Above, Below (Through the Cracks) || Part One ||
John Hamish Watson was 34.
Until six months ago he’d been a doctor.
In the army.
Serving in Afghanistan.
Then he’d been shot by the Taliban. He tried not to take it personally, they’d been shooting at everybody, after all, and he wasn’t the only one they’d hit. There’d been treatment in the field and a stay in the RAMC Medical Centre at Camp Bastion, but it hadn’t been enough. Four weeks after he’d been the only man on his patrol to be shot and survive he’d been shipped back to England.
With a hole in his shoulder and a limp that they told him was PTSD - and he said was a load of gumpf - Doctor John Watson was invalided out of the British Army. Apparently the Army didn't need a doctor with an intermittent but uncontrollable tremor in his dominant hand.
John had known he’d never be a surgeon again, that he’d never be able to work in A&E. Worst of all, he’d be lucky if he could even get a job as a GP.
So he had gravitated towards London. His sister Harry had begged him to move close to her, and while he liked to keep the peace by letting her think that was the reason, it wasn’t. London was the only place that came close to feeling like it might be home in the crushing wake of his loss. He’d belonged in the army and without it he was lost.
The rush of the city had been comforting to John when he’d gone to University nearly ten years ago. Both his parents were dead and his sister was already on her way to drinking too much and the city had swallowed him whole and made him feel alive. St. Bart’s had become like a second home as he studied, the staff a new family that supported and encouraged him and smiled proudly when he went to war.
There was nothing left in Doncaster, his childhood home, and there hadn’t been for years. He didn’t know his family in Scotland, he wasn’t even sure they still lived in Edinburgh where he’d visited them once as a boy. London had been the only place for him to go, even if it was going to be a struggle on his Army pension.
And a struggle it was.
John lived in Battersea, in a flat approximately the same dimensions as a shoebox. The only thing that stopped John’s flat from being a bedsit, other than the Landlord’s creative labelling skills, was the fact that he had his own bathroom. There wasn’t room to swing a cat in the cramped, always muggy and slightly damp room but it was his. It had been his only requirement for life outside the Army. After years of having to share bathrooms with more than a couple of other blokes John Watson was determined to be able to have a bath, shower, or even just a piss in peace.
However, taking the bathroom out of the equation, the dirty beige, run down little flat made his tent in Afghanistan seem positively palatial in comparison. When he was not enjoying a bath in peace John hated the place with a deep, heavy weight inside his chest. The dull walls, adorned with only a few photographs from his tour and one of his parents, Harry and himself on the beach at Skegness back when he and Harry were young and they were all happy, seemed like a prison.
It had taken John a month stuck in the flat to start losing his marbles. The hunt for a new job was both arduous and humiliating, being turned down at every corner. Even the desperately understaffed GP surgeries weren’t interested in him, a man trained for combat wasn’t the right fit for children with runny noses and pensioners who were a bit under the weather, deary.
With nothing better to do he had started exploring London. At first he went to all the clichéd free tourist attractions he’d eschewed during his Uni years and medical training. He walked around the museums of London until his feet were sore and his leg ached and then he’d get up the next morning, stare at his beige walls over his cup of tea and go out to do it all again.
He learnt that the he didn’t understand Modern Art and while the Tate Modern was a very nice building, he wasn’t too keen on what they kept inside it. The British Museum took over two weeks to properly investigate and wanted an extortionate one-fifty off him to look after his slightly soggy coat. When the weather was nice he enjoyed sitting on the Southbank watching the world go by and occasionally nipping into the National Theatre to listen to the free music. He was drawn back to the Hunterian Museum four times, the lines of jars fascinating if occasionally stomach turning. Even as an army doctor, a syphilitic penis wasn’t something he ever really needed to see more than once, especially not preserved in a jar.
Tourist London lost its appeal eventually. The heat of the summer and throng of children and their parents crowding the streets of the centre of town as the school holidays hit drove John back. He returned to wasting away his days in his flat, the air stifling and oppressive in the heat wave, and tried not lament his lost life. If he thought about it for too long, the dreams and nightmares of sand and dry heat and blood and gunfire, he’d really lose it. It got harder by the day.
