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r_scribblesLook what we have here - Sherlock/Tomb Raider Crossover fic!
After a storyline in the RP, largely thanks to our Mycroft, it became my headcanon that the Holmes family and the Croft family are old friends, and that Mycroft & Sherlock had adventures with Lara in their youth. (It also hugely amused many of us chatting about the concept that Lara's original bio makes her 43 now - a year older than we've decided Mycroft is). So here's a story about one such adventure, with a 24 year old Lara being awesome, a 23 year old Mycroft being suave and BAMFy and a 16 year old Sherlock being annoying and BAMFy. Oh, and there's a Mycroft/Lara/Sherlock Love triangle, too! This is part 1 of about 3 or 4 parts - might be a bit of violence in later parts but there's none here.
This Tomb Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us
-x-
‘You’re on edge.’
‘Well, of course I’m on edge. Scores of adventurers and treasure hunters have sought the Scroll of Atlantis before and died in the process, and here we are with not one but two factions of competitors – each with a small mercenary army on their side.’
‘But you have my assistance, on this occasion. I daresay that should even the odds, rather.’ He paused, watching her. ‘Or, is it my presence that’s causing you to feel uncomfortable?’
She concentrated on the controls of the jet. ‘I usually work alone.’
‘I am aware of that. And I hope that you are aware that you can trust me. To the ends of the Earth.’
She glanced across at him, her full lips curling into a fond smile. ‘My dear Mycroft. Of course I know that. I just don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘You’ll have to trust me on that matter as well, my dear Lara. I can handle myself as well as you.’
Lara laughed, lightly. ‘I’d like to see you perform acrobatics, Mycroft!’
‘Would you, now?’ Mycroft quirked an eyebrow. ‘Well, I would never be so discourteous as to deny a lady something that she would like. I’m sure that ample opportunity will arise during the mission for me to demonstrate my agility.’
‘There’ll be booby traps,’ she warned.
‘I eagerly anticipate them.’
‘Men shooting at us,’ she added.
‘How jolly.’
‘Giant spiders.’
‘Delicious barbequed, I understand.’
Lara laughed again. ‘You can be so delightfully disgusting sometimes.’
‘You have my little brother’s “slugs, snails and puppy dog tails” mentality to thank for that. Rubs off on me, sometimes.’
‘I wish I had a baby brother I could blame that sort of thing on, too,’ smiled Lara. ‘They never took kindly to my mythical monster illustrations at finishing school, unfortunately. Gruesome as it was, it actually turned out that my Bunyip was particularly accurate.’
‘You haven’t seen a Bunyip.’
Lara’s lips curled. ‘Fought three of the blighters in a swampy area of outback while looking for the Eye of the Rainbow Serpent. Killed one of them. Took some snapshots – I’ll find them for you, if you like. Take the controls.’
Mycroft took over the controls of the jet as Lara got to her feet. ‘There really is no need.’
‘Mycroft,’ she replied, locating a box of mission files, ‘where we’re going, we’re likely to see creatures far more strange and more deadly than a Bunyip. You might as well prepare yourself for the sort of monsters I come across in my work.’
Normally, Mycroft would have calmly, politely told her that there was no such thing as monsters. But something else had suddenly caught his attention. ‘These controls feel all wrong.’
‘A slight drag,’ Lara replied with a shrug. ‘Probably just needs a bit of fine-tuning. I’ll get the lads to see to it when we’re back.’
Mycroft shook his head. ‘No. No, this craft is carrying extra weight, somehow. Around 10 stone of it, I’d say.’
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Lara retorted. ‘Sometimes the weight of the weaponry gets miscalculated. It’s nothing to worry about…’
‘It isn’t the weaponry.’ Mycroft indicated for Lara to take the controls again. ‘We have a stowaway.’
Lara met eyes with Mycroft, suddenly serious, and, taking the jet’s controls with one hand, drew one of her pistols with the other. Mycroft clutched his umbrella and moved carefully down the jet’s tiny cabin, sizing up every possible space a person could conceal themself in. The supplies cupboard was too small. The trunk full of weaponry was too full. A bench ran across one side of the cabin. Underneath the seat of it was a long compartment in which lifejackets and parachutes were stored. The remaining space would still be very cramped, but a child or a slim adult would be able to fit inside without too much discomfort.
Mycroft pulled up the seat. His 16-year-old brother sat up cheerfully from his bed of emergency equipment and stretched out the long limbs that must have been tightly folded for at least the past five hours.
‘Afternoon, Mycroft.’
