Fic: Read our futures in the rising steam 1/3
Title: Read our futures in the rising steam
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Drug use, post-mortem descriptions of rape/murder victims, non-graphic torture
See Masterpost for full header
It’s a slow day, evening now, and John keeps peeping around his book at Sherlock, as though Sherlock is about to start shooting walls, taking coke, or leaping off buildings at any second. It’s not hard to see that whatever anger John was harbouring at Sherlock’s absence is long gone. Now that they’re both safely ensconced in 221B, their kitchen table covered in stolen science equipment (it calms John to have something to fuss at Sherlock about), John in his chair and Sherlock prone on the sofa, it’s up to Sherlock to continue to reinforce John’s trust. The sooner John trusts him not to leave again, the sooner he will stop peering at Sherlock with such a crumpled, worried expression every thirty seconds. He finds it distracting as he keeps focusing on it, even though he understands perfectly well why John is doing it.
His phone goes off. Lestrade, he’s certain of it. He hopes this case is more interesting than the last. He solved the last one before he even saw the body and Anderson was there to round off a perfectly vile afternoon.
“John,” Sherlock says, holding out a hand for his phone.
Pre-roof, John would have been looking at him with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. Now though, he gets Sherlock the phone with his face carefully blank. John is constantly protecting himself during their every interaction. Sherlock is doing his best to keep their interactions as free of potential abandonment as possible. He’s sure that eventually John will relax. But it’s been months and John still looks at him like he’s going to vanish at any second.
“I’m going out in ten minutes, so whatever it is will have to wait if you want me along.”
John’s girlfriend - his latest attempt at putting some distance between himself and Sherlock - is coming by and then they’re going out for dinner. She’s going to break up with him. She’s the type to tell him ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ rather than the truth, which is that she can’t stand Sherlock, and she resents their relationship.
If John asks, Sherlock is going to tell him that he’s deleted her because he knew she was going to break up with him before she even invited him out to dinner. This is only partially true. He won’t delete her. He can’t. It’s relevant data. She’s part of John’s life, therefore: relevant data. He remembers all of John’s partners, whether he likes it or not.
Bart’s morgue
bring JW
L
It’s going to take Laura five more minutes to get here. Another to steel herself for an unpleasant evening. She’ll try to be polite to Sherlock, which means he can cut down on their travel time by at least two and a half minutes by going into his room, or simply ignoring her when she comes in. But then John will waste fifteen seconds scolding him for his rudeness and another half-minute apologising to Laura. Better to just make himself scarce.
They’ll stroll to the restaurant, Laura will order a glass of mediocre plonk and John will get a half-pint. She’ll wait until they’ve ordered starters, but will tell the waitron that they’ll order their main after their starters. She’ll break up with John before they’re finished their starters.
John is used to this sort of thing now. He’ll be hurt but not surprised. He’ll pay the tab and go for a walk.
Sherlock estimates that if he texts John in thirty-nine minutes John will be near the Edgeware tube stop where there are always an abundance of cabs, or, if John wishes to be tiresome, he can take the underground.
He gets up, drawing his dressing gown around himself and retreats to his room. He’s dressed and ready to go in three minutes. He doesn’t want to wait for thirty-six minutes for John to be available to him. Sherlock pulls his gloves on, while John putters about the kitchen.
“We have a case,” he says.
“I have a date,” John says, convincing himself.
Sherlock laces his fingers together, thumbs tucked under his chin, index fingers steepled against his lips. In thirty-six minutes, plus travel time, he’ll have seen the body and be on the move, and he’ll have to wait for ages for John to catch up, physically, and mentally.
John closes the fridge. He stands in front of Sherlock at parade rest. “What?” he says. He’s standing close enough that he has to look up, just a little, at Sherlock. Sherlock discovered a long time ago that he liked it. What surprises him is that he likes it every single time and it’s not getting tiresome.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Just tell me.”
He can’t calculate if John will be more annoyed if he pre-empts the break-up or if he doesn’t and John realizes he knew, and didn’t say anything. “It’s nothing,” he says, turning away, sweeping out the door. It doesn’t matter if John is annoyed now or later, he’ll still follow. “I’ll text you,” he calls back. He means: I won’t disappear.
He’s waving for a cab when Laura walks up to the flat. She doesn’t see him as she hesitates in front of the door. Sherlock starts the countdown.
X X X
It’s not you, it’s her.
Bart’s morgue
SH
Its not her its you
JW
Take a cab, a jumper made a mess of the Tube.
SH
You knew didnt you
JW
wouldve happily skipped it
JW
R u still @ Barts?
JW
Sherlock are you still at Barts?
JW
Sherlock txt me back
JW
X X X
Sherlock and Lestrade are standing outside Bart’s not smoking when John’s taxi pulls up. Much to Sherlock’s frustration, Lestrade had refused to let him in without John. He probably shouldn’t have texted John while Laura was in the middle of explaining why they should be friends, but the waiting is intolerable.
John gets out of the cab with a heavy step. His psychosomatic limp is acting up again. This case will be good for both of them, then. As will the realization that when Sherlock asks him to meet him somewhere, he will not be about to leap off any ledges. He can see John ease down. His heart rate, elevated, is slowing again. It’s cruel, Sherlock knows, not to respond immediately to John’s distress, but this will be better for them both, in the long run.
“You could have told me beforehand,” John says, looking more tired than usual. “Saved me the trouble.”
Sherlock cocks an eyebrow. “Or not told you at all.”
John concedes the point by the slant of his shoulders, and the way the smile-lines at the corners of his eyes deepen. “Why are we standing outside?” he asks. He’s cold. His coat is not nearly warm enough for the weather. Sherlock wonders if it would be permissible to buy him a nice wool jacket. A thigh-length pea coat, he thinks, would be ideal. A little naval, but still.
“Look,” Lestrade says to Sherlock. “I know you’re back from the dead and exonerated and all, but the fact of it is, you’re going to have to tread lightly. No one knows I’ve brought you here. Not the chief superintendent, not anyone and if this gets out I’m not going to be given a slap on the wrist, or stuck behind a desk. I’m going to jail, so’s John, so are we all. So no blogging about it, no talking to your brother, no haring off without me. You have to follow my lead like…like John’s life depends on it.”
John pales. The last time his life depended on Sherlock, Sherlock stepped off the roof of Bart’s and disappeared.
“You have belaboured the point quite enough,” Sherlock says. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
There are five body bags laid out, waiting. Molly is twisting her hands together and she’s picked at her winter-chapped lips until she made herself bleed. Sherlock, despite all the waiting, and posturing, is interested.
They’ve closed ranks again. Molly, Lestrade, John, and him. It’s…comforting. All they need now is Mrs. Hudson bringing them tea and biscuits.
“Serial killer,” he says, and Lestrade nods. “White male in his late twenties to thirties,” Sherlock says, and when Molly looks startled, adds, “We are talking about a serial killer. They’re all white males in their late twenties to thirties.”
“Jeffery Hope wasn’t,” John points out, and Lestrade covers his laugh with a cough.
“Who?” Sherlock asks.
“The cabbie,” John says, at the same time Lestrade says, “How can you not know that name?”
Sherlock doesn’t quite manage to refrain from rolling his eyes. “Yes, yes, alright. Shall we get on with it?” He knows John isn’t fooled by his nonchalance and his mouth curls up in one corner in a smile. John’s eyebrows draw together, ever so slightly, but it’s his way of not smiling along with Sherlock, and they both know it.
“Doctor Hooper,” Lestrade says. “Might as well get this bit done with.”
Sherlock can already see that the bodies are all of a comparable height, somewhere between five six and five eight. A little shorter than the average British male. Molly starts unzipping the bags and the obvious similarities of the victims means this killer has a specific type - either some sort of psycho-sexual desire he’s filling, or displaced anger at his actual intended target. All male, solid build - slight variants where one was in finances, one in construction, a chemistry teacher at a private boys’ school, and two Boots employees…no, one worked at a Primark, next to a Boots. Caucasian, late thirties, dishwater brown hair greying. Not especially handsome men by media standards, but…how had Mrs. Hudson put it? Smouldering. Damply. Like a peat fire.
“You can see the problem,” Lestrade says.
Sherlock can see the order in which they were killed. The murderer is growing bolder. There are less hesitation marks with the knife - no, scalpel. The first victim, Boots employee, was killed outright, throat slit, right to left, right-handed murderer. Not much of interest, except for the missing fingers where he tried to get his hand between his throat and the knife, and the large chunks of flesh removed from the shoulder and thigh.
Second victim, teacher. Killed with no hesitation. Opened up, throat to sternum with hesitation. Organs rummaged through. Bits missing from the shoulder and thigh again.
Third victim, Primark. Raped with an object - either as humiliation or the killer couldn’t maintain an erection - flesh from shoulder and thigh removed pre-mortem, throat cut, properly dissected, all organs in the body cavity are missing.
Fourth victim, banker. Raped by the killer - obviously the killer had hesitated previously but was now in the swing of things - flesh from shoulder and thigh removed pre-mortem, throat cut, properly dissected, organs missing. Organs replaced with the organs of the previous victim except for the heart. Obvious.
Fifth victim, construction worker. Raped. Lack of obvious cause of death. No, cause of death is perfectly, obvious; trauma and blood loss. Vivisected.
“Bloody hell,” John says.
