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It’s pissing rain and midnight when he shows up at her door. He’s soaked through, limping again, and she can tell with one look that he hasn’t slept properly in weeks (she’d be willing to put money down that she could guess precisely when his sleeping troubles started).
Ok, he says and she doesn’t need to ask what he’s agreeing to. On one condition, he adds and she gives him a grim smile.
She knows the look in his eyes. Recognises it from years ago, after their Da died and Ma began her crusade. Her final mission. There’s only one thing that would bring her brother here with that look in his eyes, that would drive him back into the arms of his family, and nothing he would think to ask of her in this state is something she wouldn’t willingly give him.
She stands back and holds the door open to show acceptance of his terms.
She agrees because, even as the mere shell that he’s become, he is her brother (and no one is allowed to hurt what is hers) and because Moriarty (even dead) had gotten to be a thorn in her side and this sounds like a good reason to destroy him (not that she really needs a reason, but she’s found it’s usually best to have one).
He gasps quietly at her acceptance and the tension drains from his shoulders. She wonders if, perhaps, he honestly thought she would say no. She wouldn’t. There is very little she would deny him if he’d only ask. She grabs his arm and pulls him into a hug as he finally comes in off the porch and into the entryway. Their family has never been one for the touchy-feely side of things but he always has taken after Ma.
It’s uncomfortable. He clings to her just a little too tightly as though she’s his only lifeline (perhaps she is, he was never one for many friends and the one true friend she’d seen him make their entire lives has thrown himself off a building) and his breath condensates on her neck where he’s gasping away tears he refuses to let fall.
She allows the akward moment to go on for a minute or so before she guides him to the couch and disappears to the kitchen to make tea. She’s almost certain he knows she added something to it but he drinks the whole thing down so perhaps he simply chalks it up to her milk having gone slightly off.
It doesn’t really matter either way, he needs the sleep and she doesn’t need the distraction.
x-x-x-x-x
She starts with Kitty Riley.
She is first not because of her importance, but because her retribution will take time (that is not to say that Harry couldn’t destroy the woman completely with a snap of her fingers, Kitty’s retribution takes time because Harry desires it so). Kitty will watch her world crumble around her slowly and have no power to stop it. She will suffer as John’s Sherlock suffered as her fame becomes her downfall.
It starts subtle, because it certainly doesn’t take much to get this ball rolling, a whispered word in the right ear. A reminder of Kitty’s infamous fact checking (or, more accurately, lack thereof) and her tendency to twist and omit the truth for a better story. She’s a liability, Harry whispers and the seed has been planted now she just needs to leave it be to grow for a while.
The Chief Superintendent is next. His nose is “accidently” re-broken in a break in at his flat. It will never heal quite right. He will also likely end up with sinus problems and possibly migraines. These are unexpected consequences but not wholly unwelcome. She isn’t quite finished with the Chief Superintendent, but this is as far as her plan requires her to go for now.
John had wanted to be the one to do the breaking (breaking in, breaking of his nose) but Harry is adamant. He asked for her help and so she will but he cannot be directly involved in this because it will lead back to him and to her.
She will not risk everything for such a small player.
He is on the other side of town getting drunk and into a bit of a bar fight when the break in occurs... Just to be safe she makes sure a reporter or two happens to be in the bar that night. With her help the press are gearing up to paint him as the grieving widow instead of the sucked-in sidekick. Harry can’t help but wonder how inaccurate it actually is.
With the superintendent out of the way, it isn’t hard to get an inquiry started over Sherlock’s death. Prove he was real, John had asked her. The evidence won’t point that way, Moriarty will have made sure of that... But you can change it back, can’t you? She can’t. Well, technically there’s a slim chance she could (in this age of computers very little is unrecoverable), but it’s quicker and easier just to make up new evidence. She’s just as good, if not better, than Moriarty at faking evidence.
A week after John comes to her, John is kidnapped by the elder Holmes brother which, while not wholly unexpected, is far sooner than accounted for. Kitty Reilly has only just begun to feel the heat from the fire Harry has built under her and the inquiry into Sherlock’s death has only just begun.
The superintendent has mysteriously been transferred (and much as she would like to take the credit for this one, she can’t and assumes this is the elder Holmes at play). It’s a promotion, they’ve told him (which is utter codswallop) especially since he now has at least three people watching him for any sign of being dirty. Harry debates whether it would be better to let him dig his own grave (because he will undoubtedly, even without her help... he has it written all over if you know what to look for) or whether she should help the process along a bit.
She descides against it though (at least for the time being). If the elder Holmes is onto her (or, more accurately, onto John which will eventually lead to her), she needs to limit her influence a bit until he backs off.
But, as it turns out, he hasn’t made the connection between John and the goings-on in Kitty’s life and the Yard. He is simply warning John about the assassins and hitmen that never moved out after Sherlock’s death.
