Fic: Behavioural Modification - 4/5 (BBC Sherlock)
Title: Behavioural Modification
Rating: R
Wordcount: 4.4k this part, 23.7k overall
Warnings: Extremely dysfunctional behaviour, sexual acts, swearing. Spoiler: ramifications of past emotional abuse.
Beta: vyctori
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: Whatever it took, he was going to make this work.
step one: acclimatize subject
step two: reward behaviour
Step Three: Escalate Procedure
Step Four: Control Damages
“Anything you can tell me,” Lestrade prompted.
He scoffed, turning over the corpse’s hand. Fresh scratch over light, thin scars. “Anything?” Down the body now, unlacing the shoes, pulling them off. He checked inside the shoe and regarded the socks. Lint. Human hair only. “She volunteered at an animal shelter. It’s either close to her... apartment, I’d say. Extremely close to her apartment or close to an Underground station. Meaning she lived at an apartment near an Underground station as well, one where they don’t allow pets.”
“Is that going to be important?” Lestrade asked, arms crossed. Tired. He wanted to lean against something but couldn’t in the morgue; the walls were too far away from the table. Also, on sheer principle, Lestrade never leaned. But he wanted to.
“Could be. I don’t know yet.”
There was a long silence as John didn’t ask him how he knew what he already knew.
There was an extended silence as Lestrade looked at the spot where John wasn’t.
Thank god for Molly.
“Molly!” he said. “You adopt your cats from a shelter. Does she look familiar?”
Molly popped over from where she’d been attempting to casually hover. She bit her lip as she looked at the woman. “Sorry, no. Still no I.D.?”
“None,” Sherlock agreed. “Considering her Oyster card was in her purse, the theft must have occurred after she left the tube. Whether the thief also strangled her with piano wire remains to be seen. Rather, whether the killer stole her purse to make it look like theft. Honestly, there are easier ways of mugging people.”
Wait.
“The killer and the thief are separate, working in tandem,” he realized.
“And we know this how?”
“You’ve seen the footprints. She went down the alley willingly. At a run. But she wasn’t being chased. She had her purse out on the way to the Underground, it was snatched, and she gave chase. She pulls her mobile out as she runs and drops it when the second player in this little drama jumps out behind her.”
“Who walks down a London street with their purse out?”
“A woman who just bought a hotdog with mustard and relish,” Sherlock replied. “It was on the ground, uneaten, less than four metres away from the vender.” He excluded the influence of pigeons in that statement. “It also happens to be on the front of her shirt, just there.” He pointed. The green and yellow blended in with the print of her top, a stain convenient for the top’s owner and inconvenient for everyone else. “She dropped it and her change when her purse was taken. I imagine passersby picked up her change. Anyway, I’d talk to the hotdog vender if I were you. He must have seen the theft.”
Lestrade glanced away from him, toward the empty air where John wasn’t.
“Problem?” Sherlock asked.
“You tell me,” Lestrade said.
“If you’re going to say something, then say it.”
Molly touched his sleeve. “I’ll get you a coffee.” Excuse to leave, conflict aversion. Long strides confirmed it.
“Look,” Lestrade said. “What’s between you two is your business until you start making it my business. Lay off my people and I won’t say a word.”
“I have laid off.”
Lestrade lifted his eyebrows. “Yeah. Right.” He adjusted his coat. On his way out, excellent. “Just apologize to John before I have to arrest Anderson for killing you.”
“What makes you think it was my fault?” he demanded.
Lestrade looked at him.
“Fine,” Sherlock spat.
“Are you staying with the body?”
He nodded curtly, glaring at the corpse.
Lestrade walked three-fourths of the way to the door. He turned around. He didn’t sigh in the same way he didn’t lean against the wall. “How long is Dr. Watson planning to stay home? Just for damage control purposes.”
“He’s not.”
“What?”
“Home.”
This time, Lestrade did sigh. He bent his head and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Right. Anderson deserved what he got this time. This time,” Lestrade stressed.
What’s wrong, freak? Boyfriend doesn’t love you anymore?
“He was surprisingly accurate,” Sherlock said. “For once.” Whether or not it held any degree of truth was of course irrelevant, but to have Anderson talking about John, for Anderson to refer to John as Sherlock never had.... Unbearable.
Lestrade looked at him. A different look. Recognition of Sherlock’s capacity for emotion. It made Lestrade’s expression oddly similar to John’s and Sherlock didn’t like that at all.
“Stop it. Get out.”
Raising his hands in a gesture of indifferent surrender, Lestrade left.
Sherlock studied the body. Why piano wire? Difficult to hold, required thick gloves to wield, fairly noticeable to prepare. The unending question of Sherlock’s life: who was being stupid now?
He thought and he thought. He didn’t focus, but he certainly thought. Come on, try. There was a perfectly good corpse in front of him. Why her? The piano wire and two-man effort meant preparation. The setting meant watching her habits - the men had counted on her buying a hotdog there. Clearly, she’d been observed for some time. The wire was unique and would have been noticed if this had been a pleasure killing. Not to mention the sloppy technique. Not a hired job. It reeked of amateurs who thought themselves clever. Who was in the lead, then? The thief, the strangler, or another individual?
A warm mug was pressed into his hands. He drank his tea and choked on coffee.
Molly snatched the mug back from him before he could spill on the corpse. Hot liquid scalded his hands through his gloves, but the corpse escaped.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he rasped, then coughed again.
Mug in one hand, his arm in the other, Molly pulled him over to a sink. She peeled his gloves off with an elastic snap and pushed his hands under the tap. He surprised himself by letting her. Molly’s hands were less scarred than the corpse’s but the telltale signs of lifelong cat-ownership were clear.