“Half the press are calling him the Baker Street Butcher and the other half is calling them the new Ripper murders.” Lestrade wants a cigarette. His fingers rub together and he keeps touching his mouth.
Baker Street? What on earth has Baker Street to do with-
“Look with your eyes,” John says. “Not with your brain.” A nonsense statement which Sherlock ignores as he puts together all the pieces. It hits him like a train. All the victims, who have been taken apart and examined (and sexually assaulted), look like John Watson.
…everyone thinks he’s the one doing it.
“Ah,” Sherlock says.
“Should I be worried?” John asks. John, who never believed the lies.
“You don’t-” Sherlock starts, hurt, instinctively hiding it under a waspish tone.
“Not about you, you berk,” John says dismissively. He’s looking at Lestrade. “Do I need to be worried about the maniac who’s doing this?”
Lestrade rubs at his jaw. “I want to take you into protective custody.”
“Absolutely not,” Sherlock says at about the same time John says, “Not a chance.” They’re standing too close. Sherlock knows this. John is sparing himself some psychosomatic pain by putting his weight on his other leg, so he’s leaning ever so slightly towards Sherlock who is standing close enough that their coats are touching. They’ve been doing that a lot, post-fall. Sherlock knows why he’s doing it, but he’s not sure if John has even noticed. It seems to him that John is in constant readiness to catch hold of him, as though they were still handcuffed together.
It might help John’s pain, actually, to just go ahead and cuff them. Sherlock suspects that he’d still get free use of his arms, so long as he could (and he could) ignore John’s protests.
“You’ve already washed the bodies,” Sherlock points out. “What, exactly, can I tell you that a medical examiner could not?” Probably a lot, if he put his mind to it, but he doubts they want to know intimate details of the victims’ lives. It won’t tell them anything about the killer.
“Nothing,” Lestrade says. “I don’t want you on this case; I don’t want either of you anywhere near it. Take a vacation, get out of London. Get yourselves an alibi other than each other, or Mrs. Hudson.” He nods at Molly who dutifully begins zipping the body bags closed, much to Sherlock’s annoyance. He is in no way finished looking at them.
Sherlock is not impressed, to say the least. Not that he’s ever impressed with Lestrade, but still. “You expect me to just-”
“Yes,” Lestrade snaps. “Yes, I do. I don’t give a monkey’s how interested you are.”
Molly hesitates, the face of the third victim still visible, zipper drawn up to the body’s chin. “I have a pullout,” she says, tentatively.
“That won’t be necessary,” John says, far more harshly than Sherlock would have predicted. Although, she had been the one to draw John away when Sherlock was headed up to the roof and help out afterwards, but that was hardly her fault. “We’ll figure it out.”
Lestrade sighs.
“We’re not leaving Baker Street,” Sherlock says, in the cab home. “We can find the murderer far faster than the Met. Just a serial killer, hardly a challenge.” John is silent. “What?” Sherlock says.
“We’ll talk about it at home,” John says, stone-faced. When Sherlock demands to know why, John grits out, “Because I’m going to bloody throttle you, and I’d rather not do it in front of the cabbie.”
They spend the rest of the journey in a hostile silence. Or, rather, John is hostile, and Sherlock utilizes the time to calculate how best to persuade John that he - as always - is in the right. Obviously John is highly emotional and Sherlock can appreciate why, he just doesn’t see why feelings based on something that happened ages ago should have any bearing on the matter.
X X X
Sherlock, do what the detective
inspector says
MH
I will kidnap the both of you
MH
You can’t ignore me forever
MH
Back off
JW
X X X
The first person to whom Sherlock revealed he was still alive was John. The only person to whom Sherlock revealed he was still alive was John, and it was John who notified Mrs. Hudson (best to break the news gently, John said), Lestrade - and through Lestrade the rest of the force - and all other interested parties including Mycroft because John might be furious at Mycroft but John’s not the sort to let a man think his own brother is dead.
John had, at first, seemed to look right through him but upon further evidence that Sherlock was not some figment of his imagination, had fainted. Passed out stone cold. Sherlock would like to tease him about it, but John can’t bear any mention of Sherlock’s disappearance so he keeps his amusement to himself.
John’s violently emotional reaction to their reunion - fainting, shouting, hugging, a few tears - clearly indicates that he’s going to have a proportionally large outburst at the thought of anyone trying to threaten their status quo. The colloquial expression for what’s going to happen next, as far as Sherlock knows, is ‘getting ripped a new asshole.’
Sherlock flops down on the sofa, fully prepared to let John get the yelling out of his system before he begins his counter arguments. They have crime scenes to break into.
Instead of yelling, John very carefully takes off his coat, and his shoes, and then stands there in his absurd button-down jumper, neatly ironed plaid shirt, and jeans. There was a hole in his sock, three days ago, but John darned it, rather than buy new ones. “You died,” John says. “I buried you, and everywhere I went people thought you were a murderer, and a liar, and no one believed that you were…” He takes a deep breath and collects himself. “You left me, Sherlock. I won’t go through that again.”
This is one of those situations where having a rudimentary grasp of complicated emotions like grief would come in extremely useful. Probably it feels like trying to convince John that he was a fraud but Sherlock never wants to think about that in any sort of detail ever again, so it’s not helping him now.
John sits down on the sofa next to Sherlock. “Without you, I’m just a sad bastard sitting around reading his own old blog entries. I actually asked Mycroft to get me back into the army.”
Sherlock is aghast and sits bolt upright. “I’m glad he had the common sense to say no.”
“He said you wouldn’t’ve wanted it so he wouldn’t do it.” John looks very small next to him. “I threatened to take it up the chain of command, he threatened to disappear me.”
Sherlock is going to have extremely loud words with his brother just as soon as he can bear to talk to him. “But I’m right here. It’s fine. Obviously.”
John’s hands are suddenly warm and rough on Sherlock’s face, and Sherlock can feel John’s heart racing. “You’re a blithering idiot sometimes,” John says and when Sherlock opens his mouth to protest, John kisses him.
The first thing that Sherlock says, when John has sat back, red-faced with what is clearly embarrassment, is, “You’re straight.” Not, he will admit, really the point but John winces a little.
John “confirmed bachelor” Watson is straight and while he’s stopped protesting assumptions he and Sherlock are together and started joking about it, and now he’s making sudden advances on the sofa, he’s still straight. He’s straight, and Sherlock is…He is. He just is. Cogito Ergo Sum. Although if thinking is what makes a person, then Sherlock and Mycroft, damn him, are possibly the only people who exist in London.
“Yeah,” John agrees. “It’s probably an adrenaline thing. I don’t know. You drive me mental because it’s not like we run out of murderers to catch or nutters trying to kill us, or you managing to blow up the kitchen because you’re bored…”
Sherlock puts two and two together. “No shortage of adrenaline,” he says, mildly disappointed. Is he disappointed? Why is he disappointed?
John’s left hand is shaking, ever so slightly, but so is his right. Nerves then. At least he understands that this is important. “No,” John says, drawn out, like Sherlock’s missing something. Unlikely.
The entire thing is getting right away from Sherlock and it’s starting to make him feel strangely uncomfortable. Something is seriously amiss. It is a rare occasion that someone is able to make him feel uncomfortable but The Conversation he’s about to have with John is enough to do it.
“I don’t…” Sherlock says. He knows perfectly well how to explain - John is sexual (and straight, as all the data proves!), he is not - but laying it out so John comprehends…that’s another matter altogether.
“Never?” John asks. “I mean, I figured at some point…Not even?”
Sherlock closes his eyes, wondering if it will make the conversation any more bearable. “No, never, not at any point. Yes, I do, if you’re asking if I masturbate, though rarely and occasionally without result. And before you ask, Doctor, there is nothing physically wrong with me. Nor, I would say, is there anything wrong mentally-”
John laughs, a nervous guffaw. “Well,” he says.
“Oh do shut up,” Sherlock says, but can’t quite keep a straight face.
“What about the rest of it?” John asks when they’ve finished tittering like schoolgirls.
Sherlock, to his annoyance, has no idea what ‘the rest’ is. Evidently his confusion is clear to John because John flaps a hand at him in an unhelpful sort of way. “Non-sexual close contact,” he says, in his professional voice. “Kissing, for example.”
“I find most people to be a waste of carbon and most people find me…difficult. The odds of stumbling across someone who would want to share a non-sexual relationship with me, and with whom I would share such a thing, are long indeed.” Sherlock sounds petulant even to his own ears.
John doesn’t look pitying, which is good, because Sherlock is very much prepared to unleash a rant of such vitriol that can only come from being asked the same stupid questions and receiving the same stupid replies time, after time, after time. Instead, John looks sympathetic. “I had a girlfriend with a much higher sex-drive,” he says. “Put a bit of a strain on things. Er, the relationship.” He nods firmly, like he’s figured something out. “I won’t ask again,” he says.
This, weirdly, is not the answer Sherlock wants or even completely understands. There was an element to this conversation that he has missed, utterly. “Good, thanks,” he says and stands, ostensibly to check on the strips of skin in the oven, but more to remove himself from the conversation.
On the up side, at least John isn’t talking about leaving Baker Street and letting Lestrade and his idiots handle the case, or other nonsense.
John turns on the telly, says, “Hungry?” (the answer is no, but John in an embarrassingly English way always gets too much food from the Indian place a couple streets over and Sherlock will pick at the leftovers because it makes John happy to see him eat), and they talk no more about it, but Sherlock is unsettled and anxious; emotions he rarely suffers from - well, when they’re not withdrawal related that is - and it’s a feeling of being below average, like he’s somehow lacking. It’s not something he’s used to.
