The six months immediately following the event that reporters still insisted, on slow days, on calling ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, were months during which Sebastian had been anything but idle.
He’d allowed himself exactly thirty days to – lose his shit, or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it (not ‘mourn’, never ‘mourn’); this month, the first month, had been typified by too much drink, no work, and a series of increasingly poor decisions that culminated in the oily black smoke rising from the Conduit Street flat being visible for miles in each direction.
He hadn’t even bothered to run when the fire department came screaming in; he’d merely sauntered away from the wreck of the place he’d once called home, completely ignored by emergency personnel.
On the thirty-first day, Sebastian had awoken in the shabby bedsit where he’d turned up the night prior with a rucksack and a wad of cash, showered, shaved away the beginnings of a beard, dressed in freshly-laundered clothes for the first time in too long, and set to work with the calm air of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
Stalingrad. Prague. A series of unconfirmed sightings in the Balkans.
Holmes.
Alive.
Unacceptable.
It was all the incentive he could have asked for; Holmes yet lived. He needed to find him. He needed information, and he had a fairly good idea of where to find it. An admittedly impressive display of hacking, a handful of codes, three silenced rounds and some judicious bribery later, he strode with perfect confidence, smiling faintly, into the very heart of British political power. Not Downing Street, nor the palace, no. The real centre of things.
He lowered himself slowly into the vacant chair, made a great show of taking his time shifting to make himself comfortable, and met the eye of none other than Mycroft Holmes.
“Tell me,” he directed calmly, “where your brother is, Mister Holmes.”