Once she turned the tap off, they stood in silence. An inconvenient noise interrupted it.
“Was that your stomach?” she asked.
“Not important,” he said. There was no food at the flat. He kept forgetting. That would be problematic. He’d finished the last of the Weetabix this morning. The bread had been yesterday morning, once he’d picked the mould off it. Mycroft had promised to say nothing about his situation as long as he ate breakfast for the duration of it. If he didn’t buy more food, Mycroft would visit. And then he would say things. He would say things about John. It would be horrific.
“Have you eaten?” Molly asked.
“I ate breakfast.”
“It’s almost five,” she said.
“Six,” he corrected.
Abruptly tense, almost frantic, Molly checked her watch. She relaxed, then tensed again, now looking up at Sherlock. “It’s only four forty-eight.”
“What? Oh.” The time. Yes. No one was counting the days of John’s absence besides him.
His bag was packed for five days. John didn’t have the budget for new clothing. He’d done laundry somewhere else. The choice of returning to 221b would be more compelling at the end of each laundry cycle. Four more days.
“Sherlock?”
There was a small, feminine hand on his. He’d been staring at the sink. He looked at the hand.
Molly didn’t move it.
He considered asking her to. He considered simply pulling away and letting that be that. After all, Molly didn’t like him. Molly was blindly infatuated with a version of him that didn’t exist. She saw but she didn’t observe. He couldn’t particularly fault her for it either. It made her happy and her aim was happiness, not results. It was annoying, but he let her have her fun. Besides, annoying was par for the course. Women in his life fell into two categories: Mummy (subcategory: Mrs. Hudson) and Annoyance (subcategories: helpful, detrimental, suspect).
But right now. Her hand.
That wasn’t annoying. It was just sort of there. He wasn’t used to that. Nobody touched him. Mummy was dead, Mycroft was Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson limited it to special occasions, and John was somewhere out in the world without him, just like Victor. Nobody else touched him. Honestly, John didn’t touch him that much either. He still didn’t initiate. At least Victor had had the decency to collapse on top of him, warm and sprawling, if sweaty.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said and removed her hand. Now his hand was cold. Not simply from the water. “You just looked like you could use a friend.”
“And what does that look like?”
“Like you’ve had a crap week and no sleep. Basically, like you could use a hug and a nap.”
Sherlock looked at her.
“What?” Molly asked.
“I hadn’t considered that.”
Molly’s eyes flickered between his face and his chest. She stepped in, arms slipping between his sides and his elbows. She pressed her face against his shoulder with complete disregard of the way his hands moved about helplessly in the air behind her back.
“What are you doing?” he asked again. Then he felt the muscles of his shoulders begin to relax. “Oh,” he said. “That’s very effective.” Experimentally, he let his hands touch her back. Were her shoulders relaxing as well?
Molly laughed. Her giggle wasn’t at all like John’s. “I’m glad,” she said. She let him go and he didn’t have the timing down. For a moment, she was pulling back against his hands. Just as she tried to adjust to being held in place, he hastened to let her go and then they stood there, hyper-aware of their own arms, until Sherlock took a large step backward.
“Awkward,” she said.
“Only if you think it is.” He smiled as best he could.
She did the same.
“I’m going to leave now,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s probably for the best.”
They walked away in opposite directions.
Molly hugged me today. SH
This received the exact same answer as his previous messages, which was to say, none. Nothing to Why haven’t you come home yet? SH, nothing to John, where are you? SH, and nothing even to Let me know you’re safe at least. SH.
Simply nothing.
Well, nothing from John.
The unknown number and the order to stop txting my brother had cleared a few things up, though.
It turned out to be three idiots, not two, as he’d expected. And, as it happened, they had killed the wrong woman by mistake. Amateurish had been too kind a term.
He texted Harry about it.
Her response of wtf had been less than impressive.
Tell John. SH
No u creepy bastard
He’d be interested. SH
Leave us alone
John was still with her, then. Day eight.
On the morning of day nine, Sherlock realized there was nothing in the flat fit for human consumption.
Mycroft showed up by ten o’clock.
“I would tell you how to fix this, but then you’d never do it,” the bastard sighed. He heaped pity onto his face and exasperation into his shoulders. He was sitting in John’s chair. “Too stubborn for your own good.”
“Shut up. He isn’t yours.”
“Nor yours, at this rate,” Mycroft agreed.
Sherlock was abruptly reminded of a large portion of his childhood. He had spent it determining whether he could master telekinesis the small amount necessary to cause internal bleeding.
Mycroft sighed another one of his heavy sighs. “No, Sherlock, I thought you learned this when you were seven: you can’t kill me with your brain.”
He could try.
“Wasted effort.”
What else was he going to do?
“There’s a great number of things you could be doing.” Mycroft rotated the handle of his umbrella, the tip against the carpet.
He turned his face away.
“No, no job. Not at the moment, certainly.”
Must he smile like that?
“Yes, I really must. It does annoy you so.”
Sherlock glared.
“You’re not even giving me the silent treatment properly,” Mycroft lamented. “You’re taking the easy way out and letting me read your body language. How very fortunate that I know it. If I didn’t, I might be offended. I might, even, be hurt.”
Sherlock wished he would be.
“Yes, well, we can’t have everything, can we?”
He refused to dignify that with even a nonverbal answer.
“But you could have something, couldn’t you?” Mycroft went on. “More than you think you had, at any rate.”
“More than I think.” Indignation flung the words out of him. He knew what he had. He knew that he needed John and John wanted him. Coming from an alcoholic family and sporting a stress addiction of his own, John was even highly inclined to need Sherlock back. John was loyal and sentimental and would be inclined to love Sherlock, given time, or close enough to be satisfactory.