Hours later, after John has gone to bed - he’ll dream of Afghanistan tonight - Sherlock lies under his own sheets, pyjama bottoms around his knees, and attempts to get himself off. He doesn’t like being unable to succeed at something. It takes a few long minutes of concentrated effort to spin a fantasy in his head. He imagines the first case that he and John worked together. In this scenario however, when the case is closed instead of Sherlock going to John, John joins him in the ambulance. His hands are still warm from washing off the GSR, his expression still calm stoicism. John snaps on latex gloves and…
Sherlock closes his eyes and thumbs at the glans on his cock. What comes next is inevitably some tawdry dialogue like, “Better give you a proper check,” or something equally awful. He skips ahead to the nudity portion of things. But then, he dislikes being naked, especially when it’s anything but very warm out, and it feels invasive to imagine John that way.
He tries anyway, for the sake of the experiment. John would be pale, somewhere there’d be a birthmark, the scars any adventurous young boy accumulates over the years. Grey and blond chest hair. None where the scar on his shoulder…
Sherlock is hard mostly due to friction and not through any real interest in the proceedings. He’s snagged the barely used Vaseline from the nightstand, two fingers rubbing roughly over his prostate when it hits him.
The scar on his shoulder.
John has called it by many names, the light bulb moment, the a-ha! effect, but his best analysis was to describe it as a dialogue box from a computer’s OS letting you know it’s updated and needs to be restarted and you can’t do anything else until you click away from that popup. Sherlock is having that moment.
He barely remembers to wipe his hands and pull up his pyjama bottoms before rushing up the stairs to throw open John’s bedroom door. “The legs!” he exclaims.
John sits bolt upright, reaching for his L85A2 rifle that isn’t there. “Sherlock?” he asks, eyes full of mountains and convoys.
“Think, John,” Sherlock says. “The flesh missing from the bodies - the shoulder and thigh - the killer is going from faulty observation, not concrete fact and data. Lestrade was correct, you are the target of the murderer’s obsession and he removes the flesh from those places because of your gunshot wound, and rightly so. But he also supposes you to have a corresponding wound on your thigh. The killer doesn’t know your limp is psychosomatic! Don’t you see?”
John relaxes. “It’s three in the morning.” It’s two fifty-seven, to be precise. “Don’t phone Lestrade-”
“But I’m demonstratively not the culprit,” Sherlock says, “since I’m fully aware you have no actual, physical damage to your thigh. We may stay here, without fear of arrest.” That, he thinks, ought to convince John as to the wisdom of remaining in London.
But then, John doesn’t appear convinced. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. He looks like a disgruntled hedgehog. “Sherlock,” he says in a patient sort of way, “It’s three in the morning.”
“Two fifty-eight.”
“I’m sleeping.”
Sherlock realizes he’s never actually seen John’s leg. “You don’t have scar tissue there, do you?”
“Goodnight, Sherlock.” John lies back down, pointedly. “Close the door when you go?”
Sherlock, despite what some may believe, has excellent impulse control and so he only takes two steps towards John’s bed to see for himself, before stopping. “In the morning then,” he says, already texting Lestrade. “And I’ll want to see your leg.”
He’s down the stairs when he hears John’s feet padding across the floor, the door closing. Whoops.
Sherlock has a great deal of very important thinking to do, so he pulls up a new message and starts typing.
X X X
You’ll find payment
in our usual place
SH
Stuf in othr usl
place. U evr sleep?
lol
X X X
Sherlock hasn’t slept. Now that he can focus wholeheartedly on finding the killer - rather than proving conclusively to John that he is not a depraved lunatic bent on raping and murdering his closest friend - he intends to do just that.
The fuck of it is, Mycroft has been apologising for grossly violating Sherlock’s trust by not pointing every camera in London at Sherlock, even though he wants to, and Sherlock has been masterfully avoiding those that Mycroft is still utilizing. It makes it rather hard to prove his whereabouts at any given moment in time. Still, there will be another murder and Sherlock will have to contrive to be somewhere public, in view of CCTV, and possibly a policeman or two.
For the moment though, Sherlock is fully dressed and perched in the window of the lavatory at 221B, one leg dangling down onto the lip of the tub, the other crammed up into the window with the rest of him. The window frame is digging uncomfortably into his thigh. It is not the most dignified position he has ever been in.
He’s picked up an old habit or two during his time away from London and the people he has come to realise are his friends. Smoking, which John knows about because he’s not an idiot and Sherlock is legitimately trying to quit again so he’s made no secret of it. He’s also started taking cocaine again, and he’s certain that John will neither understand, nor handle this information well.
Track marks aren’t hard to hide. It’s not as though he and John spend any amount of time in the altogether together so he hasn’t had to resort to anal suppositories but he’s taken to injecting the veins in the backs of his knees and his thighs which makes him feel like he’s hiding it. He is hiding it. He shouldn’t have to hide it. He’ll come up with a way to explain it to John and then he won’t have to.
Now though, he needs to zero his attention in on the case. It’s been three point six minutes, the tinnitus has faded; he’s at his peak mental ability. He’s on his third bump of the night. Morning. Whatever it is now. Morning. Six thirty-two am.
He’s been to five abduction sites, five dump sites, and broken in to four of the victims’ domiciles. Sherlock feels electric.
He visited the body dump sites during the wee hours of the morning, and all of them were contaminated beyond usefulness as the scenes had been released and hosts of people had tramped all over them. The victims’ flats however…
The victims lived dull, ordinary little lives, nothing exceptional between them. The first was an avid cinephile who mostly stayed in and never even had a parking ticket or detention. The second had a fairly crippling online gambling habit and owed several dangerous people money. The third had stabbed a man in a bar fight, though the man had lived and he’d done only minimal jail time. The fourth had gone to med school but had dropped out, unable to stomach the less academic parts of the job and decided there was more money and less rigor mortis in banking. He was moderately interested to see what John Five was like before he was murdered.
Sherlock is having trouble thinking of the victims in his usual dispassionate way. He keeps mentally referring to them as John One, John Two, etc. It isn’t helpful.
John Watson opens the door and sighs. “You said you weren’t smoking in the flat,” he says.
Sherlock flicks ash off the end of his cigarette and shrugs a shoulder. “As I recall, at that moment, I wasn’t.”
“Put it out,” John says, turning the tub on in what Sherlock supposes is a hint for him to leave so John can shower.
No matter what little quirks the victims have not one of them is remotely as interesting as John Watson. They’d never come face to face with serial killers and walked away, they’d never argued down Mycroft (which, to be fair, isn’t so different, in the end). They went about their business without ever having killed to save lives and saved lives to allow more killing. They had never tried to sacrifice themselves, or been sacrificed for. They couldn’t explain the complexities of social niceties because they’d never had to hide that their hands that were only truly steady when staring down the sight of a gun and they aren’t anything at all like his John.
None of those other Johns knew how Sherlock likes his tea, or let him order them around even though they could probably kill him in as many ways as Sherlock himself can imagine. They didn’t remind him to eat, or pay him honest little compliments and guide him through the tedious business of talking to people without getting hit. They are not his John, and whoever is working his way up to it cannot have the only John that matters.
“May I see your leg now?” Sherlock asks, lazily taking another drag. His heart is racing and he can feel its every pulse in every part of his body. This is as close as his body gets to mistaking one sort of arousal for another. God, he’d missed this feeling.
Sherlock is certain the killer has recognized the complexities and paradoxes that make up John Watson and wants it for his own. He has to laud the man’s choice but John is pretty much the only person he would step off a roof for (he’s not sure, even now, if he would have done it had Moriarty just threatened Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade and he thinks he should probably be ashamed of himself. He’s not. They would be unacceptable but survivable losses) and every day that John doesn’t throw up his hands and move out of 221B is another day he has chosen to stay with Sherlock. While it’s nice to have validation, Sherlock does not require someone trying to take John away from him to know what it is he has.
He needs to focus.
Johns one through four did not frequent the same pubs, the same corner shops, the same grocery stores. They had four degrees of separation, at their closest and going to the same school as a half-brother’s (that they were unaware of) ex-girlfriend’s kid’s father was a very tenuous link indeed. Different social spheres, different classes, came from and lived in different parts of London. Two of them weren’t from London at all.
“Will you get out then?” John counters. John doesn’t look annoyed though; he’s rolling his eyes and trying not to smile. He doesn’t wait for the answer but wraps a towel around his waist and drops his tracky-bums and stands there. Sherlock is extremely pleased by John’s compliance and he completely fails to conceal that. John’s compliance is…it appeals to some dark part of him that he doesn’t care to examine too closely. Not right now.
John is pale and his body hair is sparse and pale too. There is more hair around his ankles than midway up his calf and almost nothing at all on his thighs. He has old, faded marks on his knees from childhood scrapes, tiny dents in his shinbones that would feel rough under Sherlock’s fingers from normal knocks and bumps over the years. There is no scar on his thigh. Any pain is from nerve damage.
There is no connection between the victims. They were random, utterly random, save for their distinct similarity to Sherlock’s John. So how did the killer find them? John isn’t an especially odd-looking man, but he isn’t featureless either and Johns One to Five could have been brothers. Fraternal twins even. Imperfect copies, but copies nevertheless.