The heat eventually broke and as summer moved into autumn the streets cleared as much as they ever would. John started to look at his service handgun - illegally kept - with contemplation, and then what he realised in complete horror, was longing.
//
The first thing Sherlock noticed was the smell of blood, sharp and metallic against the back of his throat. It overpowered his senses.
It was everywhere. He was too late. Again.
The Lady Bethnal was sprawled across the dirty floor, the electric green of her dress and hair were fanned out around her in the pool of red. Her eyes were open, staring lifelessly at the roof of the tunnel in horror, the once bright and vibrant emerald, already dull and starting to cloud.
Sherlock was no stranger to death. No stranger to unpleasant and painful and horrible death. The site before him still made his empty stomach churn and heave.
Bethnal had been gutted. Filleted from throat to pelvis, her insides hanging out in a way that wasn’t just unnatural because they weren’t inside anymore. They’d been arranged. They’d been played with.
Sherlock swallowed down the bile threatening to rise up his throat. It was not the time to start getting emotional, to stop thinking about the facts, the plan, the chase.
There was a noise at the end of the tunnel, deep in the dark where the stone was cold and damp and old. Two sets of footsteps, walking almost idly. They were letting him know they were coming.
Sherlock hadn’t slept in four days, hadn’t eaten in two. His body was rapidly approaching limits he had not tested in over five years. Limits he had not tested since the drugs, since the withdrawal.
He had not planned on testing them again but he didn’t have any choice.
Turning, he ran. Towards light. Towards air.
Above.
//
John had not been out of the flat that day. It was grey and drizzly and generally foul outside but he was suddenly in desperate need to get out from inside his horrible four walls. He put on a jacket, grabbed his cane and went to the newsagents that occupied the ground floor of the building next door. The Rajit’s were the hardest working people John had ever known in England and somehow were always happy to see him.
The bell above the door rang as John pushed it open and stepped inside. “Hello,” he said with as much of a smile as he was able to muster. His shoulder had started aching as soon as he stepped outside, the low steady throb that always came with the rain.
“Good evening, doctor,” Mr Rajit greeted him cheerfully in return. Behind the counter his daughter, a toddler wrapped up in a bright pink puffa jacket and matching hat and mittens waved up at him from her playpen.
John warmed a little at the toothy smile she offered him and waved back.
“Busy day?” Mr Rajit asked as John browsed the shelves and stands.
“A bit,” John lied. He was unable to tell Mr Rajit, who was up at three every morning for the shop, the most taxing thing he’d done all day was get up to change the channel for Homes Under the Hammer when he couldn’t find the remote.
They exchanged genial but idle chitchat as John picked up a few items, some more milk, a newspaper, a packet of chocolate digestives and a large bar of fruit and nut. He didn’t really want anything else, but he kept looking anyway. He added a pot noodle to his haul, even though he hated them. Anything to delay going back to the flat for as long as possible.
As Mr Rajit offered to have Mrs Rajit bring him up a spot of her spicy dhal at teatime, John was hit with the full force of just how empty his existence had become. If he were to fall off the face of the earth the only people likely to miss him would be the Rajits, and that would probably take a while.
Coupled with his slowly building insanity in the flat, it was a deeply, darkly depressing thought. Whatever London had been to him once, whatever comfort it had offered it was failing to give him again.
He was just as lost as the day he’d taken off his uniform for the last time.
//
The first breath of fresh air burned Sherlock's lungs. It was damp, but crisp Above as he heaved in deep, gasping breaths. The dull, grey light stung his eyes and his pupils contracted sharply against the burn to his retinas. It was nothing compared to the pain in his shoulder, which throbbed and pulsed as though it were on fire.
He stumbled down the nameless church’s stone steps, forcing his feet not to drag or trip. Blood dripped on the ground from his wound and the handle of the knife was still protruding from the back of his jacket.