“You really are terribly dense sometimes, dear brother.”
“Stay out of my relationship. Stay out and keep out.”
“Yes, because Dr. Watson is a fort you’ve constructed and put a sign on.” There it was: the eye roll. “Sherlock, you don’t have a relationship.”
Sherlock got up, went to his room, and slammed the door.
Four hours later, he came out. Mycroft’s PA was now in John’s chair. She didn’t look up from her Blackberry. “All right,” Sherlock said. “What did he mean by that?”
The woman clicked through a few menus and wordlessly handed the mobile to him. There was a video lined up on it. Sherlock hit play. The quality of the image was low, CCTV level. The angles confirmed it.
And there, a sight Sherlock had gone nine days without.
John was walking on the street at night. He wore his tan jumper beneath his coat. There was a woman with him. They were chatting. John looked happy. Excited. As did the woman. They went into a building. The camera turned. It was an Italian restaurant. Through the window, the chairs and tables were seen. They were clearly too small, meant for intimacy rather than comfort.
A time skip. John and the woman exited. John looked tired. Tense. Faking interest. The woman didn’t notice. She touched John’s arm as if she had any right to. John smiled and shook his head. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. They parted ways. John trudged homeward.
The video ended.
Sherlock handed the PA back her phone.
She left.
Sherlock stayed very still. He stayed very still indeed and then he went upstairs. He went to John’s desk and opened the drawer where John kept his gun and ammunition.
Both were gone.
In their place was the small notebook from John’s jacket.
He opened it to the last entry.
Never theorize before possessing the facts. One inevitably twists the facts to suit the theory rather than the theory to suit the facts.
Oh.
Well.
It was hardly as if Sherlock had never been a hypocrite before.
Fact: John wouldn’t cheat on him. John wouldn’t cheat on anyone, and especially not for a date as bad as the one he’d just had.
Fact: In order to cheat on someone, one must be in a relationship with that individual.
Fact: John had gone on a crap date last week.
Conclusion: John did not believe that he and Sherlock were engaged in a romantic relationship.
But why?
“Molly.”
“I’m sorry, I’m heading home,” she said. “I can’t let you in today. Maybe you could ask Dr. Brent.”
“I’m not here for the morgue, actually,” he corrected. He didn’t mind the correction; it had been the sane assumption to make. Mrs. Hudson had been out. The skull, still missing, would have been of no use in this situation. “I need a hug again.”
Molly stared at him and then obliged. She tucked herself against him with an alacrity that the majority of the world would have been bewildered at. “How about tea?”
“God yes.”
...Had he just said that?
“Caffè Nero’s closest, but there’s a Starbucks and a Pret A Manger down the street, too.”
“A Caffè Nero next to a Pret A Manger.” That effectively described a third of London. “Will wonders never cease.”
She laughed again, using her stupid giggle that wasn’t John’s.
This was how Sherlock Holmes somehow wound up inside a Caffè Nero with Molly Hooper. As if the day hadn’t been disconcerting enough already.
The cup was wrong. For the tea. The tea was also wrong, but the cup itself served as a warning.
“Flatmate troubles?” Molly asked eventually. She had done an extraordinary job of leaving him be but ruined it after six minutes. Not bad, all things considered.
“Go on,” he said, leaning back in his chair. It wasn’t a chair conducive to leaning in, but he did it anyway. “Puzzle it out.”
Molly looked at him uncertainly.
Honestly. “You can’t think you’re that stupid.”
“I don’t think I’m stupid.” Irritation, largely to mask confusion, but also sincere.
“I don’t think you do. Therefore, you should have the confidence to at least try and reason it out,” he explained.
She waited a moment, possibly to see if he were done being tactless. He was, but only because he had finished speaking for the moment. “Well, I can see you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Obvious.”
“And you need to,” she added. “It’s about that man who’s usually with you. John Watson.” Her eyes divided their time looking between him, her coffee, and his tea. She brightened up at some sudden recollection. “You two were in the paper a couple weeks ago, did you see?”
Sherlock would have rolled his eyes, but then he might have resembled Mycroft.
“Okay, yes, you’re you,” Molly corrected herself. “Sorry. Did them forgetting his name spark something off? You, um. You do have quite the shadow to stand in.”
“We resolved that issue.” They had. John had been upset, Sherlock had taken action, and John had been happy. They had been happy. Sherlock drank his tea and it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
“‘That’ issue.”
Oh god, she was actually trying. Chewing on her lip and fighting the urge to fiddle with her hair. If she hadn’t been wearing it back, she would have been playing with it, he was certain. She was working herself toward some insignificant epiphany.
“Are you-” Biting her lip again. It made her mouth appear tiny. “I’m sorry, but, um.”
He looked at her mildly.
“Sherlock, are you... gay?”
There it ended, her little fantasy. It was a day for that, it seemed. “Yes. More precisely, a homoromantic asexual,” he replied. Precise didn’t necessarily mean accurate, but it sufficed for his purposes.
“Oh.”
He drank his tea. If only Mrs. Hudson had returned his skull. It would have saved everyone so much bother.
Molly said nothing. She wasn’t moving much either.
“Problem?”
“I, no, I-” She visibly shook herself. “Th-thank you for coming out to me. Your trust means a lot to me.” There was an extremely practiced quality to the words. She really had been making the same mistake her entire life, hadn’t she? “I- sorry, I don’t know what that term you used was.”
“Google it,” he advised.
“No, I mean: if you’re....”
“Asexual.”
“If you’re asexual, how can you still be gay?” She seemed to be coming around to the fact that whatever answer he would give, it would still exclude her from his love life.
“Which do you prefer: soft or firm mattress?”
“Um. Firm?”
“So do I,” he said.