As far as Sherlock is aware there is no search engine or social networking site that will find him ‘people who look like John Hamish Watson’ and their information.
Sherlock flicks the fag end of the cigarette out the window and climbs down. “As I said,” Sherlock says. In the small space, he’s very close to John. Close enough that John has to look up at him, just like the day before, close enough that Sherlock can feel the heat of John’s skin. Still enjoyable.
“If this is an experiment,” John says, audibly swallowing, looking away, “please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Sherlock asks. He wants to see John’s shoulder. He plucks at John’s jumper. “Let me see your shoulder.”
Sherlock has been collecting vital details about John: DNA, x-rays, dental records, and such. He never wants to stand in a morgue wondering. And if it’s John, if it’s ever John lying on Molly’s table, he’s not confidant in his ability to be unemotional about it. He’s as certain as it is possible to be that he’ll prove to be spectacularly ridiculous in his reactions. Sherlock has the nagging sensation he’s already being a little ridiculous and John hasn’t even been inconvenienced, never mind actually harmed, at this point.
Because right now he doesn’t actually want to go and look at John Five’s flat. He wants his John to strip down and let Sherlock examine every inch of him, just in case it ever comes in useful. He wants to be able to identify John, to find John, even if he’s bereft of most senses. John’s the doctor, not him, and he’ll need to be thorough, so thorough, so that he understands every identifiable detail.
John isn’t smiling any more but he pulls his sweatshirt off and his t-shirt. “Can I shower now?” he asks.
Even Sherlock knows better than to ask to touch the scars, but oh how he wants to. There’s a bruise on John’s left forearm from falling asleep at the desk earlier in the week. His calluses are starting to peel and his tan line is less noticeable, probably most people wouldn’t see it at all. John has muscle under a softer, deceptive layer of fat, just like his temper under his stoicism, the soldier hiding under the doctor.
“Be quick about it,” Sherlock says, already on his way to the kitchen. “We’re going out.”
John calls after him, “Learn to shut the door!”
Sherlock isn’t one for needless profiling; the inner workings of the mind of a killer are not relevant. The man responsible is obsessed with John Watson, probably because of the media exposure, and is displaying symptoms of erotomania. His obsessional behaviour will culminate in him attempting to kidnap John. Another victim and crime scene that he would be allowed to look at would be very helpful.
Keep that to himself. John wouldn’t like it.
The first victim was abducted on his way home from the Boots where he worked. The store shut at nine o’clock and he usually closed, but a co-worker and he had switched shifts so the victim had headed out at four o’clock instead. Either he was being very closely followed, or it was a crime of opportunity - not likely for this sort of abduction. All the others were abducted at quiet moments when no one would have noticed their absence. This killer is not concerned about that part of the event. He is organized and cautious. Likely he is already stalking John.
Sherlock is dressed and ready to go, and rearranged his entire book system when John finally appears. “Shoulder holster,” he notes. John nods and pulls his jacket over it. Sherlock can see the outline of the Sig Saur but no one else will be able to. Sherlock is collecting John’s secrets, hoarding them away on his hard-drive where no one else can have them.
They catch a cab to John Five- to the fifth victim’s house with John quietly complaining most of the way there, and Sherlock trying very hard not to let his leg bounce up and down like it wants to. He stares out the window to conceal the size of his pupils.
“What can you possibly find here?” John asks, as Sherlock picks the lock to the flat. “He wasn’t killed here, he wasn’t taken from here. If the victims are being chosen for their appearance, then his life, his flat, has nothing to do with why he died.”
“Hunting ground,” Sherlock says, slipping the picks back into his coat and rising from his crouch. “We need to know where the killer finds his victims. London is a big city and none of the Jo- none of the victims were from the same area.” None of the other victims were actually called John at all. Sherlock doesn’t remember any of their names.
He strides in, John trailing dutifully after him.
“Lestrade’s going to kill us,” John says, hands at his side, watching as Sherlock examines the flat. “Actually kill us. Do you even know when the un-sub-”
“I beg your pardon?”
John rolls his eyes. “Unknown subject, it’s from, look, that’s not important. Do you even know when the murderer first saw them? Without a timeline-”
Sherlock doesn’t bother turning around, instead going through the messy pile of crumpled corner shop receipts, movie ticket stubs, and bank statements that John Five pulled out of his wallet to sort through later. “The first murder was two months ago, each man was held for approximately thirty-two hours, so there’s a cool down period of, on average, two weeks, less with each murder as the killer becomes more confident. That means that the killer isn’t wandering about aimlessly, he’s got a system, and the system works.”
John heads over to the landline, checking for messages. “So they all must have been to the same place, at least once, during that two week period?”
“It would seem the most logical conclusion.”
“Right,” John says, in that tone of voice that implies a perfectly simple solution is anything but. “That’ll be nice and easy then. A bit like finding one book out of a million only we don’t even know if it’s a book we’re looking for.”
All they reasonably have to do is track the comings and goings of five men over two months and see where they trod the same path. Sherlock can’t see what the problem is.
X X X
£50 for each man you find in London who looks like John Watson
X X X
Four hours later Sherlock can see what the problem is.
There is, insofar as he can work out, nowhere in the entire city of London that the Five Johns all went to during their two week period. Nowhere. He’s missing something obvious, he must be.
Proper John is in the kitchen, contentedly swearing at a labelling machine. It’s not as though Sherlock isn’t perfectly aware of all John’s ‘rules of the kitchen,’ he just doesn’t follow them. John is going to label their cupboards and drawers and the shelves in the fridge because he was vocally annoyed about the skin strips in the oven (though he was actually curious). Sherlock is going to ignore the labels until he gets bored and replaces them with humorous substitutes so he can see how long it takes John to notice.
Sherlock is pacing in front of the window in his pyjamas, plucking out an accompaniment on his violin to John’s muttering in the key of F major. Until the killer makes a mistake, and he will, Sherlock is somewhat stuck. Not that he’s planning on admitting any such a thing to John. Dear John, who still looks at him with that same slightly ridiculous expression of shock and awe when Sherlock makes an elementary deduction.
He’s not going to settle down with a case still on, and John’s ill-timed kiss and his own feeble response seem like a suitable distraction. Not really his area, true, but never let it be said that Sherlock Holmes is afraid learning something new.
“Don’t touch the microwave,” he says absently. “It’s emitting radiation down into the oven.”
“What?” John says, startled. “Why?”
Sherlock plucks out the opening notes to Watching Joey Glow. “Why do you think I have that skin in the oven? Really, John, do try thinking.”
John puts the labelling gun down. “Right. I see. How dangerous is that to us?”
“Not very.”
“I’m going for a shower now. Try not to develop any mutant powers while I’m gone. And call hazardous waste so someone can pick it up before we both become riddled with cancer.”
Sherlock tucks his violin back into its case. “Don’t look under the sink if you’re feeling especially fragile of soul today,” he advises.
“You’re a dick, Sherlock Holmes,” John calls back and Sherlock can feel himself smiling.
He should know better, really, he should. He’s been here once before and that had gone extremely poorly. If this thing he has planned goes the same way, he’s not sure he’ll recover.
There are a lot of things about Mycroft that annoy Sherlock but chief amongst them is how easily and consistently Mycroft can play a role. He was popular with students and teachers alike in school. He had a string of incredibly vapid but beautiful women on his arm in sixth form and throughout university. He climbed the ladders of success not only with his intellect but with his ability to adapt to his surroundings and blend in seamlessly. Now, of course, he needs to do no such thing; his current position is better held just being his - as John put it - fantastically creepy self around anyone in a position of lesser power (which is most people). Anyone else is under the mistaken impression that he’s just like them. They can figure out what schools he went to, who his friends are, what circles he moves in socially, but they will never see the rest of the iceberg.
Sherlock, on the other hand, has trouble being anyone but himself for longer than a few hours and so has been alone for most of his life. He found this preferable, has always found this preferable, but his adult years have yielded him some unexpected comrades. And then there’s John. John who has looked under the sink, judging by the combination of laughing and swearing coming from the bathroom.
Mycroft, Sherlock is certain, would know exactly what to do. He would be able to perfectly mimic what a normal person would do and, moreover, he would be able to maintain the illusion for precisely as long as he needed to.
“But John is my friend regardless of my…social difficulties,” Sherlock says to the skull.
Playing Devil’s advocate, the skull says nothing.
Nerves, Sherlock thinks; what an imbecilic way to describe cowardice.
He makes the error of shooting up while John is in the shower - or rather, he miscalculates the dosage for the situation and the amount of time he has - and realizes he is utterly, stupidly, visibly, high. Sherlock gets dressed, buttons his shirt wrong and manages to delete that information before he can fix it. He can’t follow through with his plan now. If John sees him, he’ll know for sure that Sherlock is taking coke again. The evening is ruined but it doesn’t have to be wasted.
“Going out,” he shouts, and is gone before John can stop him, evading Mycroft’s security as he goes.
X X X
Where ru?
JW
Sherlock txt me back
JW
VOICEMAIL
Sherlock this isn’t funny. Either pick up your phone or text me back. For God’s sake, call me.
Have you seen Sherlock?
JW
No.fuck. Ill keep a lookout
L
My network can’t find him.
MH
No one asked you
JW
Sherlock pick up ur phone
JW
Sherlock you twat
JW
VOICEMAIL
Sherlock…Please. Just let me know you’re okay.
Have you found S?