There wasn't time to stop, time to adjust. The heavy oak and iron doors shut behind him with a shuddering thud. Attempting to lock or bar them would do no good. It would take too long with only one properly functioning arm and would lose him time rather than gain it.
Moriarty and Moran were still coming, toying with him as they closed the gap between hunters and prey. Being Above would only offer protection for a short while, and only a little of it at best.
At their current rate of gain they would have him in less than twenty minutes.
He jumped the fence around the church with great difficulty and a cry of agony as pain sparked hot and sharp through his shoulder. The pedestrians on the street hurried past him huddled beneath their umbrellas with collars upturned. Not one of them noticed him. None of them questioned what he’d been doing, if he was all right, why he’d been stabbed. Not even the off duty policeman.
Sherlock forged on. There wasn’t time to lament why he never came Above, the people that had looked through him often enough to force him through the cracks. There was only one chance.
He had to get to Mycroft.
If anyone could help him, if anyone had the strength of mind to really see him again it would be his brother. The brother he’d idolised as a child, who had always been more brilliant than Sherlock could have dreamed. The brother he had so desperately wanted to impress, to be until Mycroft had turned into their father, all secret handshakes and influential whispers behind closed doors.
If it worked, if Mycroft could still be the boy Sherlock remembered wanting the approval of, he might make it. Mycroft was the only person who might be able to offer him a safe harbour for long enough to allow him to solve this.
The rain was like ice on Sherlock’s skin, seeping through his clothes to chill his exhausted, weary bones. He made his way towards the river and hoped the rain might cover his tracks, give him just a little longer before they caught him.
He fell.
The pavement was cold and rough beneath his palms. The knife shifted. Someone screamed and blood mixed pink in the rain.
Sherlock’s world went black.
John said goodbye to Mr Rajit once he’d browsed for too long in the small shop, paid for all the things he didn’t need and had them put in a blue carrier bag. The bell above the door tinkled again as he stepped outside into what had become a bloody awful downpour.
He turned the corner, planning on going straight back up to his flat when he saw it. A great black heap in the middle of the pavement, twenty or so yards away from his front door.
Somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled.
As he approached the black mass he realised it wasn’t an abandoned bin liner full of rubbish. It was a person, a man, and there was a knife sticking out the back of his shoulder.
“Shit,” John cursed loudly. Now that he looked he could see blood dripping from the wound, pink trickles mixed with rainwater ran across the pavement and into the drain.
The man was clearly tall, but lean, curled up and collapsed on his knees. He was soaked to the bone. John was on the pavement next to him in an instant, cane and shopping forgotten as he pressed two fingers to the man’s neck. He didn’t know he’d been holding his breath until he found a pulse, weak but there, and the tightness around his chest eased a little.
Years of training kicked in without having to think about it. John pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around the man’s trembling shoulders, considering the risks and merits of trying to move him inside until an ambulance arrived.
The man’s head snapped up. A crown of messy, black, soaking wet curls gave way to a pale and angular, but stunning face with piercing blue eyes full of accusation.
“It’s okay,” John assured, hands raised in supplication. “I’m a doctor, I’m trying to help you. Can you walk?”
“No,” the man said, his voice hoarse but full of a fear John knew too well. Remembered from the war. “No help.”
“You’ve been stabbed,” John told him, though he realised the man probably already knew that. Unless he was well on his way to hypothermia and everything hurt, the knife in his shoulder would be causing him a lot of bother. “We need to get you inside, then get you to hospital.”
“No!” The man shouted, attempting to scrabble away from John but not getting far. “No hospitals, no hospitals,” he repeated, frantic and terrified eyes scanning the street as though he were looking for an escape. Then his injured arm gave out from under him and with a cry of pain, he crumpled back onto the pavement.
The man was out cold again.
Lightning flashed and barely a second later the thunder rumbled again. The storm was overhead.
John picked the man up, not an easy task considering his size, and took him inside. He didn’t call an ambulance, or the police.
//
John moved on autopilot.