Mycroft and Lara groaned as one, putting away their weapons.
‘Hullo Lara,’ added Sherlock, clambering out of his hiding place. ‘Keeping well, I hope. I don’t know about you two, but I’m parched.’ He picked up a travel kettle. ‘Look at this tiny kettle! Shall I be mother?’
‘Sherlock,’ sighed Lara, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘The same as my brother,’ replied Sherlock. ‘Found out about this little excursion, it sounded interesting. And here was me with nothing to do.’
‘This is not,’ replied Mycroft through gritted teeth, ‘a friends and family trip to the Cote D’Azur.’
‘Funny,’ retorted Sherlock, ‘isn’t that exactly what you told Mother it was?’
‘I didn’t want to worry her.’
‘Well, she was all too happy for me to join you and “that nice Croft girl” on your outing, rather than have me kick around the house for the rest of the summer holidays.’
‘That is not the point, and you know it! Lara invited me – not you. You have imposed yourself in the most discourteous manner...’
‘It’s nothing personal, Sherlock,’ added Lara with a tone of soft kindness that Mycroft was sure she reserved solely for his little brother. ‘This expedition is going to be very dangerous.’
‘Dangerous is my middle name.’
‘No it’s not,’ snapped Mycroft, ‘it’s Cecil.’
‘I’m applying for a Deed Poll,’ Sherlock replied with a scowl. ‘I looked it up – Mother lied. You don’t have to be 18 after all.’
‘You just highlighted my point, Sherlock,’ Lara continued, with more patience than she’d show most. ‘You’re still a child.’
Sherlock drew himself up to the 5’10” he’d managed to acquire so far during his 16 and a half years. Mycroft himself hadn’t stopped growing until after his 19th birthday, so he imagined his brother still had a couple of inches to go. Still, even now, his height, coupled with a particularly deep voice that a combination of genetics and a very unhealthy smoking habit had given him, did rather create an illusion that Sherlock was older than his tender years – one that he automatically played up whenever it was suggested that he was too young to do what he wanted to do.
‘I’m hardly some wide-eyed naïf. I can take care of myself, you know – I brought down the Hardwell Gang in Hackney, on my own.’
‘He sneaked out of school to infiltrate one of the most notorious criminal gangs in London,’ Mycroft told Lara. ‘It seems that my brother’s latest hobby is trying to get himself killed, as violently as possible.’
‘And yet,’ added Sherlock, ‘here I am, all in one piece.’
‘You were bloody lucky that time, Sherlock…’
‘There is no such thing as luck,’ Sherlock retorted. ‘I was not lucky. I was brilliant.’ He cocked his head up at his brother, eyes bright with anger and arrogance and defiance. ‘I can run as fast and fight as well as either of you, and I was clever enough to get on to this plane without you noticing.’
‘And hopefully,’ Mycroft told him, ‘you’ll be clever enough to get off this plane, as well.’
Sherlock smiled. ‘We’re already over the Atlantic Ocean. You can’t turn the plane around to send me back to England – there’s no time. With a brief window of opportunity and two competitors on your tail, you can’t afford to waste a second. If this expedition’s to go ahead at all, it’s going to have to be with me. And that is not a Bunyip.’ He nodded at the photos that Lara still clutched in her hands. ‘It’s clearly some sort of oversized prehistoric ancestor to the Platypus. A handful of the species must have survived intact in pockets of land untroubled by humankind.’
‘That was what I was thinking too,’ Lara conceded. ‘Still not the sort of chap you want to run into on a dark night, though.’
‘It does look fiercer than a Platypus should have the right to do. Still – spear gun to the weak point behind its jaw and it should go down without to much of a fuss.’ He smiled brightly at her. ‘That is how you dispatched of the creature, isn’t it?’
Lara nodded, modestly.
Sherlock sniffed. ‘Then it’s settled – I’m coming with you.’ He put his hands on his hips and craned his head around, dramatically. ‘Right – where are the tea bags?’
-x-
Sherlock reached down and touched the rock underfoot. (Wet. Thick layer of algae. Seaweed. Barnacles. Like a rock pool. Like a rock pool, only all over. Recently submerged. All of it.)
‘Mind your step,’ Lara advised, needlessly. She turned to them as they approached the cave’s opening. ‘Aren’t either of you going to comment that there are no records of an island at this location?’
‘It’s clearly only very recently been unsubmerged,’ replied Mycroft.