Theres another body
L
X X X
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Drug use, post-mortem descriptions of rape/murder victims, non-graphic torture
See Masterpost for full header
It’s a slow day, evening now, and John keeps peeping around his book at Sherlock, as though Sherlock is about to start shooting walls, taking coke, or leaping off buildings at any second. It’s not hard to see that whatever anger John was harbouring at Sherlock’s absence is long gone. Now that they’re both safely ensconced in 221B, their kitchen table covered in stolen science equipment (it calms John to have something to fuss at Sherlock about), John in his chair and Sherlock prone on the sofa, it’s up to Sherlock to continue to reinforce John’s trust. The sooner John trusts him not to leave again, the sooner he will stop peering at Sherlock with such a crumpled, worried expression every thirty seconds. He finds it distracting as he keeps focusing on it, even though he understands perfectly well why John is doing it.
His phone goes off. Lestrade, he’s certain of it. He hopes this case is more interesting than the last. He solved the last one before he even saw the body and Anderson was there to round off a perfectly vile afternoon.
“John,” Sherlock says, holding out a hand for his phone.
Pre-roof, John would have been looking at him with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. Now though, he gets Sherlock the phone with his face carefully blank. John is constantly protecting himself during their every interaction. Sherlock is doing his best to keep their interactions as free of potential abandonment as possible. He’s sure that eventually John will relax. But it’s been months and John still looks at him like he’s going to vanish at any second.
“I’m going out in ten minutes, so whatever it is will have to wait if you want me along.”
John’s girlfriend - his latest attempt at putting some distance between himself and Sherlock - is coming by and then they’re going out for dinner. She’s going to break up with him. She’s the type to tell him ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ rather than the truth, which is that she can’t stand Sherlock, and she resents their relationship.
If John asks, Sherlock is going to tell him that he’s deleted her because he knew she was going to break up with him before she even invited him out to dinner. This is only partially true. He won’t delete her. He can’t. It’s relevant data. She’s part of John’s life, therefore: relevant data. He remembers all of John’s partners, whether he likes it or not.
Bart’s morgue
bring JW
L
It’s going to take Laura five more minutes to get here. Another to steel herself for an unpleasant evening. She’ll try to be polite to Sherlock, which means he can cut down on their travel time by at least two and a half minutes by going into his room, or simply ignoring her when she comes in. But then John will waste fifteen seconds scolding him for his rudeness and another half-minute apologising to Laura. Better to just make himself scarce.
They’ll stroll to the restaurant, Laura will order a glass of mediocre plonk and John will get a half-pint. She’ll wait until they’ve ordered starters, but will tell the waitron that they’ll order their main after their starters. She’ll break up with John before they’re finished their starters.
John is used to this sort of thing now. He’ll be hurt but not surprised. He’ll pay the tab and go for a walk.
Sherlock estimates that if he texts John in thirty-nine minutes John will be near the Edgeware tube stop where there are always an abundance of cabs, or, if John wishes to be tiresome, he can take the underground.
He gets up, drawing his dressing gown around himself and retreats to his room. He’s dressed and ready to go in three minutes. He doesn’t want to wait for thirty-six minutes for John to be available to him. Sherlock pulls his gloves on, while John putters about the kitchen.
“We have a case,” he says.
“I have a date,” John says, convincing himself.
Sherlock laces his fingers together, thumbs tucked under his chin, index fingers steepled against his lips. In thirty-six minutes, plus travel time, he’ll have seen the body and be on the move, and he’ll have to wait for ages for John to catch up, physically, and mentally.
John closes the fridge. He stands in front of Sherlock at parade rest. “What?” he says. He’s standing close enough that he has to look up, just a little, at Sherlock. Sherlock discovered a long time ago that he liked it. What surprises him is that he likes it every single time and it’s not getting tiresome.
“Sherlock,” John says. “Just tell me.”
He can’t calculate if John will be more annoyed if he pre-empts the break-up or if he doesn’t and John realizes he knew, and didn’t say anything. “It’s nothing,” he says, turning away, sweeping out the door. It doesn’t matter if John is annoyed now or later, he’ll still follow. “I’ll text you,” he calls back. He means: I won’t disappear.
He’s waving for a cab when Laura walks up to the flat. She doesn’t see him as she hesitates in front of the door. Sherlock starts the countdown.
X X X
It’s not you, it’s her.
Bart’s morgue
SH
Its not her its you
JW
Take a cab, a jumper made a mess of the Tube.
SH
You knew didnt you
JW
wouldve happily skipped it
JW
R u still @ Barts?
JW
Sherlock are you still at Barts?
JW
Sherlock txt me back
JW
X X X
Sherlock and Lestrade are standing outside Bart’s not smoking when John’s taxi pulls up. Much to Sherlock’s frustration, Lestrade had refused to let him in without John. He probably shouldn’t have texted John while Laura was in the middle of explaining why they should be friends, but the waiting is intolerable.
John gets out of the cab with a heavy step. His psychosomatic limp is acting up again. This case will be good for both of them, then. As will the realization that when Sherlock asks him to meet him somewhere, he will not be about to leap off any ledges. He can see John ease down. His heart rate, elevated, is slowing again. It’s cruel, Sherlock knows, not to respond immediately to John’s distress, but this will be better for them both, in the long run.
“You could have told me beforehand,” John says, looking more tired than usual. “Saved me the trouble.”
Sherlock cocks an eyebrow. “Or not told you at all.”
John concedes the point by the slant of his shoulders, and the way the smile-lines at the corners of his eyes deepen. “Why are we standing outside?” he asks. He’s cold. His coat is not nearly warm enough for the weather. Sherlock wonders if it would be permissible to buy him a nice wool jacket. A thigh-length pea coat, he thinks, would be ideal. A little naval, but still.
“Look,” Lestrade says to Sherlock. “I know you’re back from the dead and exonerated and all, but the fact of it is, you’re going to have to tread lightly. No one knows I’ve brought you here. Not the chief superintendent, not anyone and if this gets out I’m not going to be given a slap on the wrist, or stuck behind a desk. I’m going to jail, so’s John, so are we all. So no blogging about it, no talking to your brother, no haring off without me. You have to follow my lead like…like John’s life depends on it.”
John pales. The last time his life depended on Sherlock, Sherlock stepped off the roof of Bart’s and disappeared.
“You have belaboured the point quite enough,” Sherlock says. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
There are five body bags laid out, waiting. Molly is twisting her hands together and she’s picked at her winter-chapped lips until she made herself bleed. Sherlock, despite all the waiting, and posturing, is interested.
They’ve closed ranks again. Molly, Lestrade, John, and him. It’s…comforting. All they need now is Mrs. Hudson bringing them tea and biscuits.
“Serial killer,” he says, and Lestrade nods. “White male in his late twenties to thirties,” Sherlock says, and when Molly looks startled, adds, “We are talking about a serial killer. They’re all white males in their late twenties to thirties.”
“Jeffery Hope wasn’t,” John points out, and Lestrade covers his laugh with a cough.
“Who?” Sherlock asks.
“The cabbie,” John says, at the same time Lestrade says, “How can you not know that name?”
Sherlock doesn’t quite manage to refrain from rolling his eyes. “Yes, yes, alright. Shall we get on with it?” He knows John isn’t fooled by his nonchalance and his mouth curls up in one corner in a smile. John’s eyebrows draw together, ever so slightly, but it’s his way of not smiling along with Sherlock, and they both know it.
“Doctor Hooper,” Lestrade says. “Might as well get this bit done with.”
Sherlock can already see that the bodies are all of a comparable height, somewhere between five six and five eight. A little shorter than the average British male. Molly starts unzipping the bags and the obvious similarities of the victims means this killer has a specific type - either some sort of psycho-sexual desire he’s filling, or displaced anger at his actual intended target. All male, solid build - slight variants where one was in finances, one in construction, a chemistry teacher at a private boys’ school, and two Boots employees…no, one worked at a Primark, next to a Boots. Caucasian, late thirties, dishwater brown hair greying. Not especially handsome men by media standards, but…how had Mrs. Hudson put it? Smouldering. Damply. Like a peat fire.
“You can see the problem,” Lestrade says.
Sherlock can see the order in which they were killed. The murderer is growing bolder. There are less hesitation marks with the knife - no, scalpel. The first victim, Boots employee, was killed outright, throat slit, right to left, right-handed murderer. Not much of interest, except for the missing fingers where he tried to get his hand between his throat and the knife, and the large chunks of flesh removed from the shoulder and thigh.
Second victim, teacher. Killed with no hesitation. Opened up, throat to sternum with hesitation. Organs rummaged through. Bits missing from the shoulder and thigh again.
Third victim, Primark. Raped with an object - either as humiliation or the killer couldn’t maintain an erection - flesh from shoulder and thigh removed pre-mortem, throat cut, properly dissected, all organs in the body cavity are missing.
Fourth victim, banker. Raped by the killer - obviously the killer had hesitated previously but was now in the swing of things - flesh from shoulder and thigh removed pre-mortem, throat cut, properly dissected, organs missing. Organs replaced with the organs of the previous victim except for the heart. Obvious.
Fifth victim, construction worker. Raped. Lack of obvious cause of death. No, cause of death is perfectly, obvious; trauma and blood loss. Vivisected.
“Bloody hell,” John says.
“Half the press are calling him the Baker Street Butcher and the other half is calling them the new Ripper murders.” Lestrade wants a cigarette. His fingers rub together and he keeps touching his mouth.