“Oh.” And there it was, depression settling in. “Okay. And John doesn’t want to be a mattress.”
“That’s the gist of it.” He returned to his tea, giving her a few more moments to recover. He wondered if she’d keep letting him into the morgue. Now that he couldn’t bribe her with hope, what else could he offer?
“So now he’s moved out?”
“No,” Sherlock corrected immediately. “The majority of his things are still in the flat.” Just not the important ones.
“So he’s staying with a friend.”
“Sister. With his stupid alcoholic sister who thinks I’m a creepy bastard and is encouraging John to have nothing to do with me ever again.”
Molly attempted to cover his hand with her small one. “That’s just homophobic.”
“No, she’s a lesbian. I think it’s her overprotectiveness towards a brother who won’t allow her to look after him.”
“Oh.” She said that a great deal. It made her look terribly disappointed each and every time. Difficult to know when she actually was. Molly squeezed his hand in what was presumably a show of support. “Well, I’m sorry John doesn’t fancy you.”
“John does fancy me.”
He’d lost her completely. He could tell by the tension in her hand, not to mention the look on her face. “...You’ve lost me,” she admitted.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Even I thought it was going to be simpler than that.”
Molly removed her hand and prodded her coffee stirrer through the foam still in her cup. She didn’t look up when she asked, “Do you love him?”
“Obviously.”
She bit her lip.
“Out with it.”
“But he doesn’t love you,” she finished.
“He might. In a way. He’d die for me, so at least there’s that.” He frowned. “Does it matter?”
“Does it matter if the man you’re in love with doesn’t love you back,” Molly said. Statement of disbelief.
“I mean, is it any different?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” she answered. Her voice was as small as her mouth.
“I wouldn’t know either, but it doesn’t seem like it could be.” He forestalled her before she could disagree. “If you both do the motions of it, both take what you want from it, and are both happy, how can that matter? Everyone wins and no one gets hurt.”
“That sounds like a lot of hurt, actually,” Molly said.
“It isn’t, really. More a matter of compromise.” Frankly, he was amazed more people didn’t do it this way.
“What if John isn’t okay with not loving you back?”
Sherlock hadn’t thought of that. This had been a good decision after all, getting a result like that. “Do you think he wouldn’t be?”
Molly smiled at him sadly. “Most people can’t handle it.” Personal experience, clearly.
“John isn’t most people.” John wasn’t anything like most people. He only seemed to be. John knew and he’d handled it wonderfully. Hadn’t he? “And I’ve hardly begged him for his undying devotion. If he’d just come back to the flat, everything would be fine.”
She went on playing with that coffee stirrer. A minute or so later, she looked up, hell-bent on being helpful. Years of people, school and college and all levels of uni, all these people crying on her shoulder because she so wanted to help. How could she stand it? And yet she went on doing it. An incomprehensible person, but a fantastic resource. “What have you asked him for?”
“I told you: to come back to the flat.”
“I mean besides that.”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not pressuring him.” He was behaving inappropriately, society might tell him, but John had only ever objected retroactively.
“No,” she said, looking impatient. Her, impatient at him! “I mean, what have you ever asked him for, romantically?”
“Tea.”
“Sorry?”
“I’ve asked him for tea. Which he supplied without qualm.”
“O...kay. What does he ask you for? Romantically.”
“He doesn’t initiate. Apparently, he hadn’t realized I’d instigated a relationship.” He paused. “This sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. That sad expression was back, with a dash of resigned and just a touch of pity.
“So, from your expertise as a long-suffering sympathetic ear and damp shoulder, what happens now?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, “typically, this is where we get a pint of ice cream, two spoons and watch a bad movie.”
“You mean, surrender.”
She nodded.
He tried to consider it. Really, he did. “No,” he said. “That’s a horrible idea.”
Molly deflated.
“I meant the surrendering part,” he clarified. “Not the ice cream part. I can see how that would be nice.”
“Do you want ice cream?” she asked.
“No.” He wanted John and, apparently, couldn’t have him anymore. That was the crux of the problem.
If John hadn’t thought they were in a relationship, what had he thought was going on? Those jokes about Sherlock prostituting himself for tea, had he actually meant those? It had hardly been the tea he’d prostituted himself for.
No, those were still probably just jokes. John’s moral compass didn’t agree with prostitution. He would have put a stop to that.
Friends with benefits, then. But why the anger at the benefits?
No.
Wait.
Stop.
“I need more information,” he realized. “I keep making the same mistake.” It was a frustratingly simple mistake to make and-
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“What?” Molly asked.
“I think John might be, too.” That would make so much sense. No. Stop. He was theorizing again. Still, if John didn’t know, Sherlock ought to tell him. If John didn’t know Sherlock loved him, John would think himself in a terrible bargaining position, being sexually vulnerable. John would feel cornered and trapped. He would be inclined to fight and escape, as he had done. As it stood, if John already knew, the reminder could hardly make matters any worse. It would mean putting himself into an obviously vulnerable position, but the risk seemed worth it. “I need to check, at the very least.”
“Check what?”
“Molly,” Sherlock asked, “how do you prove you love someone?”
“Um,” Molly said.
“Think!”
“You do something ridiculous.”
“I do ridiculous things every day. I need something better than that.”
“Something ridiculous, for the other person? That you wouldn’t normally do? Sherlock, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“No,” he said. He stood. Downed the rest of his tea, even if it wasn’t the same as John’s. “I know what I’m doing. This time.” He slammed the cup back onto the table and said, because Mummy had always told him to and sometimes he even remembered: “Thank you.”
Despite the rare appearance of Sherlock’s manners, Molly didn’t look terribly pleased. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. This is perfect.”
“What is?”
He grinned wildly. “Autons!”