Lara nodded. ‘It’s above sea level for twelve hours once every twenty years. So we don’t have long to do this.’ She squeezed through the narrow opening of the cave. ‘There are steps here, carved into the rock,’ she called. ‘Watch out, it’s still wet and very dark. I can see some light coming from below, though.’
Sherlock squeezed through next, then stopped to assist his brother who, as he’d expected, had rather more trouble fitting through the gap. The umbrella his brother was still carrying didn’t particularly help matters. Sherlock supposed that it might have seemed very odd to most outsiders that Mycroft was insisting upon taking an umbrella into an underground tomb. But then, most outsiders were idiots.
Finally through, Mycroft brushed the worst of the slime from his shirt and pulled a small torch from his breast pocket. Sherlock took it from him.
‘Better keep a hand free in case you slip. I’ll light the way.’
The torch cast an inadequate beam of light through the dingy, damp spiral stairwell, roughly carved into the rock of the cave. The torchlight just picked up the top of Lara’s head before the stairs she was descending towards the faint glow of firelight down below took her out of their view. He and his brother began to carefully pick their way down after her.
‘Yes, where on Earth would I be without my little helper?’ said Mycroft as they went. ‘Carrying a torch into certain danger – how apt.’
Sherlock didn’t stop, but lowered his voice so that he could be certain Lara couldn’t hear him. ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ he hissed.
‘You know exactly what that’s supposed to mean,’ whispered Mycroft. ‘Most schoolboys deal with their juvenile crushes by putting pictures of the objects of their affections on their walls – not by stowing away on a private jet in order to raid a catacomb beneath a sunken island with them.’
‘I came here for the experience – for the adventure!’
‘Do not even attempt to pull that one with me, Sherlock. Didn’t you think I’d notice the way you look at her – the excitement in your eyes every time she so much as comes up in conversation?’
‘Well, you clearly didn’t think I’d notice a very similar reaction in you.’ Sherlock risked a glance over his shoulder in order to get a peek at Mycroft’s expression. He almost missed his footing as a result, but it was worth the moment of inelegance. He smirked. ‘Oh, is that what’s really upset you about my decision to join you? Your baby brother gooseberrying in on your little date. Crofty and Crofty Investigate – how cozy.’
‘So that’s why you came,’ Mycroft sighed. ‘Oh, Sherlock. That’s so…’
Spiteful, Sherlock silently filled in for Mycroft, devious, petty, unkind…
‘…that’s so sad,’ said Mycroft.
‘Lads,’ called Lara from below, ‘hurry up and look at this.’
They did so, leaving their altercation unfinished. They found Lara at the bottom of the stairwell, bathed in the firelight of several burning torches (only recently relit Sherlock observed, some sort of automatic device that ignites the flames whenever the tomb rises from the water) in front of a sealed stone door.
(Pressure plates to the left and right connect to the bolts at the sides of the door, but there’s a further locking mechanism. There must be a switch nearby. Somewhere… Where..?)
‘Mycroft,’ Lara walked over to the pressure plate on the left and indicated to the second one. ‘Stand on that plate – it should release the bolts. Then there should be a switch…’ She looked around, hands on hips, for the elusive mechanism.
‘It’s on the other side of the door,’ said Sherlock, ‘has to be. Makes sense, really. Nobody gets in without the say-so of somebody who’s already inside.’
‘How inconvenient,’ Lara tutted. ‘I suppose I can always leave you two on the plates and see if I can find another way around…’
Sherlock was about to protest when Mycroft interrupted.
‘Or, you could try your chances with that fissure.’ He pointed out a shadowy corner to the right of the door where millennia of being pushed up out of the water and re-submerged had caused the wall to crack.
‘I’ll go,’ announced Sherlock.
‘I’ll go,’ retorted Lara, stepping towards the fissure.
Sherlock cast an eye over the crack in the stone and then gazed back at her. ‘You’re - what – a 34E, these days?’
Lara folded her arms across her chest. ‘Double D,’ she replied with that delightfully haughty air that always made Sherlock bite down a smirk.
‘You need to get re-measured. And you’re never going to fit through there.’
‘Unlike you.’
‘Unlike me. You should see the tight spots I can squeeze through. I’m like a cat.’
‘You’re like an animated piece of string.’
Sherlock laughed.
‘Quite sure you’ll be able to get your head through?’ asked Mycroft.
‘Quite sure.’ Sherlock winked at Lara.
‘Be careful through there,’ added Lara, going back to her pressure plate.
‘I’m only unlocking the door,’ Sherlock replied. ‘See you in a tick.’