Baker Street? What on earth has Baker Street to do with-
“Look with your eyes,” John says. “Not with your brain.” A nonsense statement which Sherlock ignores as he puts together all the pieces. It hits him like a train. All the victims, who have been taken apart and examined (and sexually assaulted), look like John Watson.
…everyone thinks he’s the one doing it.
“Ah,” Sherlock says.
“Should I be worried?” John asks. John, who never believed the lies.
“You don’t-” Sherlock starts, hurt, instinctively hiding it under a waspish tone.
“Not about you, you berk,” John says dismissively. He’s looking at Lestrade. “Do I need to be worried about the maniac who’s doing this?”
Lestrade rubs at his jaw. “I want to take you into protective custody.”
“Absolutely not,” Sherlock says at about the same time John says, “Not a chance.” They’re standing too close. Sherlock knows this. John is sparing himself some psychosomatic pain by putting his weight on his other leg, so he’s leaning ever so slightly towards Sherlock who is standing close enough that their coats are touching. They’ve been doing that a lot, post-fall. Sherlock knows why he’s doing it, but he’s not sure if John has even noticed. It seems to him that John is in constant readiness to catch hold of him, as though they were still handcuffed together.
It might help John’s pain, actually, to just go ahead and cuff them. Sherlock suspects that he’d still get free use of his arms, so long as he could (and he could) ignore John’s protests.
“You’ve already washed the bodies,” Sherlock points out. “What, exactly, can I tell you that a medical examiner could not?” Probably a lot, if he put his mind to it, but he doubts they want to know intimate details of the victims’ lives. It won’t tell them anything about the killer.
“Nothing,” Lestrade says. “I don’t want you on this case; I don’t want either of you anywhere near it. Take a vacation, get out of London. Get yourselves an alibi other than each other, or Mrs. Hudson.” He nods at Molly who dutifully begins zipping the body bags closed, much to Sherlock’s annoyance. He is in no way finished looking at them.
Sherlock is not impressed, to say the least. Not that he’s ever impressed with Lestrade, but still. “You expect me to just-”
“Yes,” Lestrade snaps. “Yes, I do. I don’t give a monkey’s how interested you are.”
Molly hesitates, the face of the third victim still visible, zipper drawn up to the body’s chin. “I have a pullout,” she says, tentatively.
“That won’t be necessary,” John says, far more harshly than Sherlock would have predicted. Although, she had been the one to draw John away when Sherlock was headed up to the roof and help out afterwards, but that was hardly her fault. “We’ll figure it out.”
Lestrade sighs.
“We’re not leaving Baker Street,” Sherlock says, in the cab home. “We can find the murderer far faster than the Met. Just a serial killer, hardly a challenge.” John is silent. “What?” Sherlock says.
“We’ll talk about it at home,” John says, stone-faced. When Sherlock demands to know why, John grits out, “Because I’m going to bloody throttle you, and I’d rather not do it in front of the cabbie.”
They spend the rest of the journey in a hostile silence. Or, rather, John is hostile, and Sherlock utilizes the time to calculate how best to persuade John that he - as always - is in the right. Obviously John is highly emotional and Sherlock can appreciate why, he just doesn’t see why feelings based on something that happened ages ago should have any bearing on the matter.
X X X
Sherlock, do what the detective
inspector says
MH
I will kidnap the both of you
MH
You can’t ignore me forever
MH
Back off
JW
X X X
The first person to whom Sherlock revealed he was still alive was John. The only person to whom Sherlock revealed he was still alive was John, and it was John who notified Mrs. Hudson (best to break the news gently, John said), Lestrade - and through Lestrade the rest of the force - and all other interested parties including Mycroft because John might be furious at Mycroft but John’s not the sort to let a man think his own brother is dead.
John had, at first, seemed to look right through him but upon further evidence that Sherlock was not some figment of his imagination, had fainted. Passed out stone cold. Sherlock would like to tease him about it, but John can’t bear any mention of Sherlock’s disappearance so he keeps his amusement to himself.
John’s violently emotional reaction to their reunion - fainting, shouting, hugging, a few tears - clearly indicates that he’s going to have a proportionally large outburst at the thought of anyone trying to threaten their status quo. The colloquial expression for what’s going to happen next, as far as Sherlock knows, is ‘getting ripped a new asshole.’
Sherlock flops down on the sofa, fully prepared to let John get the yelling out of his system before he begins his counter arguments. They have crime scenes to break into.
Instead of yelling, John very carefully takes off his coat, and his shoes, and then stands there in his absurd button-down jumper, neatly ironed plaid shirt, and jeans. There was a hole in his sock, three days ago, but John darned it, rather than buy new ones. “You died,” John says. “I buried you, and everywhere I went people thought you were a murderer, and a liar, and no one believed that you were…” He takes a deep breath and collects himself. “You left me, Sherlock. I won’t go through that again.”
This is one of those situations where having a rudimentary grasp of complicated emotions like grief would come in extremely useful. Probably it feels like trying to convince John that he was a fraud but Sherlock never wants to think about that in any sort of detail ever again, so it’s not helping him now.
John sits down on the sofa next to Sherlock. “Without you, I’m just a sad bastard sitting around reading his own old blog entries. I actually asked Mycroft to get me back into the army.”
Sherlock is aghast and sits bolt upright. “I’m glad he had the common sense to say no.”
“He said you wouldn’t’ve wanted it so he wouldn’t do it.” John looks very small next to him. “I threatened to take it up the chain of command, he threatened to disappear me.”
Sherlock is going to have extremely loud words with his brother just as soon as he can bear to talk to him. “But I’m right here. It’s fine. Obviously.”
John’s hands are suddenly warm and rough on Sherlock’s face, and Sherlock can feel John’s heart racing. “You’re a blithering idiot sometimes,” John says and when Sherlock opens his mouth to protest, John kisses him.
The first thing that Sherlock says, when John has sat back, red-faced with what is clearly embarrassment, is, “You’re straight.” Not, he will admit, really the point but John winces a little.
John “confirmed bachelor” Watson is straight and while he’s stopped protesting assumptions he and Sherlock are together and started joking about it, and now he’s making sudden advances on the sofa, he’s still straight. He’s straight, and Sherlock is…He is. He just is. Cogito Ergo Sum. Although if thinking is what makes a person, then Sherlock and Mycroft, damn him, are possibly the only people who exist in London.
“Yeah,” John agrees. “It’s probably an adrenaline thing. I don’t know. You drive me mental because it’s not like we run out of murderers to catch or nutters trying to kill us, or you managing to blow up the kitchen because you’re bored…”
Sherlock puts two and two together. “No shortage of adrenaline,” he says, mildly disappointed. Is he disappointed? Why is he disappointed?
John’s left hand is shaking, ever so slightly, but so is his right. Nerves then. At least he understands that this is important. “No,” John says, drawn out, like Sherlock’s missing something. Unlikely.
The entire thing is getting right away from Sherlock and it’s starting to make him feel strangely uncomfortable. Something is seriously amiss. It is a rare occasion that someone is able to make him feel uncomfortable but The Conversation he’s about to have with John is enough to do it.
“I don’t…” Sherlock says. He knows perfectly well how to explain - John is sexual (and straight, as all the data proves!), he is not - but laying it out so John comprehends…that’s another matter altogether.
“Never?” John asks. “I mean, I figured at some point…Not even?”
Sherlock closes his eyes, wondering if it will make the conversation any more bearable. “No, never, not at any point. Yes, I do, if you’re asking if I masturbate, though rarely and occasionally without result. And before you ask, Doctor, there is nothing physically wrong with me. Nor, I would say, is there anything wrong mentally-”
John laughs, a nervous guffaw. “Well,” he says.
“Oh do shut up,” Sherlock says, but can’t quite keep a straight face.
“What about the rest of it?” John asks when they’ve finished tittering like schoolgirls.
Sherlock, to his annoyance, has no idea what ‘the rest’ is. Evidently his confusion is clear to John because John flaps a hand at him in an unhelpful sort of way. “Non-sexual close contact,” he says, in his professional voice. “Kissing, for example.”
“I find most people to be a waste of carbon and most people find me…difficult. The odds of stumbling across someone who would want to share a non-sexual relationship with me, and with whom I would share such a thing, are long indeed.” Sherlock sounds petulant even to his own ears.
John doesn’t look pitying, which is good, because Sherlock is very much prepared to unleash a rant of such vitriol that can only come from being asked the same stupid questions and receiving the same stupid replies time, after time, after time. Instead, John looks sympathetic. “I had a girlfriend with a much higher sex-drive,” he says. “Put a bit of a strain on things. Er, the relationship.” He nods firmly, like he’s figured something out. “I won’t ask again,” he says.
This, weirdly, is not the answer Sherlock wants or even completely understands. There was an element to this conversation that he has missed, utterly. “Good, thanks,” he says and stands, ostensibly to check on the strips of skin in the oven, but more to remove himself from the conversation.
On the up side, at least John isn’t talking about leaving Baker Street and letting Lestrade and his idiots handle the case, or other nonsense.
John turns on the telly, says, “Hungry?” (the answer is no, but John in an embarrassingly English way always gets too much food from the Indian place a couple streets over and Sherlock will pick at the leftovers because it makes John happy to see him eat), and they talk no more about it, but Sherlock is unsettled and anxious; emotions he rarely suffers from - well, when they’re not withdrawal related that is - and it’s a feeling of being below average, like he’s somehow lacking. It’s not something he’s used to.