With that, he swept out of the building, success well within his grasp.
Step Five
Rating: R
Wordcount: 4.4k this part, 23.7k overall
Warnings: Extremely dysfunctional behaviour, sexual acts, swearing. Spoiler: ramifications of past emotional abuse.
Beta: vyctori
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: Whatever it took, he was going to make this work.
step one: acclimatize subject
step two: reward behaviour
Step Three: Escalate Procedure
Step Four: Control Damages
“Anything you can tell me,” Lestrade prompted.
He scoffed, turning over the corpse’s hand. Fresh scratch over light, thin scars. “Anything?” Down the body now, unlacing the shoes, pulling them off. He checked inside the shoe and regarded the socks. Lint. Human hair only. “She volunteered at an animal shelter. It’s either close to her... apartment, I’d say. Extremely close to her apartment or close to an Underground station. Meaning she lived at an apartment near an Underground station as well, one where they don’t allow pets.”
“Is that going to be important?” Lestrade asked, arms crossed. Tired. He wanted to lean against something but couldn’t in the morgue; the walls were too far away from the table. Also, on sheer principle, Lestrade never leaned. But he wanted to.
“Could be. I don’t know yet.”
There was a long silence as John didn’t ask him how he knew what he already knew.
There was an extended silence as Lestrade looked at the spot where John wasn’t.
Thank god for Molly.
“Molly!” he said. “You adopt your cats from a shelter. Does she look familiar?”
Molly popped over from where she’d been attempting to casually hover. She bit her lip as she looked at the woman. “Sorry, no. Still no I.D.?”
“None,” Sherlock agreed. “Considering her Oyster card was in her purse, the theft must have occurred after she left the tube. Whether the thief also strangled her with piano wire remains to be seen. Rather, whether the killer stole her purse to make it look like theft. Honestly, there are easier ways of mugging people.”
Wait.
“The killer and the thief are separate, working in tandem,” he realized.
“And we know this how?”
“You’ve seen the footprints. She went down the alley willingly. At a run. But she wasn’t being chased. She had her purse out on the way to the Underground, it was snatched, and she gave chase. She pulls her mobile out as she runs and drops it when the second player in this little drama jumps out behind her.”
“Who walks down a London street with their purse out?”
“A woman who just bought a hotdog with mustard and relish,” Sherlock replied. “It was on the ground, uneaten, less than four metres away from the vender.” He excluded the influence of pigeons in that statement. “It also happens to be on the front of her shirt, just there.” He pointed. The green and yellow blended in with the print of her top, a stain convenient for the top’s owner and inconvenient for everyone else. “She dropped it and her change when her purse was taken. I imagine passersby picked up her change. Anyway, I’d talk to the hotdog vender if I were you. He must have seen the theft.”
Lestrade glanced away from him, toward the empty air where John wasn’t.
“Problem?” Sherlock asked.
“You tell me,” Lestrade said.
“If you’re going to say something, then say it.”
Molly touched his sleeve. “I’ll get you a coffee.” Excuse to leave, conflict aversion. Long strides confirmed it.
“Look,” Lestrade said. “What’s between you two is your business until you start making it my business. Lay off my people and I won’t say a word.”
“I have laid off.”
Lestrade lifted his eyebrows. “Yeah. Right.” He adjusted his coat. On his way out, excellent. “Just apologize to John before I have to arrest Anderson for killing you.”
“What makes you think it was my fault?” he demanded.
Lestrade looked at him.
“Fine,” Sherlock spat.
“Are you staying with the body?”
He nodded curtly, glaring at the corpse.
Lestrade walked three-fourths of the way to the door. He turned around. He didn’t sigh in the same way he didn’t lean against the wall. “How long is Dr. Watson planning to stay home? Just for damage control purposes.”
“He’s not.”
“What?”
“Home.”
This time, Lestrade did sigh. He bent his head and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Right. Anderson deserved what he got this time. This time,” Lestrade stressed.
What’s wrong, freak? Boyfriend doesn’t love you anymore?
“He was surprisingly accurate,” Sherlock said. “For once.” Whether or not it held any degree of truth was of course irrelevant, but to have Anderson talking about John, for Anderson to refer to John as Sherlock never had.... Unbearable.
Lestrade looked at him. A different look. Recognition of Sherlock’s capacity for emotion. It made Lestrade’s expression oddly similar to John’s and Sherlock didn’t like that at all.
“Stop it. Get out.”
Raising his hands in a gesture of indifferent surrender, Lestrade left.
Sherlock studied the body. Why piano wire? Difficult to hold, required thick gloves to wield, fairly noticeable to prepare. The unending question of Sherlock’s life: who was being stupid now?
He thought and he thought. He didn’t focus, but he certainly thought. Come on, try. There was a perfectly good corpse in front of him. Why her? The piano wire and two-man effort meant preparation. The setting meant watching her habits - the men had counted on her buying a hotdog there. Clearly, she’d been observed for some time. The wire was unique and would have been noticed if this had been a pleasure killing. Not to mention the sloppy technique. Not a hired job. It reeked of amateurs who thought themselves clever. Who was in the lead, then? The thief, the strangler, or another individual?
A warm mug was pressed into his hands. He drank his tea and choked on coffee.
Molly snatched the mug back from him before he could spill on the corpse. Hot liquid scalded his hands through his gloves, but the corpse escaped.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he rasped, then coughed again.
Mug in one hand, his arm in the other, Molly pulled him over to a sink. She peeled his gloves off with an elastic snap and pushed his hands under the tap. He surprised himself by letting her. Molly’s hands were less scarred than the corpse’s but the telltale signs of lifelong cat-ownership were clear.
Once she turned the tap off, they stood in silence. An inconvenient noise interrupted it.
