than the contortion of his expression. He was wild and angry, and she knew she would sooth her own fears by comforting him, even before she knew it was John that he was asking about, or recognized that he was Sherlock Holmes.

"No, he's in surgery. No—nothing yet."

The room stopped jarring as he released his grip. He was silent now, and his long, thin face had smoothed into its recognizable lineaments, though the mouth was tighter, and the eyebrows were creased. She took him by the elbows and pushed him down into a chair. Perhaps he did not need it—he was the last person to need such a thing—but he shared her fear, and if he let her allay it in him, it might lessen it in her. She sat beside him and took his hands. He frowned at the gesture. It was unwelcome and it confused him. She let it. Better to be offended in company than to hold this fear alone.

"Mr. Holmes… what happened? Last night he was… was he with you?"

Holmes let out his breath between his teeth. "I lost track of him. They told me they had found him miles away from where we had been, that he was beaten badly, that they could not tell me whether he would live."

"They could not tell me any more than that either. I think I have been here for hours."

"I am… sorry." He was looking through hooded eyes at the snow collecting on the windowsill, and his voice was no warmer than that.

Mary frowned at him. In a way, in a thousand ways, all of this was his fault. If he had been more careful, he might have protected John better. If he had not called on her and John that night… If John had never known him at all…

But if John were not friends with Holmes, she would never have met him—No, it was more than that. If John were not friends with Holmes, the even plod of the general practitioner making his rounds would never be punctuated by sudden leaps and bounces. If John were not friends with Holmes, the boyish sparkle in his eyes when he ran up the stairs and took her in his arms after a long day of work would not have stayed there, month after month, year after year. She could kindle the spark, but adventure and danger were the feeding source of it. John had said it of Holmes one night, that sometimes he wished that he could end the peril, take him away from it, but that immediately after thinking so, he always knew that he could not do it. That if he had been offered that one boon, to keep his best friend from danger forever, he would refuse it. "To take Holmes away from danger," John had said, "would be to kill him even more surely than all the bullets they could fire at him." And with Holmes it was quite obviously true. John had told her of the bullets in the wall, the depression, the cocaine. But it was true of John as well, that he could not fade into the safe dullness of a doctor's life, without losing something precious. And so she would embrace him, and not think of how it might be the last time, but concentrate on the fact that what she loved needed danger, and needed her to wait, and be patient, and try not to be afraid.

The detective's cold, narrow face was frozen in profile to her, still staring at the window. A shudder had begun in one of the muscles of his cheeks, but otherwise, all was still. She pictured John's warm, brown eyes. He loves him too.

A change in her expression must have caught Holmes' eye, because he looked at her and scowled. She knew too well the strain they were both under to be intimidated by the look. She returned it levelly and calmly.

"I do not blame you, Mr. Holmes, whatever that is worth, whatever… happens."

Holmes leaped up and began to pace. "Six men in plain sight, five shadowy areas likely to hide more, estimate room for concealment of about ten. Leader on the left. Angry, drunk—more clumsy, but more willing to kill, and, I think, able. His leadership is not secure—they may not follow his orders, but it does not matter much in this case. They all want us out.

"They rush behind us first, cut off our escape, drive us into the center, where they can see us, where there is no cover. It is only Watson and I. We stand back to back, at first, but that breaks up when the fighting starts. I should see that we are being drawn apart, but I do not. I keep fighting, though I cannot see him. I blew the whistle long before, but no one has come. I can fight them all, but I cannot keep them all in the room, and I cannot see Watson. There are footsteps in the hall. The brigands rush to the windows, and I cannot stop them all. Watson is gone by the time Lestrade is in the room."

"Mr. Holmes, you do not have to—"

"Have you seen him?"

"Yes."

"They would not let me in."

"I could not judge the extent of it. Married to a doctor, yet I do not know the signs to look for, I cannot tell which mark is something vital, or which is nothing!

"Do you observe the doctors when they speak to us, Mr. Holmes? Never mind—you must. I could not read the signs in blood, but I have seen eyes that can.

"Mr. Holmes, there is not much hope in them."