He laid the still unconscious man out across the sofa, resting his head on one of the cushions. The man stirred as John pressed a clean tea towel around the hilt of the knife where blood was still steadily oozing from around the wound. His eyes fluttered and he let out a low groan.
“Sorry,” John muttered. It was only going to get worse.
The man was shivering, he was probably already in shock and his clothes were soaked through. John couldn’t help but stop and stare for a moment at what he was wearing. He looked like he’d wandered off the set of the sort of Regency period drama his mother used to love watching when she was sick.
The man gave another pained groan and John set back to work. He stripped the madly dressed stranger of his shoes and almost impossibly tight trousers quickly and clinically. His top half wasn’t so easy. The clothes were dirty and well worn and John didn’t want to cut them off with nothing to offer him in exchange that would fit.
John unbuttoned his black tailcoat, deep blue waistcoat with red edging and black fitted shirt and removed each layer from the man’s right side. Then covered him to the waist in the spare blanket John kept under the bed.
“Be right back,” John said into the silence before getting up from where he’d been sitting on the coffee table.
He collected his medical kit from where it had been packed away in the back of his wardrobe, not used since his move to London. Then in the kitchen he washed his hands twice, filled a bowl with warm water, a clean cloth and a healthy splash of dettol disinfectant.
John put on a pair of surgical gloves and with the steadiest hands he’d possessed since his return, sat the stranger up against him and removed the knife. The man awoke, with a gasp and then a low shout of pain that was universal as his whole body tensed against John’s.
“It’s okay,” John soothed, pressing a clean towel to the wound as it started to bleed more freely. “I’m trying to help you.”
“Who are you?” the man asked, voice rough but confident.
“I’m a doctor,” John explained. Keeping the pressure on the wound with one hand, John was glad to see the knife was only about three inches long. The damage would be limited and hopefully easy to fix. “If you don’t want to go to hospital you’re going to have to lay on your front, you need stitches.”
“Why are you helping me?” the man questioned as he complied, the muscles in his jaw tensing visibly as he turned onto his front. John helped him settle into a comfortable, but correct position and stripped him of the rest of his clothes.
“Because I’m a doctor,” John told him. “Though if I was a good one, I would have taken you to a hospital.”
“No hospitals,” the man growled, attempting to push himself up but crying out in pain again.
“Don’t be stupid,” John said, holding him down firmly but carefully. “If I was going to take you to a hospital I would have done it while you were out cold and couldn’t complain. Now, hold still. This is going to hurt.”
John didn’t have anything to numb the pain, not even a tube of lidocaine to take the edge off. The man buried his face in John’s ratty old sofa cushion and stayed there, silent other than occasional muffled groans of pain as John cleaned and then closed the wound with five neat stitches.
“You need to keep this clean,” John instructed as he dressed the wound with gauze and then a carefully wrapped bandage. “Or it’ll get infected. I don’t have any antibiotics I can give you, though I’ve got some savalon that’ll help.”
John waited for an answer, but it never came. Panic flared, hot and fast in his chest as he fumbled for a pulse. He found it quickly, the slow and steady throb of the stranger’s heartbeat reassuring beneath his fingers.
He’d just passed out again.
John looked at the clock. It was just after five and Mrs Rajit would be up in an hour or so with the dhal. Other than that, there was nothing else that needed his attention.
He moved the injured man to his bed. It wouldn’t do to leave him on the now soaking wet sofa to catch pneumonia as well, and it wasn’t as if he could send him back to the streets in his condition.
//
When Sherlock woke he was warm, dry and sleeping in a real bed. This was a combination of events that he hadn’t experienced in some time, weeks, maybe even months.
He was instantly alert.
The doctor sat on the sofa, his breathing and the way his head nodded up and down suggested he was dozing, but only lightly and he hadn’t been at it for long. It wouldn’t take a great deal to wake him up and that was the last thing Sherlock wanted. The longer he stayed with the doctor, the more danger Sherlock was putting him in. Dragging him into the deep, dark mess of the Underside would be poor thanks for saving Sherlock’s life.