Hours later, after John has gone to bed - he’ll dream of Afghanistan tonight - Sherlock lies under his own sheets, pyjama bottoms around his knees, and attempts to get himself off. He doesn’t like being unable to succeed at something. It takes a few long minutes of concentrated effort to spin a fantasy in his head. He imagines the first case that he and John worked together. In this scenario however, when the case is closed instead of Sherlock going to John, John joins him in the ambulance. His hands are still warm from washing off the GSR, his expression still calm stoicism. John snaps on latex gloves and…
Sherlock closes his eyes and thumbs at the glans on his cock. What comes next is inevitably some tawdry dialogue like, “Better give you a proper check,” or something equally awful. He skips ahead to the nudity portion of things. But then, he dislikes being naked, especially when it’s anything but very warm out, and it feels invasive to imagine John that way.
He tries anyway, for the sake of the experiment. John would be pale, somewhere there’d be a birthmark, the scars any adventurous young boy accumulates over the years. Grey and blond chest hair. None where the scar on his shoulder…
Sherlock is hard mostly due to friction and not through any real interest in the proceedings. He’s snagged the barely used Vaseline from the nightstand, two fingers rubbing roughly over his prostate when it hits him.
The scar on his shoulder.
John has called it by many names, the light bulb moment, the a-ha! effect, but his best analysis was to describe it as a dialogue box from a computer’s OS letting you know it’s updated and needs to be restarted and you can’t do anything else until you click away from that popup. Sherlock is having that moment.
He barely remembers to wipe his hands and pull up his pyjama bottoms before rushing up the stairs to throw open John’s bedroom door. “The legs!” he exclaims.
John sits bolt upright, reaching for his L85A2 rifle that isn’t there. “Sherlock?” he asks, eyes full of mountains and convoys.
“Think, John,” Sherlock says. “The flesh missing from the bodies - the shoulder and thigh - the killer is going from faulty observation, not concrete fact and data. Lestrade was correct, you are the target of the murderer’s obsession and he removes the flesh from those places because of your gunshot wound, and rightly so. But he also supposes you to have a corresponding wound on your thigh. The killer doesn’t know your limp is psychosomatic! Don’t you see?”
John relaxes. “It’s three in the morning.” It’s two fifty-seven, to be precise. “Don’t phone Lestrade-”
“But I’m demonstratively not the culprit,” Sherlock says, “since I’m fully aware you have no actual, physical damage to your thigh. We may stay here, without fear of arrest.” That, he thinks, ought to convince John as to the wisdom of remaining in London.
But then, John doesn’t appear convinced. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. He looks like a disgruntled hedgehog. “Sherlock,” he says in a patient sort of way, “It’s three in the morning.”
“Two fifty-eight.”
“I’m sleeping.”
Sherlock realizes he’s never actually seen John’s leg. “You don’t have scar tissue there, do you?”
“Goodnight, Sherlock.” John lies back down, pointedly. “Close the door when you go?”
Sherlock, despite what some may believe, has excellent impulse control and so he only takes two steps towards John’s bed to see for himself, before stopping. “In the morning then,” he says, already texting Lestrade. “And I’ll want to see your leg.”
He’s down the stairs when he hears John’s feet padding across the floor, the door closing. Whoops.
Sherlock has a great deal of very important thinking to do, so he pulls up a new message and starts typing.
X X X
You’ll find payment
in our usual place
SH
Stuf in othr usl
place. U evr sleep?
lol
X X X
Sherlock hasn’t slept. Now that he can focus wholeheartedly on finding the killer - rather than proving conclusively to John that he is not a depraved lunatic bent on raping and murdering his closest friend - he intends to do just that.
The fuck of it is, Mycroft has been apologising for grossly violating Sherlock’s trust by not pointing every camera in London at Sherlock, even though he wants to, and Sherlock has been masterfully avoiding those that Mycroft is still utilizing. It makes it rather hard to prove his whereabouts at any given moment in time. Still, there will be another murder and Sherlock will have to contrive to be somewhere public, in view of CCTV, and possibly a policeman or two.
For the moment though, Sherlock is fully dressed and perched in the window of the lavatory at 221B, one leg dangling down onto the lip of the tub, the other crammed up into the window with the rest of him. The window frame is digging uncomfortably into his thigh. It is not the most dignified position he has ever been in.
He’s picked up an old habit or two during his time away from London and the people he has come to realise are his friends. Smoking, which John knows about because he’s not an idiot and Sherlock is legitimately trying to quit again so he’s made no secret of it. He’s also started taking cocaine again, and he’s certain that John will neither understand, nor handle this information well.
Track marks aren’t hard to hide. It’s not as though he and John spend any amount of time in the altogether together so he hasn’t had to resort to anal suppositories but he’s taken to injecting the veins in the backs of his knees and his thighs which makes him feel like he’s hiding it. He is hiding it. He shouldn’t have to hide it. He’ll come up with a way to explain it to John and then he won’t have to.
Now though, he needs to zero his attention in on the case. It’s been three point six minutes, the tinnitus has faded; he’s at his peak mental ability. He’s on his third bump of the night. Morning. Whatever it is now. Morning. Six thirty-two am.
He’s been to five abduction sites, five dump sites, and broken in to four of the victims’ domiciles. Sherlock feels electric.
He visited the body dump sites during the wee hours of the morning, and all of them were contaminated beyond usefulness as the scenes had been released and hosts of people had tramped all over them. The victims’ flats however…
The victims lived dull, ordinary little lives, nothing exceptional between them. The first was an avid cinephile who mostly stayed in and never even had a parking ticket or detention. The second had a fairly crippling online gambling habit and owed several dangerous people money. The third had stabbed a man in a bar fight, though the man had lived and he’d done only minimal jail time. The fourth had gone to med school but had dropped out, unable to stomach the less academic parts of the job and decided there was more money and less rigor mortis in banking. He was moderately interested to see what John Five was like before he was murdered.
Sherlock is having trouble thinking of the victims in his usual dispassionate way. He keeps mentally referring to them as John One, John Two, etc. It isn’t helpful.
John Watson opens the door and sighs. “You said you weren’t smoking in the flat,” he says.
Sherlock flicks ash off the end of his cigarette and shrugs a shoulder. “As I recall, at that moment, I wasn’t.”
“Put it out,” John says, turning the tub on in what Sherlock supposes is a hint for him to leave so John can shower.
No matter what little quirks the victims have not one of them is remotely as interesting as John Watson. They’d never come face to face with serial killers and walked away, they’d never argued down Mycroft (which, to be fair, isn’t so different, in the end). They went about their business without ever having killed to save lives and saved lives to allow more killing. They had never tried to sacrifice themselves, or been sacrificed for. They couldn’t explain the complexities of social niceties because they’d never had to hide that their hands that were only truly steady when staring down the sight of a gun and they aren’t anything at all like his John.
None of those other Johns knew how Sherlock likes his tea, or let him order them around even though they could probably kill him in as many ways as Sherlock himself can imagine. They didn’t remind him to eat, or pay him honest little compliments and guide him through the tedious business of talking to people without getting hit. They are not his John, and whoever is working his way up to it cannot have the only John that matters.
“May I see your leg now?” Sherlock asks, lazily taking another drag. His heart is racing and he can feel its every pulse in every part of his body. This is as close as his body gets to mistaking one sort of arousal for another. God, he’d missed this feeling.
Sherlock is certain the killer has recognized the complexities and paradoxes that make up John Watson and wants it for his own. He has to laud the man’s choice but John is pretty much the only person he would step off a roof for (he’s not sure, even now, if he would have done it had Moriarty just threatened Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade and he thinks he should probably be ashamed of himself. He’s not. They would be unacceptable but survivable losses) and every day that John doesn’t throw up his hands and move out of 221B is another day he has chosen to stay with Sherlock. While it’s nice to have validation, Sherlock does not require someone trying to take John away from him to know what it is he has.
He needs to focus.
Johns one through four did not frequent the same pubs, the same corner shops, the same grocery stores. They had four degrees of separation, at their closest and going to the same school as a half-brother’s (that they were unaware of) ex-girlfriend’s kid’s father was a very tenuous link indeed. Different social spheres, different classes, came from and lived in different parts of London. Two of them weren’t from London at all.
“Will you get out then?” John counters. John doesn’t look annoyed though; he’s rolling his eyes and trying not to smile. He doesn’t wait for the answer but wraps a towel around his waist and drops his tracky-bums and stands there. Sherlock is extremely pleased by John’s compliance and he completely fails to conceal that. John’s compliance is…it appeals to some dark part of him that he doesn’t care to examine too closely. Not right now.
John is pale and his body hair is sparse and pale too. There is more hair around his ankles than midway up his calf and almost nothing at all on his thighs. He has old, faded marks on his knees from childhood scrapes, tiny dents in his shinbones that would feel rough under Sherlock’s fingers from normal knocks and bumps over the years. There is no scar on his thigh. Any pain is from nerve damage.
There is no connection between the victims. They were random, utterly random, save for their distinct similarity to Sherlock’s John. So how did the killer find them? John isn’t an especially odd-looking man, but he isn’t featureless either and Johns One to Five could have been brothers. Fraternal twins even. Imperfect copies, but copies nevertheless.