John brings the list to Harry and she disposes of the ones that aren’t hers (moved in as a reaction to Moriarty’s game, left there to protect John and his landlady). Mrs. Turner’s “married ones” aren’t on the list but that’s hardly a surprize, not even John knows about them. Derik and Carl lived there long before even Sherlock moved in... It was just pure coincidence that the flat he was looking to share just happened to be next door to her two right hands.
A happy coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
She offers to destroy the elder Holmes as well but mainly just to see what John will do. She is hesitant to actually go through with the offer. It’s doable, it could possibly even pose a challenge (which she would enjoy), but the consequences stretch beyond her ability to predict and control. She knows better than to do something so drastic without careful, careful planning first.
John must understand this, she decides, because he shakes his head. No, he tells her, Not yet, anyway.
Harry arranges for Mrs. Hudson to win a trip. A transatlantic cruise (packed with some of Harry’s squeaky clean minions that will show as nothing but other passengers on Holmes’ check) that ends with several weeks touring the Bahamas from the boat. All paperwork shows John getting on the boat with her. The landlady can barely work a computer and doesn’t own a cell phone, even if she could she’s far too practical to pay the exorbitant fees for phone or internet time for anything less than an emergency.
It will be a month before anyone notices John is not where he should be.
It is when John has been disappeared off the face of the earth and, more importantly, Holmes’ surveillance that the real work can begin.
Harry absorbs parts of his empire into hers but for the most part she and John dismantle everything. She has long had plans in place to destroy Moriarty’s empire, sleeper cells that can be triggered with a simple phone call, text, or email, but she activates none of them. She remembers all too well what happened when Ma’s crusade ended. How she wound up in a grave next to Da by her own hand.
Harry has no desire to bury John so she draws his crusade out. Prolonging the time the grave beside Sherlock’s remains empty. She won’t be able to maintain this indefinitely (John will become suspicious if nothing else) but she’s calculated that if she limits the resources she dedicates to the endeavour and dismantles Moriarity’s empire piece by piece, it could take years.
Three to five if she goes about it the right way, longer if she allows them to build pieces back up.
But she is surprised to find that while they work from one side, someone else seems to be working from the other. It exponentially reducing the time it will take. There are fewer people to run to, to hide with, and it has the added benefit of turning them against each other. They’ve taken her carefully planned three-to-five-plus years and reduced them to one at best.
Harry finds herself with no idea who it is on the other side of their two pronged attack. It’s not the elder Holmes, she knows that, but a Holmes is the only one capable of this (well, besides a Watson).
It is when they find Irene Addler alive that she suspects. She doesn’t tell John. If she is wrong it will break him and he is already far too broken for her liking.
It is when people realize John is missing and the mysterious other side disappears that she knows.
Sherlock Holmes is alive.
All it takes is a few texts, emails, and phone calls for the remnants of Moriarty’s empire crumble overnight.
There are stragglers of course, the leaders left behind were well protected and she couldn’t get to the highest of the high. She has a name though.
Sebastian Moran: the sniper that held her brother in his crosshairs, not once, but twice.
John is still sleeping off the drugged tea she’s had to give him at least every other day. He knows she’s drugging him, he has to. Her brother is not stupid, in fact he’s far smarter than most people give him credit for (a mistake Harry will never make again after he managed to sneak off to Afghanistan and get himself shot outside the reach of her protection, she has tendrils of power worldwide but there’s only so much even she can do in a warzone).
So no, he knows that the tea is drugged but when she offers him the pills outright he won’t take them. He offers no reason and she doesn’t really ask, though she can’t think of any way for this make sense. She supposes he probably has reasons that make sense, if only to him. Sentiment.
But his drugged sleep makes it easier on her. She’s able to get him loaded into the backseat of a car and he wakes up on the three hour drive to Cardiff. She leaves a trail (for the other side of their two-pronged attack) that shows both she and John were kidnapped by Sebastian. He will follow them to Cardiff.
John is the one with Sebastian in his gunsights this time, though he uses a pistol. A Sig, though not the one that he used to kill the cabby. Don’t monologue, she tells him. It’s the biggest mistake you see in movies, the one that always allows the other side to get the upper hand at the last second. Not that she hasn’t account for it, but there’s always the chance she missed something and she’d rather not run the risk.
It doesn’t occur to her that he might not quite have believed her when she told him his Sherlock wasn’t dead. That he might have figured it was a way to keep him going after his crusade was over. He remembers Ma as well.
She sees a moment too late that he plans to make it a fight to the death. She cares little for Sebastian, but its easy enough to tell that he’s quite happy to oblige. His Jim is gone just as John thinks his Sherlock is.
Sebastian is killed by a crackshot somewhere to her left (three taps: chest, chest, head) and she catches a glimpse of a tall, thin figure figure breaking into a run from the alleyway as he lowers his own gun.
She melts into the shadows then, slipping away from them. John is injured but not badly and she does not wish to intrude on their reunion.
She’s rather looking forward to the black eye Sherlock Holmes will undoubtedly be sporting the next time she sees him.