He intended to get up, silently, and leave. Once he was outside the small flat he could vanish back into London Below easily, and quickly, enough that the doctor would not be able to follow even if he were so inclined. Something Sherlock doubted, as there was only so far good Samaritans would go without reward, a lesson he’d learnt long ago.
Only there were two problems with his course of action, the first being that he hadn’t been redressed and was wearing nothing under the duvet other than his underwear. The second being that when Sherlock tried to sit up pain flared through his shoulder, a white-hot burn beneath the clean bandages and he was unable to contain his cry.
The doctor’s head snapped up and Sherlock could tell he was wide-awake and alert in an instant. The doctor stood, then reached for his cane, and it became blindingly apparent why. He was in the army. Or he had been, before he was shot in combat. His wound was in his shoulder and the limp he was walking towards Sherlock with was in his head.
There was a time when Sherlock would have been able to tell which war, now all he knew was the Underside’s battles. He didn’t even know what countries the ‘Empire’ was at war with anymore.
“You’re awake,” the doctor said, stating the obvious as he came to stand beside the bed.
Sherlock bristled, though he was able to bite his tongue against an insulting reply. “How long?” He asked instead. The time itself was of little relevance, it didn’t move in the same ways Below as it did Above. When everything was lit by lamplight the rising and the setting of the sun meant precious little.
What he did need to know was how long Moriarty and Moran had been looking for him while he had not been making any active attempts to avoid them. His hair was still slightly damp and he remembered the rain, and being so wet it felt as though he were soaked through to the bone. It had been some time and while no more than six hours it was still too long even though the rain would lend him a little added protection from Moriarty and Moran. It would wash away evidence of his presence, tucked away in the flat of someone from Above. He was by no means impossible to find, but perhaps it was still difficult enough now to give him the chance he required if he left quickly.
It was a shame he couldn’t stay. There weren’t many better places to hide, at least for a short while. Especially with the doctor, who years and years ago, was the sort of man Sherlock would have wanted to try and take to his bed. As the situation stood, it was all the more reason to leave rather than one to stay.
The doctor looked at the clock on the wall, it read eight forty-three and judging by the lack of light coming from behind the curtains it was the eight at night not in the morning. Sherlock remembered the daylight burning his eyes when he came out of the church.
“Nearly five hours since I found you,” the doctor said before sitting on the bed next to Sherlock. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Painful, but acceptable,” Sherlock answered. He studied the lines of the doctor’s face and it was impossible to tell his age. His face was obviously deceptive and Sherlock imagined he was very good at poker. “Where are my clothes?”
The doctor pointed to the other side of the room, where Sherlock’s clothes hung along the small radiator next to the sofa. It was impossible to tell from his current location if they were fully dry yet or not. “I put them through the wash for you. Got most of the blood out and they’ll be dry by morning.”
Braving wet clothes didn’t cause Sherlock any sort of concern. It might have, once, but there were more pressing matters at hand. The journey to Mycroft was more likely to kill him than catching something from damp clothing.
"Thank you," Sherlock said, belatedly, and trusted the doctor to understand it wasn't just for cleaning his clothes.
"It was nothing, really," the doctor said as if what he'd done really was nothing, as if it wasn't the first act of genuine and selfless human kindness Sherlock had experienced in over ten years. “What’s your name?”
For just a moment, as Sherlock stared into the doctor’s warm and curious face, he wished he could tell him. “I don’t have a name,” he lied, swallowing down the urge, which was both stupid and dangerous.
“Don’t be daft." The doctor's face lit up in amusement as he chuckled. "Everyone has a name. I'm John. John Watson.”
“I don’t,” Sherlock said, simply. It had been a lesson quickly learned, even before he fell through the cracks. Don't give anyone anything they can use against you, no matter how much you think you can trust them.
Victor taught him that Above, promising him the world and leaving him with nothing when prettier, more easily led young things crossed his path. Molly had reinforced it Below, using his own desperate desire for knowledge to trap him until he’d clawed himself free of her.
Doctor Watson frowned in obvious confusion, and pressed. “But what do people call you?”