As far as Sherlock is aware there is no search engine or social networking site that will find him ‘people who look like John Hamish Watson’ and their information.
Sherlock flicks the fag end of the cigarette out the window and climbs down. “As I said,” Sherlock says. In the small space, he’s very close to John. Close enough that John has to look up at him, just like the day before, close enough that Sherlock can feel the heat of John’s skin. Still enjoyable.
“If this is an experiment,” John says, audibly swallowing, looking away, “please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Sherlock asks. He wants to see John’s shoulder. He plucks at John’s jumper. “Let me see your shoulder.”
Sherlock has been collecting vital details about John: DNA, x-rays, dental records, and such. He never wants to stand in a morgue wondering. And if it’s John, if it’s ever John lying on Molly’s table, he’s not confidant in his ability to be unemotional about it. He’s as certain as it is possible to be that he’ll prove to be spectacularly ridiculous in his reactions. Sherlock has the nagging sensation he’s already being a little ridiculous and John hasn’t even been inconvenienced, never mind actually harmed, at this point.
Because right now he doesn’t actually want to go and look at John Five’s flat. He wants his John to strip down and let Sherlock examine every inch of him, just in case it ever comes in useful. He wants to be able to identify John, to find John, even if he’s bereft of most senses. John’s the doctor, not him, and he’ll need to be thorough, so thorough, so that he understands every identifiable detail.
John isn’t smiling any more but he pulls his sweatshirt off and his t-shirt. “Can I shower now?” he asks.
Even Sherlock knows better than to ask to touch the scars, but oh how he wants to. There’s a bruise on John’s left forearm from falling asleep at the desk earlier in the week. His calluses are starting to peel and his tan line is less noticeable, probably most people wouldn’t see it at all. John has muscle under a softer, deceptive layer of fat, just like his temper under his stoicism, the soldier hiding under the doctor.
“Be quick about it,” Sherlock says, already on his way to the kitchen. “We’re going out.”
John calls after him, “Learn to shut the door!”
Sherlock isn’t one for needless profiling; the inner workings of the mind of a killer are not relevant. The man responsible is obsessed with John Watson, probably because of the media exposure, and is displaying symptoms of erotomania. His obsessional behaviour will culminate in him attempting to kidnap John. Another victim and crime scene that he would be allowed to look at would be very helpful.
Keep that to himself. John wouldn’t like it.
The first victim was abducted on his way home from the Boots where he worked. The store shut at nine o’clock and he usually closed, but a co-worker and he had switched shifts so the victim had headed out at four o’clock instead. Either he was being very closely followed, or it was a crime of opportunity - not likely for this sort of abduction. All the others were abducted at quiet moments when no one would have noticed their absence. This killer is not concerned about that part of the event. He is organized and cautious. Likely he is already stalking John.
Sherlock is dressed and ready to go, and rearranged his entire book system when John finally appears. “Shoulder holster,” he notes. John nods and pulls his jacket over it. Sherlock can see the outline of the Sig Saur but no one else will be able to. Sherlock is collecting John’s secrets, hoarding them away on his hard-drive where no one else can have them.
They catch a cab to John Five- to the fifth victim’s house with John quietly complaining most of the way there, and Sherlock trying very hard not to let his leg bounce up and down like it wants to. He stares out the window to conceal the size of his pupils.
“What can you possibly find here?” John asks, as Sherlock picks the lock to the flat. “He wasn’t killed here, he wasn’t taken from here. If the victims are being chosen for their appearance, then his life, his flat, has nothing to do with why he died.”
“Hunting ground,” Sherlock says, slipping the picks back into his coat and rising from his crouch. “We need to know where the killer finds his victims. London is a big city and none of the Jo- none of the victims were from the same area.” None of the other victims were actually called John at all. Sherlock doesn’t remember any of their names.
He strides in, John trailing dutifully after him.
“Lestrade’s going to kill us,” John says, hands at his side, watching as Sherlock examines the flat. “Actually kill us. Do you even know when the un-sub-”
“I beg your pardon?”
John rolls his eyes. “Unknown subject, it’s from, look, that’s not important. Do you even know when the murderer first saw them? Without a timeline-”
Sherlock doesn’t bother turning around, instead going through the messy pile of crumpled corner shop receipts, movie ticket stubs, and bank statements that John Five pulled out of his wallet to sort through later. “The first murder was two months ago, each man was held for approximately thirty-two hours, so there’s a cool down period of, on average, two weeks, less with each murder as the killer becomes more confident. That means that the killer isn’t wandering about aimlessly, he’s got a system, and the system works.”
John heads over to the landline, checking for messages. “So they all must have been to the same place, at least once, during that two week period?”
“It would seem the most logical conclusion.”
“Right,” John says, in that tone of voice that implies a perfectly simple solution is anything but. “That’ll be nice and easy then. A bit like finding one book out of a million only we don’t even know if it’s a book we’re looking for.”
All they reasonably have to do is track the comings and goings of five men over two months and see where they trod the same path. Sherlock can’t see what the problem is.
X X X
£50 for each man you find in London who looks like John Watson
X X X
Four hours later Sherlock can see what the problem is.
There is, insofar as he can work out, nowhere in the entire city of London that the Five Johns all went to during their two week period. Nowhere. He’s missing something obvious, he must be.
Proper John is in the kitchen, contentedly swearing at a labelling machine. It’s not as though Sherlock isn’t perfectly aware of all John’s ‘rules of the kitchen,’ he just doesn’t follow them. John is going to label their cupboards and drawers and the shelves in the fridge because he was vocally annoyed about the skin strips in the oven (though he was actually curious). Sherlock is going to ignore the labels until he gets bored and replaces them with humorous substitutes so he can see how long it takes John to notice.
Sherlock is pacing in front of the window in his pyjamas, plucking out an accompaniment on his violin to John’s muttering in the key of F major. Until the killer makes a mistake, and he will, Sherlock is somewhat stuck. Not that he’s planning on admitting any such a thing to John. Dear John, who still looks at him with that same slightly ridiculous expression of shock and awe when Sherlock makes an elementary deduction.
He’s not going to settle down with a case still on, and John’s ill-timed kiss and his own feeble response seem like a suitable distraction. Not really his area, true, but never let it be said that Sherlock Holmes is afraid learning something new.
“Don’t touch the microwave,” he says absently. “It’s emitting radiation down into the oven.”
“What?” John says, startled. “Why?”
Sherlock plucks out the opening notes to Watching Joey Glow. “Why do you think I have that skin in the oven? Really, John, do try thinking.”
John puts the labelling gun down. “Right. I see. How dangerous is that to us?”
“Not very.”
“I’m going for a shower now. Try not to develop any mutant powers while I’m gone. And call hazardous waste so someone can pick it up before we both become riddled with cancer.”
Sherlock tucks his violin back into its case. “Don’t look under the sink if you’re feeling especially fragile of soul today,” he advises.
“You’re a dick, Sherlock Holmes,” John calls back and Sherlock can feel himself smiling.
He should know better, really, he should. He’s been here once before and that had gone extremely poorly. If this thing he has planned goes the same way, he’s not sure he’ll recover.
There are a lot of things about Mycroft that annoy Sherlock but chief amongst them is how easily and consistently Mycroft can play a role. He was popular with students and teachers alike in school. He had a string of incredibly vapid but beautiful women on his arm in sixth form and throughout university. He climbed the ladders of success not only with his intellect but with his ability to adapt to his surroundings and blend in seamlessly. Now, of course, he needs to do no such thing; his current position is better held just being his - as John put it - fantastically creepy self around anyone in a position of lesser power (which is most people). Anyone else is under the mistaken impression that he’s just like them. They can figure out what schools he went to, who his friends are, what circles he moves in socially, but they will never see the rest of the iceberg.
Sherlock, on the other hand, has trouble being anyone but himself for longer than a few hours and so has been alone for most of his life. He found this preferable, has always found this preferable, but his adult years have yielded him some unexpected comrades. And then there’s John. John who has looked under the sink, judging by the combination of laughing and swearing coming from the bathroom.
Mycroft, Sherlock is certain, would know exactly what to do. He would be able to perfectly mimic what a normal person would do and, moreover, he would be able to maintain the illusion for precisely as long as he needed to.
“But John is my friend regardless of my…social difficulties,” Sherlock says to the skull.
Playing Devil’s advocate, the skull says nothing.
Nerves, Sherlock thinks; what an imbecilic way to describe cowardice.
He makes the error of shooting up while John is in the shower - or rather, he miscalculates the dosage for the situation and the amount of time he has - and realizes he is utterly, stupidly, visibly, high. Sherlock gets dressed, buttons his shirt wrong and manages to delete that information before he can fix it. He can’t follow through with his plan now. If John sees him, he’ll know for sure that Sherlock is taking coke again. The evening is ruined but it doesn’t have to be wasted.
“Going out,” he shouts, and is gone before John can stop him, evading Mycroft’s security as he goes.
X X X
Where ru?
JW
Sherlock txt me back
JW
VOICEMAIL
Sherlock this isn’t funny. Either pick up your phone or text me back. For God’s sake, call me.
Have you seen Sherlock?
JW
No.fuck. Ill keep a lookout
L
My network can’t find him.
MH
No one asked you
JW
Sherlock pick up ur phone
JW
Sherlock you twat
JW
VOICEMAIL
Sherlock…Please. Just let me know you’re okay.
Have you found S?
Theres another body
L
X X X
Part One
Part Two
Part Three