Holmes had stopped pacing, and stood obliquely to her, with his brooding eyes on her face. Mary fancied she could read the look. 'I could have judged the extent of the injuries, yet they would not let me in. The only person that matters in the world is dying, and I cannot know it. Who is this girl that she is shown what they will not show me, that she is told hours before I am, that she stand between him and I at the end if the end comes, and have a right to it? The adventure was my doing, my comrade in arms fell, the guilt is mine, and she will have the last look.' Mary covered her nose and mouth with her hands as a few hot tears cascaded over her fingers. She would not cover her eyes, for it was not yet the time for crying, and if she concealed them she would lose her last incentive to stem the flow.

She heard halting footsteps, and felt Holmes bend down before her. The blacks and greys and pale flesh tone of his figure swam and ran together through her wet eyes. His hands were on her shoulders, gently, this time. She wiped the tears away hurriedly, and saw his face more clearly. His resentment was tempered with something like concern. She hesitated a moment, then embraced him.

He started at the contact, and wriggled awkwardly, before he found a position on the back of her shoulders where his hands could hover without actually resting. He did not mold to fit a hug as John did, but stood stiffly, with too many angles, and spine and shoulder blades protruded against the back of his jacket. His breath hissed in her ear, and she could smell nothing but tobacco. Mary gave another squeeze, then let him go.

Holmes backed away and sat down in a chair facing her, with his hand steepled and his eyes mistrustful. She almost blushed that she had made him so awkward, but decided again that embarrassment was preferable to unmitigated fear and sorrow.

A cough she had been suppressing for a while rose up in her chest and shook her with its force. As the shudder lessened and the pain receded to the normal dull ache, she saw Holmes start up rigidly. She kept the handkerchief at her lips turned away from him, but even the surreptitiousness of that gesture seemed to startle him, and he examined her with his piercing eyes, as he had neglected to do when he first entered. She knew he saw it then, the perspiration on her forehead, the reddish tinge to her teeth and handkerchief.

Holmes jumped up and pulled her to her feet, holding her wrists at arms length as he looked her up and down, as if there were some key point there that would make all the rest of it untrue. She could see the thoughts darting through his pale eyes, unguarded for once: 'Does he know? He must know.' Then: 'How can you do this to him?' And finally, with terrible pain: 'Why did he not tell me? Why did I not read it in him?' And resignedly, Mary suspected that she knew jealousy well enough to know that there would be a little satisfaction when he took his best friend back to him, as chronicler, fellow-adventurer, probably roommate. Mary managed a slight smile.

"You will take care of him for me, after?"

Holmes was still searching wildly. "It may not be for a long—" His eyes slowed and traced the outline of her abdomen carefully. She started, and blushed; even John did not know yet. She had not known that it showed at all.

He sat her back down in the chair very carefully, and looked grave. "You will not survive a child, I think," he said in a low voice.

"I know. That is why I ask you to—"

"No!" He was nearly shouting, and more outwardly afraid than she had yet seen him.

"You are the only other person close to him! You must stay with him, or who will he have?"

"I cannot!" Holmes grasped his thinning hair in one hand and gnawed the nails of the other.

"Where will you be, that you cannot be with him?"

The grasping and the chewing slowed to a halt, and Holmes' long hands fell to his mouth, then rose to cover his entire face. He sank down beside her. After a long moment, he lowered his hands. His face was worn and harried, and suddenly terribly old. He began to speak in a very low voice.

"His name is Professor Moriarty. I am hunting him, but he is as clever as I am. He will kill me before the year is out. Much sooner, I think."

"You cannot know that."

"Perhaps not." But the admission had no hope in it. "Mary, thirty-seven years is not old for a man, but for a hunting hound such as I, it is ancient. I have been wearing thin in the work I have been doing, yet it is not in me to rest. Running Moriarty to the ground will kill me."

"And you will leave John alone."

"I know that."

Mary stared down at her lap. Holmes put his face in his hands again.

The door that led into the hospital opened, and a doctor emerged. "Mary Watson?" Two tense faces turned to him instantly.

Your husband will be fine." Mary leaped up, suffused with joy that, for the moment, no threat of impending doom could tarnish. She laughed aloud and wiped away a few silly tears of relief. She paused in her flight to John's bedside, to look down at Holmes, who was still seated.

The tension had gone out of him, and he seemed literally limp with relief, but the smile on his face did not change its age, or its harried look. He was looking up at Mary with an expression almost of awe. After a pause, he rose unsteadily, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

"Go to your husband, Mrs. Watson." Mary smiled a warm farewell, and hurried through the swinging doors, suddenly far less threatening. Holmes watched her leave, then made his own way out into the swirling snow.