“Was that your stomach?” she asked.
“Not important,” he said. There was no food at the flat. He kept forgetting. That would be problematic. He’d finished the last of the Weetabix this morning. The bread had been yesterday morning, once he’d picked the mould off it. Mycroft had promised to say nothing about his situation as long as he ate breakfast for the duration of it. If he didn’t buy more food, Mycroft would visit. And then he would say things. He would say things about John. It would be horrific.
“Have you eaten?” Molly asked.
“I ate breakfast.”
“It’s almost five,” she said.
“Six,” he corrected.
Abruptly tense, almost frantic, Molly checked her watch. She relaxed, then tensed again, now looking up at Sherlock. “It’s only four forty-eight.”
“What? Oh.” The time. Yes. No one was counting the days of John’s absence besides him.
His bag was packed for five days. John didn’t have the budget for new clothing. He’d done laundry somewhere else. The choice of returning to 221b would be more compelling at the end of each laundry cycle. Four more days.
“Sherlock?”
There was a small, feminine hand on his. He’d been staring at the sink. He looked at the hand.
Molly didn’t move it.
He considered asking her to. He considered simply pulling away and letting that be that. After all, Molly didn’t like him. Molly was blindly infatuated with a version of him that didn’t exist. She saw but she didn’t observe. He couldn’t particularly fault her for it either. It made her happy and her aim was happiness, not results. It was annoying, but he let her have her fun. Besides, annoying was par for the course. Women in his life fell into two categories: Mummy (subcategory: Mrs. Hudson) and Annoyance (subcategories: helpful, detrimental, suspect).
But right now. Her hand.
That wasn’t annoying. It was just sort of there. He wasn’t used to that. Nobody touched him. Mummy was dead, Mycroft was Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson limited it to special occasions, and John was somewhere out in the world without him, just like Victor. Nobody else touched him. Honestly, John didn’t touch him that much either. He still didn’t initiate. At least Victor had had the decency to collapse on top of him, warm and sprawling, if sweaty.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said and removed her hand. Now his hand was cold. Not simply from the water. “You just looked like you could use a friend.”
“And what does that look like?”
“Like you’ve had a crap week and no sleep. Basically, like you could use a hug and a nap.”
Sherlock looked at her.
“What?” Molly asked.
“I hadn’t considered that.”
Molly’s eyes flickered between his face and his chest. She stepped in, arms slipping between his sides and his elbows. She pressed her face against his shoulder with complete disregard of the way his hands moved about helplessly in the air behind her back.
“What are you doing?” he asked again. Then he felt the muscles of his shoulders begin to relax. “Oh,” he said. “That’s very effective.” Experimentally, he let his hands touch her back. Were her shoulders relaxing as well?
Molly laughed. Her giggle wasn’t at all like John’s. “I’m glad,” she said. She let him go and he didn’t have the timing down. For a moment, she was pulling back against his hands. Just as she tried to adjust to being held in place, he hastened to let her go and then they stood there, hyper-aware of their own arms, until Sherlock took a large step backward.
“Awkward,” she said.
“Only if you think it is.” He smiled as best he could.
She did the same.
“I’m going to leave now,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s probably for the best.”
They walked away in opposite directions.
Molly hugged me today. SH
This received the exact same answer as his previous messages, which was to say, none. Nothing to Why haven’t you come home yet? SH, nothing to John, where are you? SH, and nothing even to Let me know you’re safe at least. SH.
Simply nothing.
Well, nothing from John.
The unknown number and the order to stop txting my brother had cleared a few things up, though.
It turned out to be three idiots, not two, as he’d expected. And, as it happened, they had killed the wrong woman by mistake. Amateurish had been too kind a term.
He texted Harry about it.
Her response of wtf had been less than impressive.
Tell John. SH
No u creepy bastard
He’d be interested. SH
Leave us alone
John was still with her, then. Day eight.
On the morning of day nine, Sherlock realized there was nothing in the flat fit for human consumption.
Mycroft showed up by ten o’clock.
“I would tell you how to fix this, but then you’d never do it,” the bastard sighed. He heaped pity onto his face and exasperation into his shoulders. He was sitting in John’s chair. “Too stubborn for your own good.”
“Shut up. He isn’t yours.”
“Nor yours, at this rate,” Mycroft agreed.
Sherlock was abruptly reminded of a large portion of his childhood. He had spent it determining whether he could master telekinesis the small amount necessary to cause internal bleeding.
Mycroft sighed another one of his heavy sighs. “No, Sherlock, I thought you learned this when you were seven: you can’t kill me with your brain.”
He could try.
“Wasted effort.”
What else was he going to do?
“There’s a great number of things you could be doing.” Mycroft rotated the handle of his umbrella, the tip against the carpet.
He turned his face away.
“No, no job. Not at the moment, certainly.”
Must he smile like that?
“Yes, I really must. It does annoy you so.”
Sherlock glared.
“You’re not even giving me the silent treatment properly,” Mycroft lamented. “You’re taking the easy way out and letting me read your body language. How very fortunate that I know it. If I didn’t, I might be offended. I might, even, be hurt.”
Sherlock wished he would be.
“Yes, well, we can’t have everything, can we?”
He refused to dignify that with even a nonverbal answer.
“But you could have something, couldn’t you?” Mycroft went on. “More than you think you had, at any rate.”
“More than I think.” Indignation flung the words out of him. He knew what he had. He knew that he needed John and John wanted him. Coming from an alcoholic family and sporting a stress addiction of his own, John was even highly inclined to need Sherlock back. John was loyal and sentimental and would be inclined to love Sherlock, given time, or close enough to be satisfactory.
“You really are terribly dense sometimes, dear brother.”
