Pieces of a chess game [Sherlock x Harry Potter Crossover] [COMPLETE]

Chapter 24: The Lying Detective part II

'Hermione, love, I know this is hard for everyone, but you need to come home,' begged Mrs Hudson. It was the fourth message her landlady left in her voice mail, and Hermione had to bite her lips to stop the tears from welling up in her eyes. 'And Sherlock! He's trashed the place, and that weird boy with the crazy eyes has been here almost every day for the past week! Please, call me back when you hear this message.'

Hermione sniffled and deleted the message, just as she had done with Molly's, and slipped into bed. Her hand reached for the charger in the nightstand but found it empty. She sighed and got up again. After the funeral and crying herself to sleep in Harry's arms, she had not bothered to get back to the flat she was renting. Instead, she had Sirius coddle her, prompting her to stay in what he had always called her room for as long as she needed. Hermione opened the different drawers in the dressing table to search for a charger as she mulled Mrs Hudson words. The weird boy, the older woman, referred to could only be Wiggings, which wasn't a good sign. Hermione wouldn't be surprised if one day she woke up to the news that Sherlock had been found in some drug den, overdosed. It did not matter how much the thought was plaguing her nightmares. Sherlock had made abundantly clear it wasn't her fight, and she was done swimming against the current in Sherlock Holmes' life.

Hermione slammed the drawers shut and went to her bag on the armchair, making a noise of irritation. She rummaged through contents, and her fingers brushed something metallic and small. She took it out.

It was Mary's pen drive.

Hermione had all but forgotten about it. With everything that had happened, she had thrown it into her bag the night Mary had run away and had not spared a thought about it. Hermione looked at the clock. It was ten to three in the morning, and sleep was unlikely again tonight. She left her room, tiptoed across the corridor to the studio, and closed the door behind her. Sirius had stumbled through the main door close to an hour ago, sharply dressed and properly pissed from one of those fancy dinners Mycroft and him were invited to. She sat on the leather armchair, turned the table lamp on and plugged the pen drive.

Dozens of folders had been copied into the device, all ordered with strings of letters and numbers. She randomly opened one. On the first page of the scanned document were the date and the topic, and the person in charge — Arktos, Rudolf Holmes' codename. Hermione grabbed a pen from the drawer and tore a piece of paper from a notebook. She started from the beginning. Hermione opened a document, scanned it, and closed it again, and wrote the name down if she thought it could be important. She recognised some missions, if only because Mycroft had mentioned them briefly. There was a bit of everything: domestic uprisings, international coups, royal affairs.

She wrote the name of a mission in Northern Ireland and continued with the next folder.

'Sherrinford,' Hermione muttered under her breath. The name meant nothing to her. But on top of the page, a big red "Ultra" stamp marked those documents as highly classified. It gave Hermione pause. If Mycroft knew she had these documents, she could be accused of treason. She looked down at her wrist, where the innocuous feather tattoo laid. She caressed the underside of it and made a fist. Hermione clicked on the next page. The first set of pages dated back to the late seventies - when Mycroft had not started his training yet.

Proposal N23: By Arktos.[...] Name: Sherrinford. [...] Status: Proposed. [...] Subjects too dangerous for conventional prisons. [...] cannibals [...] serial killers. [...] extreme security [...] uncharted location [...] [...] clearance level: Ultra [...]

The next documents spanned several years, and were contra-proposals with status fleeting from "suspended" to "pending". Different people from the Government against such a prison and what it might suppose, the risk, the investment, what kind of personal it would need, where could it be. The last proposal dated from 1980.