(no subject)
Title: “Retribution” (1/5)
Characters: Sherlock, John, Lestrade, Ensemble
Pairings: None
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Word Count: c. 1,900 this part, c. 12,000 total
Warnings (overall): Depictions of Violence, Kidnapping, Implied Torture, Language, Angst, Implied Past Non-Con
Spoilers: through “Reichenbach”
Betas: canonisrelative, geniusbee, and killerweasel
Summary: Six months after his return from the dead, Sherlock is faced with a case that threatens all he sought to protect.
Notes: A million thanks to my wonderful betas. I couldn't have managed this without them.
Sed omnis una manet nox et calcanda semel via leti.
"But one night waits for all and the road of death is to be tread only once."
- Horace (Carmina, Liber I, XXVIII)
For the first time in nearly three weeks, John didn’t wake to the sound of something exploding in the kitchen. He didn’t wake to the pounding of feet up the stairs to his room --John, client! --or to the crash of something having been hurled at the wall in frustration.
For the first time in nearly three weeks, John woke to the silence of dawn.
He was apprehensive at first. But the quiet was contented as opposed to ominous, and John breathed a sigh of relief. They had wrapped a case just eight hours before, and he ached down to the bone from all their exertions. No doubt Sherlock was feeling the same, going by how shattered he’d looked when they stumbled through the door the previous night. With any luck, Sherlock was now in the midst of a self-induced coma, and John could spend the next few days catching up on all the work and sleep he’d been neglecting.
But first, a shower, because God, he stank. John rolled out of bed, grabbed a towel, and padded downstairs.
He found, however, that Sherlock was already awake, and working at the kitchen table with a cup of stone-cold coffee by his elbow. He was dressed in his pajamas and dressing gown, but the nightclothes appeared to just be a pretense: Sherlock looked as though he hadn’t slept at all. His hair was still damp from his shower, but his face was puffy with exhaustion and deep purple crescents sat under his eyes.
“Morning, Sher...” John muttered as he passed his flatmate, losing half the name to a yawn. Sherlock merely grunted in response.
John emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later with the towel secured around his waist and made his way back up to his bedroom to dress. Sherlock had his mobile to his ear, and was speaking testily to the person on the other end whilst simultaneously peering through his microscope.
“What about not interested do you not understand, Mycroft? I haven’t - careful,” Sherlock hissed to John as he sidled by.
“I barely touched you,” John sighed, but it was more amused than exasperated. “Tea?”
“Mmm,” Sherlock said absently. “Ten minutes.”
John grinned and shook his head, making his way to the stairs. Six months since Sherlock’s return, and he was still getting used to these subtle changes in his friend. He was still acerbic and arrogant, yes, but his years of hardship and absence had softened his roughest edges. John was still more likely to find a half-finished experiment in his mug rather than tea five days out of seven, but Sherlock’s heart was in the right place.
Back in his room, John opened his wardrobe, fingers brushing the small note he had affixed to the inside of the door, as was his ritual each morning.
Sherlock is alive.
He had written it in January, not long after Sherlock's return, because for too many mornings after that wintry night that realization was not automatic. Three years of thinking his best friend dead was a difficult state-of-mind to snap out of, and it wouldn’t be until he stumbled across Sherlock in the kitchen or happened upon the occupied bathroom that the memory would return. The note had helped that. And though it was no longer a necessary reminder, the note served as the physical marker of a miracle, and John couldn’t bring himself to remove it.
Sherlock is alive.
It wasn’t until late afternoon when John finally managed to secure a moment to check his blog. He’d meant to do it first thing that morning--answering comments tended to consume a fair bit of time for him--but then Sherlock had spilled one of his chemical concoctions and they’d needed to evacuate the building. Standing outside on an unusually chilly summer’s day hadn’t been the way John imagined spending his morning, and his irritation was compounded by the ever-present threat of a storm over their heads, along with the light mist that made everything uncomfortably damp.
The morning had been lost, then, to safely cleaning up the mess, and for the first part of the afternoon Mrs Hudson fussed over them and the state of the flat. Sherlock had indulged her patiently--another surprise, as he used to only tolerate it for about fifteen minutes--and it was John who eventually gave in and, politely, requested that she leave them to deal with things on their own.
But now, finally, they were alone. Sherlock was pacing in the kitchen, ranting once again on the phone to Mycroft. John sat down and started on his usual morning ritual. He opened his latest blog post and glanced through the comments. Most were from regular readers, praising Sherlock’s seemingly-impossible deductions and John’s level-headedness at the crucial moment. He paused to answer a few of them with a general note of thanks, and further down he addressed a couple of questions regarding the timeline of the night’s events. He had written the post while still high on adrenaline, wanting to get all of the facts down before they were lost to sleep or dulled by the passage of time, but in his haste he had left out a few minor details. He then deleted a few comments that were obviously spam, chuckling at one in particular with a header that read Thought you might like this... and then provided a link.