He slipped through the crack in the rock, and into the darkness beyond.
After a storyline in the RP, largely thanks to our Mycroft, it became my headcanon that the Holmes family and the Croft family are old friends, and that Mycroft & Sherlock had adventures with Lara in their youth. (It also hugely amused many of us chatting about the concept that Lara's original bio makes her 43 now - a year older than we've decided Mycroft is). So here's a story about one such adventure, with a 24 year old Lara being awesome, a 23 year old Mycroft being suave and BAMFy and a 16 year old Sherlock being annoying and BAMFy. Oh, and there's a Mycroft/Lara/Sherlock Love triangle, too! This is part 1 of about 3 or 4 parts - might be a bit of violence in later parts but there's none here.
This Tomb Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us
-x-
‘You’re on edge.’
‘Well, of course I’m on edge. Scores of adventurers and treasure hunters have sought the Scroll of Atlantis before and died in the process, and here we are with not one but two factions of competitors – each with a small mercenary army on their side.’
‘But you have my assistance, on this occasion. I daresay that should even the odds, rather.’ He paused, watching her. ‘Or, is it my presence that’s causing you to feel uncomfortable?’
She concentrated on the controls of the jet. ‘I usually work alone.’
‘I am aware of that. And I hope that you are aware that you can trust me. To the ends of the Earth.’
She glanced across at him, her full lips curling into a fond smile. ‘My dear Mycroft. Of course I know that. I just don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘You’ll have to trust me on that matter as well, my dear Lara. I can handle myself as well as you.’
Lara laughed, lightly. ‘I’d like to see you perform acrobatics, Mycroft!’
‘Would you, now?’ Mycroft quirked an eyebrow. ‘Well, I would never be so discourteous as to deny a lady something that she would like. I’m sure that ample opportunity will arise during the mission for me to demonstrate my agility.’
‘There’ll be booby traps,’ she warned.
‘I eagerly anticipate them.’
‘Men shooting at us,’ she added.
‘How jolly.’
‘Giant spiders.’
‘Delicious barbequed, I understand.’
Lara laughed again. ‘You can be so delightfully disgusting sometimes.’
‘You have my little brother’s “slugs, snails and puppy dog tails” mentality to thank for that. Rubs off on me, sometimes.’
‘I wish I had a baby brother I could blame that sort of thing on, too,’ smiled Lara. ‘They never took kindly to my mythical monster illustrations at finishing school, unfortunately. Gruesome as it was, it actually turned out that my Bunyip was particularly accurate.’
‘You haven’t seen a Bunyip.’
Lara’s lips curled. ‘Fought three of the blighters in a swampy area of outback while looking for the Eye of the Rainbow Serpent. Killed one of them. Took some snapshots – I’ll find them for you, if you like. Take the controls.’
Mycroft took over the controls of the jet as Lara got to her feet. ‘There really is no need.’
‘Mycroft,’ she replied, locating a box of mission files, ‘where we’re going, we’re likely to see creatures far more strange and more deadly than a Bunyip. You might as well prepare yourself for the sort of monsters I come across in my work.’
Normally, Mycroft would have calmly, politely told her that there was no such thing as monsters. But something else had suddenly caught his attention. ‘These controls feel all wrong.’
‘A slight drag,’ Lara replied with a shrug. ‘Probably just needs a bit of fine-tuning. I’ll get the lads to see to it when we’re back.’
Mycroft shook his head. ‘No. No, this craft is carrying extra weight, somehow. Around 10 stone of it, I’d say.’
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Lara retorted. ‘Sometimes the weight of the weaponry gets miscalculated. It’s nothing to worry about…’
‘It isn’t the weaponry.’ Mycroft indicated for Lara to take the controls again. ‘We have a stowaway.’
Lara met eyes with Mycroft, suddenly serious, and, taking the jet’s controls with one hand, drew one of her pistols with the other. Mycroft clutched his umbrella and moved carefully down the jet’s tiny cabin, sizing up every possible space a person could conceal themself in. The supplies cupboard was too small. The trunk full of weaponry was too full. A bench ran across one side of the cabin. Underneath the seat of it was a long compartment in which lifejackets and parachutes were stored. The remaining space would still be very cramped, but a child or a slim adult would be able to fit inside without too much discomfort.
Mycroft pulled up the seat. His 16-year-old brother sat up cheerfully from his bed of emergency equipment and stretched out the long limbs that must have been tightly folded for at least the past five hours.
‘Afternoon, Mycroft.’
Mycroft and Lara groaned as one, putting away their weapons.
