"Good morning, Russell."
Mary's voice sounded at his side, as bright and breezy as ever.
"Morning."
Russell looked up and met Mary's gaze — those clear, cornflower-blue eyes of hers, sparkling today with a particular curiosity.
"You seem in especially good spirits," he remarked, with an air of casual disinterest.
"Mm... do I?" Mary smiled and set her textbook down on the desk. "Might just be the weather. It's a nice day."
As she spoke, her gaze drifted to the newspaper Russell had brought in.
"That fellow really has gone and done something spectacular, hasn't he."
Mary picked up the paper, eyes settling on the announcement letter printed across the front page.
"A performance preview... what do you think he's planning?"
"Who knows. Nothing good, that's for certain." Russell leaned back. "If I were Mycroft, I'd use this window to lock onto every last person who's ever crossed me and watch them like a hawk. The moment any of them so much as twitches, haul the lot of them in. When you get down to it, Moriarty's his man — for all we know, he's the one who cooked the whole thing up."
Russell made a pointed attempt to splash mud in Mycroft's direction.
Mary listened, then fell quiet for a moment, turning the possibility over in her mind. She thought it through carefully, her memory drifting back to the late-night conversation two evenings ago.
After a moment, she shook her head.
"Mm... I don't think Mycroft has anything to do with this."
"Why not?" Russell asked.
"It's too conspicuous. The Lloyds Bank attack has barely cooled, and now Moriarty is supposed to go on a city-wide trawl for dirt on half the Members of Parliament and half the nobility? Even Mycroft can't manage the fallout from that many people collapsing at once. And besides — if you were going to do it, why make all of London watch? Wouldn't it be far cleaner to do it the way Ethan Roy did?"
Mary paused, then added, "Mycroft isn't the sort of man who takes unnecessary risks."
Tch. She's not buying it.
Russell made a small, inward noise of reluctant admiration.
"So what do you think Moriarty's reason is?" he asked.
"Carrying out justice?"
"Mm..." Mary considered for a moment. "Probably... just because it interests him, I'd say."
"Just because it interests him?" Russell repeated the words, then gave a short, quiet laugh, as though he'd just heard a rather amusing joke.
He didn't pursue the topic any further, and steered the conversation elsewhere.
"By the way — how did you manage to get out this weekend? I always had you pegged as the type kept behind locked gates."
"Normally I couldn't," Mary said lightly, "but thanks to a certain someone, Father is likely to be rather preoccupied for the next two weeks. Which means I'm off the leash."
"A certain someone?" Russell raised an eyebrow. "Don't tell me it's Moriarty."
"That," Mary said, with a small blink, "is classified. All I'll say is that he's currently in the middle of dealing with someone who's been making his life rather unpleasant."
"Dealing with who?" Russell asked, before he could stop himself. "It isn't me, is it?"
"Why on earth would you think that?"
"Because the last time at the bank, I got the distinct impression Duke Morstan wasn't particularly fond of me," Russell said.
He still remembered the look the Duke had given him.
Mary fell into a brief silence. The smile on her face faded a little, as though she were thinking through something she wasn't quite ready to share.
After a moment, she raised her head again. The smile returned, this time threaded with a note of teasing.
"You're a penniless student. Why would he bother? He has a very long list of people he can't stand, and you don't even make the cut. If he sat down to write out every name, he'd run the pen dry before he ever got to yours."
"Well, that's a relief." Russell exhaled.
Mary's mouth twitched. She looked at his expression — the entirely unfeigned, chest-deflating relief of a man who has narrowly escaped some terrible fate — and something complicated crossed her eyes.
"You genuinely... don't have even the slightest bit of curiosity?" she couldn't help asking.
"Curiosity about what?" Russell returned. "About how long Duke Morstan's blacklist is?"
"I meant the performance." Mary sighed. "Don't you want to know what Moriarty is actually planning this time? His methods before were never anything like this — going to all this trouble, whipping the entire city into a frenzy. What's the purpose of it?"
"Not particularly." Russell's answer was blunt and immediate. He slumped back down with the boneless ease of a man whose skeleton had quietly excused itself, basking in the slant of morning sunlight.
"What about Charlotte? She doesn't want to know either?"
"Charlotte says he's having a performative episode, and that speculating about that man's motivations is a complete waste of time and a criminal misuse of brainpower. On that point, I am in absolute and wholehearted agreement."
Russell nodded with great conviction.
"Lestrade can lose sleep over it — that's what he's paid for. And if the sky falls, Mycroft's there to hold it up. What's any of it got to do with an ordinary, civic-minded citizen like me?"
"..." Mary regarded him in silence.
"Sometimes I genuinely wonder," she said, pressing a hand to her forehead, "whether you have anything resembling ambition."
"My ambition," Russell said, "is to coast through to graduation without incident, then secure the perfect job — close to home, desk-bound, out of the public eye, with a complete idiot for a boss."
Listening to this resolutely untroubled vision of the future, Mary couldn't help rolling her eyes.
"Just a small reminder," she said, "that before any of that, we still have a final term paper, Mr. Watson. I have absolutely no intention of letting my partner drag me down."
"Relax, we've got ages before the end of term." Russell waved a dismissive hand. "I'll be counting on you to carry me through it all, Teacher Mary."
"Don't even think about slacking off," Mary warned, half seriously and half in jest. "I'll be checking on your preparatory work when we have Afternoon tea on Saturday."
"My contribution will be to eat all the scones," Russell said solemnly, "and nod along earnestly to every single thing you say."
"In your dreams."
Mary shot him a reproving look — but in those blue eyes of hers, a warmth danced that she herself hadn't even noticed.
And then, just as the two of them were trading lazy volleys of small talk, the classroom door swung open, and Professor Fields walked in, arms laden with a thick sheaf of lesson notes.
The room fell instantly silent.
Russell closed his mouth at once, dropped his head onto the desk, and folded himself flat with the fluid, practised efficiency of a man who had rehearsed the move ten thousand times.
Mary looked at him and gave a helpless shake of her head.
"Why do I always get the feeling you sleep through every single lesson," she muttered.
"What are you doing at night?"
"Would you believe me if I told you I'm actually Moriarty," Russell said, muffled, from somewhere inside his folded arms, "and I spend my nights leaping across the rooftops of London?"
"Oh, please." Mary rolled her eyes and turned toward the board.
"If you're Moriarty, then I'm the Professor."
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