“Stay out of my relationship. Stay out and keep out.”
“Yes, because Dr. Watson is a fort you’ve constructed and put a sign on.” There it was: the eye roll. “Sherlock, you don’t have a relationship.”
Sherlock got up, went to his room, and slammed the door.
Four hours later, he came out. Mycroft’s PA was now in John’s chair. She didn’t look up from her Blackberry. “All right,” Sherlock said. “What did he mean by that?”
The woman clicked through a few menus and wordlessly handed the mobile to him. There was a video lined up on it. Sherlock hit play. The quality of the image was low, CCTV level. The angles confirmed it.
And there, a sight Sherlock had gone nine days without.
John was walking on the street at night. He wore his tan jumper beneath his coat. There was a woman with him. They were chatting. John looked happy. Excited. As did the woman. They went into a building. The camera turned. It was an Italian restaurant. Through the window, the chairs and tables were seen. They were clearly too small, meant for intimacy rather than comfort.
A time skip. John and the woman exited. John looked tired. Tense. Faking interest. The woman didn’t notice. She touched John’s arm as if she had any right to. John smiled and shook his head. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. They parted ways. John trudged homeward.
The video ended.
Sherlock handed the PA back her phone.
She left.
Sherlock stayed very still. He stayed very still indeed and then he went upstairs. He went to John’s desk and opened the drawer where John kept his gun and ammunition.
Both were gone.
In their place was the small notebook from John’s jacket.
He opened it to the last entry.
Never theorize before possessing the facts. One inevitably twists the facts to suit the theory rather than the theory to suit the facts.
Oh.
Well.
It was hardly as if Sherlock had never been a hypocrite before.
Fact: John wouldn’t cheat on him. John wouldn’t cheat on anyone, and especially not for a date as bad as the one he’d just had.
Fact: In order to cheat on someone, one must be in a relationship with that individual.
Fact: John had gone on a crap date last week.
Conclusion: John did not believe that he and Sherlock were engaged in a romantic relationship.
But why?
“Molly.”
“I’m sorry, I’m heading home,” she said. “I can’t let you in today. Maybe you could ask Dr. Brent.”
“I’m not here for the morgue, actually,” he corrected. He didn’t mind the correction; it had been the sane assumption to make. Mrs. Hudson had been out. The skull, still missing, would have been of no use in this situation. “I need a hug again.”
Molly stared at him and then obliged. She tucked herself against him with an alacrity that the majority of the world would have been bewildered at. “How about tea?”
“God yes.”
...Had he just said that?
“Caffè Nero’s closest, but there’s a Starbucks and a Pret A Manger down the street, too.”
“A Caffè Nero next to a Pret A Manger.” That effectively described a third of London. “Will wonders never cease.”
She laughed again, using her stupid giggle that wasn’t John’s.
This was how Sherlock Holmes somehow wound up inside a Caffè Nero with Molly Hooper. As if the day hadn’t been disconcerting enough already.
The cup was wrong. For the tea. The tea was also wrong, but the cup itself served as a warning.
“Flatmate troubles?” Molly asked eventually. She had done an extraordinary job of leaving him be but ruined it after six minutes. Not bad, all things considered.
“Go on,” he said, leaning back in his chair. It wasn’t a chair conducive to leaning in, but he did it anyway. “Puzzle it out.”
Molly looked at him uncertainly.
Honestly. “You can’t think you’re that stupid.”
“I don’t think I’m stupid.” Irritation, largely to mask confusion, but also sincere.
“I don’t think you do. Therefore, you should have the confidence to at least try and reason it out,” he explained.
She waited a moment, possibly to see if he were done being tactless. He was, but only because he had finished speaking for the moment. “Well, I can see you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Obvious.”
“And you need to,” she added. “It’s about that man who’s usually with you. John Watson.” Her eyes divided their time looking between him, her coffee, and his tea. She brightened up at some sudden recollection. “You two were in the paper a couple weeks ago, did you see?”
Sherlock would have rolled his eyes, but then he might have resembled Mycroft.
“Okay, yes, you’re you,” Molly corrected herself. “Sorry. Did them forgetting his name spark something off? You, um. You do have quite the shadow to stand in.”
“We resolved that issue.” They had. John had been upset, Sherlock had taken action, and John had been happy. They had been happy. Sherlock drank his tea and it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
“‘That’ issue.”
Oh god, she was actually trying. Chewing on her lip and fighting the urge to fiddle with her hair. If she hadn’t been wearing it back, she would have been playing with it, he was certain. She was working herself toward some insignificant epiphany.
“Are you-” Biting her lip again. It made her mouth appear tiny. “I’m sorry, but, um.”
He looked at her mildly.
“Sherlock, are you... gay?”
There it ended, her little fantasy. It was a day for that, it seemed. “Yes. More precisely, a homoromantic asexual,” he replied. Precise didn’t necessarily mean accurate, but it sufficed for his purposes.
“Oh.”
He drank his tea. If only Mrs. Hudson had returned his skull. It would have saved everyone so much bother.
Molly said nothing. She wasn’t moving much either.
“Problem?”
“I, no, I-” She visibly shook herself. “Th-thank you for coming out to me. Your trust means a lot to me.” There was an extremely practiced quality to the words. She really had been making the same mistake her entire life, hadn’t she? “I- sorry, I don’t know what that term you used was.”
“Google it,” he advised.
“No, I mean: if you’re....”
“Asexual.”
“If you’re asexual, how can you still be gay?” She seemed to be coming around to the fact that whatever answer he would give, it would still exclude her from his love life.
“Which do you prefer: soft or firm mattress?”
“Um. Firm?”
“So do I,” he said.
“Oh.” And there it was, depression settling in. “Okay. And John doesn’t want to be a mattress.”