‘Hullo Lara,’ added Sherlock, clambering out of his hiding place. ‘Keeping well, I hope. I don’t know about you two, but I’m parched.’ He picked up a travel kettle. ‘Look at this tiny kettle! Shall I be mother?’
‘Sherlock,’ sighed Lara, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘The same as my brother,’ replied Sherlock. ‘Found out about this little excursion, it sounded interesting. And here was me with nothing to do.’
‘This is not,’ replied Mycroft through gritted teeth, ‘a friends and family trip to the Cote D’Azur.’
‘Funny,’ retorted Sherlock, ‘isn’t that exactly what you told Mother it was?’
‘I didn’t want to worry her.’
‘Well, she was all too happy for me to join you and “that nice Croft girl” on your outing, rather than have me kick around the house for the rest of the summer holidays.’
‘That is not the point, and you know it! Lara invited me – not you. You have imposed yourself in the most discourteous manner...’
‘It’s nothing personal, Sherlock,’ added Lara with a tone of soft kindness that Mycroft was sure she reserved solely for his little brother. ‘This expedition is going to be very dangerous.’
‘Dangerous is my middle name.’
‘No it’s not,’ snapped Mycroft, ‘it’s Cecil.’
‘I’m applying for a Deed Poll,’ Sherlock replied with a scowl. ‘I looked it up – Mother lied. You don’t have to be 18 after all.’
‘You just highlighted my point, Sherlock,’ Lara continued, with more patience than she’d show most. ‘You’re still a child.’
Sherlock drew himself up to the 5’10” he’d managed to acquire so far during his 16 and a half years. Mycroft himself hadn’t stopped growing until after his 19th birthday, so he imagined his brother still had a couple of inches to go. Still, even now, his height, coupled with a particularly deep voice that a combination of genetics and a very unhealthy smoking habit had given him, did rather create an illusion that Sherlock was older than his tender years – one that he automatically played up whenever it was suggested that he was too young to do what he wanted to do.
‘I’m hardly some wide-eyed naïf. I can take care of myself, you know – I brought down the Hardwell Gang in Hackney, on my own.’
‘He sneaked out of school to infiltrate one of the most notorious criminal gangs in London,’ Mycroft told Lara. ‘It seems that my brother’s latest hobby is trying to get himself killed, as violently as possible.’
‘And yet,’ added Sherlock, ‘here I am, all in one piece.’
‘You were bloody lucky that time, Sherlock…’
‘There is no such thing as luck,’ Sherlock retorted. ‘I was not lucky. I was brilliant.’ He cocked his head up at his brother, eyes bright with anger and arrogance and defiance. ‘I can run as fast and fight as well as either of you, and I was clever enough to get on to this plane without you noticing.’
‘And hopefully,’ Mycroft told him, ‘you’ll be clever enough to get off this plane, as well.’
Sherlock smiled. ‘We’re already over the Atlantic Ocean. You can’t turn the plane around to send me back to England – there’s no time. With a brief window of opportunity and two competitors on your tail, you can’t afford to waste a second. If this expedition’s to go ahead at all, it’s going to have to be with me. And that is not a Bunyip.’ He nodded at the photos that Lara still clutched in her hands. ‘It’s clearly some sort of oversized prehistoric ancestor to the Platypus. A handful of the species must have survived intact in pockets of land untroubled by humankind.’
‘That was what I was thinking too,’ Lara conceded. ‘Still not the sort of chap you want to run into on a dark night, though.’
‘It does look fiercer than a Platypus should have the right to do. Still – spear gun to the weak point behind its jaw and it should go down without to much of a fuss.’ He smiled brightly at her. ‘That is how you dispatched of the creature, isn’t it?’
Lara nodded, modestly.
Sherlock sniffed. ‘Then it’s settled – I’m coming with you.’ He put his hands on his hips and craned his head around, dramatically. ‘Right – where are the tea bags?’
-x-
Sherlock reached down and touched the rock underfoot. (Wet. Thick layer of algae. Seaweed. Barnacles. Like a rock pool. Like a rock pool, only all over. Recently submerged. All of it.)
‘Mind your step,’ Lara advised, needlessly. She turned to them as they approached the cave’s opening. ‘Aren’t either of you going to comment that there are no records of an island at this location?’
‘It’s clearly only very recently been unsubmerged,’ replied Mycroft.