“I don’t interact with people that often,” Sherlock snapped, wanting the discussion - and temptation - to end. The less the doctor knew the better. "Not that it's any of your business."
“I’m beginning to understand why you don't interact with people," Doctor Watson shot back, quickly but perfectly calmly and Sherlock blinked in surprise. "But I think you'll find it is my business, seeing as I didn't take you to the hospital and you're sleeping in my bed. The least you can do is tell me something I can call you. Unless you'd rather be Oi you?"
Sherlock studied Doctor Watson for a long moment, unable to stop the corners of his lips curving into a smirk. Not only did the good doctor put Sherlock’s wishes over common sense, but he wasn’t cowed by Sherlock's caustic nature. Instead of pressing for something Sherlock refused to give, he requested something he might.
“There are people who refer to me as the consulting detective,” Sherlock found himself offering. It was the best he could give, considering they would never see each other again.
It went down as well as could be expected Above.
“The consulting detective?” he asked, with an incredulous laugh.
Sherlock made a noise of agreement. “Because of what I do.”
“You’re a detective without a name?” Doctor Watson confirmed with a smirk and a spark of amusement in his eyes.
“In a manner of speaking yes, and as grateful as I am for your help, I have to leave,” Sherlock declared, putting paid to any further notions of gallantry Doctor Watson was harbouring and any ridiculous ideas of his own about staying a while longer.
Doctor Watson's bearing when he stood, walked and even sat screamed at least ten years with the army but there was something far too soft and almost mild mannered about the doctor for him to be any sort of threat. While he'd not been put off by Sherlock's earlier dismissal he'd calmly adjusted his question and not demanded what really he wanted to know. Doctor Watson was surely going to complain about his leaving, possibly make a fuss in regards to Sherlock’s health but would let him go all the same. The doctor hardly seemed a man made for confrontation, especially not with that psychosomatic limp.
"Is there any point trying to talk you out of it? It's a very bad idea, you know," Doctor Watson said calmly, with the sort of disapproving resignation that confirmed his deductions were correct.
Sherlock shook his head and Doctor Watson sighed, standing up with a suppressed groan. Sleeping upright on the sofa had clearly aggravated his shoulder wound and left him with a crick in his neck, but he didn't pass comment.
“Alright. If you want to go and I can’t stop you, remember to keep-”
“The wound clean, yes, I know,” Sherlock finished. Caring for his own injuries was nothing even close to new, even before he fell Below.
Pain shuddered through Sherlock as he went to stand, his arm moving instinctively to push himself off the bed.
“Let me give you something to help with the pain. I'll make you something to eat and a cup of tea while it kicks in, then you can go,” Doctor Watson said, attempting another compromise.
“I don’t take narcotics,” Sherlock said firmly. Of all the times for a relapse, now was not it. No matter how much Sherlock needed an edge, a boost, to help him try and stay alive.
“Just a low dose of paracetamol, no opioids, nothing dangerous," Doctor Watson assured him, understanding his meaning. Surprisingly, there was no judgement in his eyes.
Sherlock moved to protest, but another stab of pain ran down his side and Doctor Watson didn't need to say I told you so. "If you want to be able to get dressed, then you’re going to need something to take the edge off.”
“A low dose,” Sherlock reluctantly conceded. It had been ten years since he had first taken cocaine and five since he’d last taken it or heroin. Nothing had passed his lips, been up his nose or gone into a vein since. He reasoned with himself that a mild analgesic was not the same thing as an opiate-based medication.
Taking it would allow him to leave, to be able to run.
//
John handed the consulting detective two white, entirely harmless looking pills and trusted that he wouldn’t know any better. He stood by the edge of his bed and watched as he took them in one easy swallow, helped down with a mouthful of water.
Barely a minute had passed when his eyes started to look heavy, accusation under his dark lashes just before they closed and he slumped back. John reached forward and caught the consulting detective, saving him from a crack on the back of the skull courtesy of his headboard.
“For your own good,” John said, entirely unapologetically as he pulled the duvet back up under the consulting detective’s chin.
//
// Part Two //