“That’s the gist of it.” He returned to his tea, giving her a few more moments to recover. He wondered if she’d keep letting him into the morgue. Now that he couldn’t bribe her with hope, what else could he offer?
“So now he’s moved out?”
“No,” Sherlock corrected immediately. “The majority of his things are still in the flat.” Just not the important ones.
“So he’s staying with a friend.”
“Sister. With his stupid alcoholic sister who thinks I’m a creepy bastard and is encouraging John to have nothing to do with me ever again.”
Molly attempted to cover his hand with her small one. “That’s just homophobic.”
“No, she’s a lesbian. I think it’s her overprotectiveness towards a brother who won’t allow her to look after him.”
“Oh.” She said that a great deal. It made her look terribly disappointed each and every time. Difficult to know when she actually was. Molly squeezed his hand in what was presumably a show of support. “Well, I’m sorry John doesn’t fancy you.”
“John does fancy me.”
He’d lost her completely. He could tell by the tension in her hand, not to mention the look on her face. “...You’ve lost me,” she admitted.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Even I thought it was going to be simpler than that.”
Molly removed her hand and prodded her coffee stirrer through the foam still in her cup. She didn’t look up when she asked, “Do you love him?”
“Obviously.”
She bit her lip.
“Out with it.”
“But he doesn’t love you,” she finished.
“He might. In a way. He’d die for me, so at least there’s that.” He frowned. “Does it matter?”
“Does it matter if the man you’re in love with doesn’t love you back,” Molly said. Statement of disbelief.
“I mean, is it any different?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” she answered. Her voice was as small as her mouth.
“I wouldn’t know either, but it doesn’t seem like it could be.” He forestalled her before she could disagree. “If you both do the motions of it, both take what you want from it, and are both happy, how can that matter? Everyone wins and no one gets hurt.”
“That sounds like a lot of hurt, actually,” Molly said.
“It isn’t, really. More a matter of compromise.” Frankly, he was amazed more people didn’t do it this way.
“What if John isn’t okay with not loving you back?”
Sherlock hadn’t thought of that. This had been a good decision after all, getting a result like that. “Do you think he wouldn’t be?”
Molly smiled at him sadly. “Most people can’t handle it.” Personal experience, clearly.
“John isn’t most people.” John wasn’t anything like most people. He only seemed to be. John knew and he’d handled it wonderfully. Hadn’t he? “And I’ve hardly begged him for his undying devotion. If he’d just come back to the flat, everything would be fine.”
She went on playing with that coffee stirrer. A minute or so later, she looked up, hell-bent on being helpful. Years of people, school and college and all levels of uni, all these people crying on her shoulder because she so wanted to help. How could she stand it? And yet she went on doing it. An incomprehensible person, but a fantastic resource. “What have you asked him for?”
“I told you: to come back to the flat.”
“I mean besides that.”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not pressuring him.” He was behaving inappropriately, society might tell him, but John had only ever objected retroactively.
“No,” she said, looking impatient. Her, impatient at him! “I mean, what have you ever asked him for, romantically?”
“Tea.”
“Sorry?”
“I’ve asked him for tea. Which he supplied without qualm.”
“O...kay. What does he ask you for? Romantically.”
“He doesn’t initiate. Apparently, he hadn’t realized I’d instigated a relationship.” He paused. “This sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. That sad expression was back, with a dash of resigned and just a touch of pity.
“So, from your expertise as a long-suffering sympathetic ear and damp shoulder, what happens now?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, “typically, this is where we get a pint of ice cream, two spoons and watch a bad movie.”
“You mean, surrender.”
She nodded.
He tried to consider it. Really, he did. “No,” he said. “That’s a horrible idea.”
Molly deflated.
“I meant the surrendering part,” he clarified. “Not the ice cream part. I can see how that would be nice.”
“Do you want ice cream?” she asked.
“No.” He wanted John and, apparently, couldn’t have him anymore. That was the crux of the problem.
If John hadn’t thought they were in a relationship, what had he thought was going on? Those jokes about Sherlock prostituting himself for tea, had he actually meant those? It had hardly been the tea he’d prostituted himself for.
No, those were still probably just jokes. John’s moral compass didn’t agree with prostitution. He would have put a stop to that.
Friends with benefits, then. But why the anger at the benefits?
No.
Wait.
Stop.
“I need more information,” he realized. “I keep making the same mistake.” It was a frustratingly simple mistake to make and-
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“What?” Molly asked.
“I think John might be, too.” That would make so much sense. No. Stop. He was theorizing again. Still, if John didn’t know, Sherlock ought to tell him. If John didn’t know Sherlock loved him, John would think himself in a terrible bargaining position, being sexually vulnerable. John would feel cornered and trapped. He would be inclined to fight and escape, as he had done. As it stood, if John already knew, the reminder could hardly make matters any worse. It would mean putting himself into an obviously vulnerable position, but the risk seemed worth it. “I need to check, at the very least.”
“Check what?”
“Molly,” Sherlock asked, “how do you prove you love someone?”
“Um,” Molly said.
“Think!”
“You do something ridiculous.”
“I do ridiculous things every day. I need something better than that.”
“Something ridiculous, for the other person? That you wouldn’t normally do? Sherlock, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“No,” he said. He stood. Downed the rest of his tea, even if it wasn’t the same as John’s. “I know what I’m doing. This time.” He slammed the cup back onto the table and said, because Mummy had always told him to and sometimes he even remembered: “Thank you.”
Despite the rare appearance of Sherlock’s manners, Molly didn’t look terribly pleased. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. This is perfect.”
“What is?”
He grinned wildly. “Autons!”
With that, he swept out of the building, success well within his grasp.
Step Five