Lara nodded. ‘It’s above sea level for twelve hours once every twenty years. So we don’t have long to do this.’ She squeezed through the narrow opening of the cave. ‘There are steps here, carved into the rock,’ she called. ‘Watch out, it’s still wet and very dark. I can see some light coming from below, though.’
Sherlock squeezed through next, then stopped to assist his brother who, as he’d expected, had rather more trouble fitting through the gap. The umbrella his brother was still carrying didn’t particularly help matters. Sherlock supposed that it might have seemed very odd to most outsiders that Mycroft was insisting upon taking an umbrella into an underground tomb. But then, most outsiders were idiots.
Finally through, Mycroft brushed the worst of the slime from his shirt and pulled a small torch from his breast pocket. Sherlock took it from him.
‘Better keep a hand free in case you slip. I’ll light the way.’
The torch cast an inadequate beam of light through the dingy, damp spiral stairwell, roughly carved into the rock of the cave. The torchlight just picked up the top of Lara’s head before the stairs she was descending towards the faint glow of firelight down below took her out of their view. He and his brother began to carefully pick their way down after her.
‘Yes, where on Earth would I be without my little helper?’ said Mycroft as they went. ‘Carrying a torch into certain danger – how apt.’
Sherlock didn’t stop, but lowered his voice so that he could be certain Lara couldn’t hear him. ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ he hissed.
‘You know exactly what that’s supposed to mean,’ whispered Mycroft. ‘Most schoolboys deal with their juvenile crushes by putting pictures of the objects of their affections on their walls – not by stowing away on a private jet in order to raid a catacomb beneath a sunken island with them.’
‘I came here for the experience – for the adventure!’
‘Do not even attempt to pull that one with me, Sherlock. Didn’t you think I’d notice the way you look at her – the excitement in your eyes every time she so much as comes up in conversation?’
‘Well, you clearly didn’t think I’d notice a very similar reaction in you.’ Sherlock risked a glance over his shoulder in order to get a peek at Mycroft’s expression. He almost missed his footing as a result, but it was worth the moment of inelegance. He smirked. ‘Oh, is that what’s really upset you about my decision to join you? Your baby brother gooseberrying in on your little date. Crofty and Crofty Investigate – how cozy.’
‘So that’s why you came,’ Mycroft sighed. ‘Oh, Sherlock. That’s so…’
Spiteful, Sherlock silently filled in for Mycroft, devious, petty, unkind…
‘…that’s so sad,’ said Mycroft.
‘Lads,’ called Lara from below, ‘hurry up and look at this.’
They did so, leaving their altercation unfinished. They found Lara at the bottom of the stairwell, bathed in the firelight of several burning torches (only recently relit Sherlock observed, some sort of automatic device that ignites the flames whenever the tomb rises from the water) in front of a sealed stone door.
(Pressure plates to the left and right connect to the bolts at the sides of the door, but there’s a further locking mechanism. There must be a switch nearby. Somewhere… Where..?)
‘Mycroft,’ Lara walked over to the pressure plate on the left and indicated to the second one. ‘Stand on that plate – it should release the bolts. Then there should be a switch…’ She looked around, hands on hips, for the elusive mechanism.
‘It’s on the other side of the door,’ said Sherlock, ‘has to be. Makes sense, really. Nobody gets in without the say-so of somebody who’s already inside.’
‘How inconvenient,’ Lara tutted. ‘I suppose I can always leave you two on the plates and see if I can find another way around…’
Sherlock was about to protest when Mycroft interrupted.
‘Or, you could try your chances with that fissure.’ He pointed out a shadowy corner to the right of the door where millennia of being pushed up out of the water and re-submerged had caused the wall to crack.
‘I’ll go,’ announced Sherlock.
‘I’ll go,’ retorted Lara, stepping towards the fissure.
Sherlock cast an eye over the crack in the stone and then gazed back at her. ‘You’re - what – a 34E, these days?’
Lara folded her arms across her chest. ‘Double D,’ she replied with that delightfully haughty air that always made Sherlock bite down a smirk.
‘You need to get re-measured. And you’re never going to fit through there.’
‘Unlike you.’
‘Unlike me. You should see the tight spots I can squeeze through. I’m like a cat.’
‘You’re like an animated piece of string.’
Sherlock laughed.
‘Quite sure you’ll be able to get your head through?’ asked Mycroft.
‘Quite sure.’ Sherlock winked at Lara.
‘Be careful through there,’ added Lara, going back to her pressure plate.
‘I’m only unlocking the door,’ Sherlock replied. ‘See you in a tick.’
He slipped through the crack in the rock, and into the darkness beyond.