“Click here for a show?” John muttered in amusement, reading the link aloud. “Sorry, mate. Don’t exactly need your help finding that.”
He clicked away, going off to check his email. He answered a message from Harry - Mum’s birthday is coming up; are there any plans in the works? - before wandering over to Sherlock’s blog. He got a bit of a smug thrill out of comparing their hit counters. His latest post had received nearly two thousand hits overnight; Sherlock’s, on the other hand, had received only fifty. That was actually a decent number for him, in all honesty, and John frowned in bemusement, wondering what had been so bloody interesting that Sherlock had received so many visitors. He hadn’t updated the blog in nearly two weeks.
John clicked on Sherlock’s latest post, scrolling down to the comments. There had been none the last time he checked; now, there were five.
Thought you might like this...
It was that same spam message, repeated five times over, each with the same link. John blinked, and then glanced at the time stamps. The first message had been posted around mid-morning; the others followed every hour or so. The fifth and final one had been posted just five minutes before.
After John had deleted the one off his own blog.
John returned to his blog and opened the latest post. Sure enough, right at the bottom, the link had been posted again. Just seconds ago.
Thought you might like this...
“No,” John muttered to himself, trepidation sitting uncomfortably in his stomach, “No, I don’t think I will.”
And then he opened the link.
The video was grainy and shot in black-and-white, two factors that, when combined, made it especially difficult to tell exactly what was happening. And then, once the thought of what he might be watching crossed John’s mind, his brain tried very hard to convince him that he was not seeing it.
Except, unfortunately, he was.
He was looking at the inside of a box, apparently via a camera that had been affixed to one of the top corners. There was a man inside, lying on his back, seemingly unconscious. He was barefoot, wearing only jeans and a plain cotton tee that was soiled down the front. Blood, John assumed, though he hoped it was only sweat. The lack of colour made it difficult to say for sure.
The man’s hands were bound in front of him at the wrists, and a thick cloth blindfolded him, stretching from the middle of his forehead to almost down over his nose, making it difficult to make out his features. The box he was in was perhaps twice the size of a coffin, permitting some maneuverability.
The camera John was watching from had been fixed to a corner at the man’s feet, and so only a portion of his face was visible. John couldn’t discern whether he had taken any blows to the head, or sustained any other injuries apart from the one that--theoretically--left the stain on his shirt. A small clock in the bottom corner of the page read the time, and John could also make out the outline of a lit torch just behind the man’s shoulder.
He had been buried alive, and someone wanted--very badly--for them to see it.
“Oh, God.” John swallowed. “Sherlock.”
Sherlock was sitting at the kitchen table, recording numbers in a ledger while part of one experiment simmered on the stove and another sat brewing over a Bunsen burner. He sighed impatiently through his nose, irritation at being interrupted heightened by his lack of sleep and the fact that Mycroft was apparently hounding him to work on a case. “Not now.”
“Sherlock.” John stood on shaky legs and strode unsteadily into the kitchen.
“Busy.”
John shoved the laptop in front of Sherlock’s nose. “Too bad.”
Sherlock blinked at the grainy image on the screen, and then snatched the laptop from John’s hands.
“Who sent this to you?” he asked briskly, suddenly alert, all exhaustion seemingly shoved aside.
“Who - yeah, right, he gave me his name and everything. ‘Dear John, thought you might like this video of someone who has been buried alive.’”
“Don’t be sarcastic, John, you aren’t very good at it,” Sherlock scolded. John sighed.
“Someone left a comment on my blog. A link. I thought it was just a spam message, so I deleted it. But then I noticed they had done the same thing to yours.”
“Interesting.” Sherlock pulled up both blogs, the corner of his mouth quirking as he did so. John suppressed a sigh; he would have to scold Sherlock about looking gleeful later. “Go on.”
John shrugged. “That’s it, really. When I went back to my own blog, I noticed that whoever it was had commented again, with that link.”
“Curious.” Sherlock pulled out his mobile and pressed 1 on the speed dial.
“Lestrade?” John asked incredulously, because though he might be first in Sherlock’s phone, Lestrade was always the last call whenever there was something truly interesting about.
“Mm,” Sherlock said distractedly. “He has access to some equipment that would make analyzing this video -”
Sherlock stopped speaking abruptly, grinding to a halt mid-sentence. His jaw went slack and the colour faded from his face.
“What is it?” John asked harshly.
Sherlock jerked the mobile away from his ear and put it on speakerphone. John, used to the clipped message that sometimes greeted him when he called the Inspector, knew at once that something was wrong. A new message had been recorded. It was Lestrade’s voice, but his tone was tight, as though the words were being forced out of him.
--Lestrade. I’m a bit tied up at the moment. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as you find me.
“That’s not his usual message,” John said stupidly. Realisation washed over him in a cold wave, and his eyes strayed hesitantly to the video. “That’s... Oh, my God...”
“Lestrade,” Sherlock said, his voice low and vicious. “Oh, you stupid, stupid man.”
----
Part Two