#(( it's mostly a sum up of how Abigail ended up at Mycroft's ))

[collidingxworlds]

Plotted starter for @governmentofficial - Abigail Hobbs & Mycroft Holmes

There are events that turn your life upside down in the matter of seconds. Everything you had thought, believed in, knows till that very moment crumbles into ashes before your eyes. The solid ground you’ve always had under your feet suddenly vanishes, leaving you plunged into a free fall. Your whole world collapses on itself in front of you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That was exactly what Abigail Hobbs had experienced less than a month before, when the FBI had barged into her house, but not before her father had managed to put his hunting knife against her mother’s throat and slit it open. The same knife that had pressed in the skin of the girl’s own neck, as she was used as a human shield, one that should have lasted long enough for her to share Louise Hobbs’s fate.

She didn’t remember much after that. The feeling of the blade cutting through her flesh, the warmth of the blood wetting her rapidly cooling skin. The deafening sounds of gunshots and then a strong, steady pressure around her neck, keeping it from bleeding it as copiously as it had been.

Then just blackness.

She had woken up days later in the ICU of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, with a tube shove down her throat and machines beeping madly all around her. On the side of her neck, under a heavy bandage, a wound that would have scarred and marked her for the rest of her life.

The next week had been a blur too. She had learnt that both her parents were dead, that her father was a serial killer and that all the money and the properties of her family had been confiscated to pay the victims’ family. She had found herself at 13 years old, orphaned and penniless, with more debts to be settled. The world she had spent her childhood in was gone, just like that, and her future had looked like a dark, bottomless void.

At least until social services had tracked down some distant relatives on her mother’s side, who had accepted not just to pay for her medical expenses, but also to take her in.

A couple of days she had been put on a plane and shipped to England, with nothing but the slightly oversized, old clothes one of the nurses had generously provided her with and a passport.

And that was how Abigail had found herself standing in the hall of a mansion of the size of a small castle, surrounded by paintings that had to cost more than her old family house had. It made her feel intimidate and completely out of place, like a cheap trinket that had ended up in a refine jewelry shop by mistake.

That place was nothing like the home she had grown up in. Her house had used to be simple, decorated with the rugs and deer mounts her father had made out of the animals he hunted. The smooth wood surfaces, the many handmade pillows and pelts had always made it feel warm and welcoming, even despite the dark, disquieting shadows had been cast all over it when, several months before, she had discovered what sort of monster her father was and what other, less conventional materials were used to decorate the building and fill their plates.

The mansion was gave off a completely different vibe. It felt cold and distant with its high, finely chiselled ceilings, its large windows and pieces of furniture that looked like the belonged into a museum. The only bright side was that it was surrounded by a large garden. The thought of being able to immerse in nature even there brought her some comfort.

Blue eyes touched one of the armours before moving on the man who had come to greet her at the door after a limousine had picked her up at the airport. Mycroft Holmes. Her new adoptive father, even if, looking at him, Abigail wondered if he could have truly become a parental figure.

He too, like the mansion, was nothing like what she had known till now. However, in this sense, it was perhaps for the best.

“Do you really live here all by yourself?” She found herself asking, the hint of a frown on her face. “What do you...do with all this space?”

It made her wonder what her new room would have looked like.

“And...what should I call you?” She couldn’t see herself calling him ‘Dad’ nor using his first name. Perhaps ‘father’? Or maybe... “Mister Holmes?”