From the Blog of Dr. John Watson

I've been waffling about writing an account of these events—which are undoubtedly still on everyone's mind—but I've finally decided to tell the story, with all the facts, even the rather embarrassing and/or gruesome ones. I am doing this partly because all the facts will eventually be common knowledge anyway, and my blog only has three subscribers (Hello there, DI Lestrade, Sergeant Donovan, and Sherlock!) so it's not likely anyone will ever read this who doesn't already know all the embarrassing bits.

You know from my previous post ("The Great Game") that Moriarty very nearly got himself blown up by a pool, and myself and Sherlock with him. Fortunately, he skipped off with a few more threats and actually let us leave. What he said to Sherlock, though, about burning the heart out of him, didn't seem like idle words, and they stuck with me, made me paranoid. I guess getting kidnapped will also do that to a man.

Sherlock drove himself mad trying to find some way to get to Moriarty. He was hell to live with for the next few weeks, always pacing around in the middle of the night, and really, I have enough trouble sleeping without him muttering things to himself and trying to stomp through the floorboards. And I don't even want to talk about the violin-playing.

On the morning that my story begins, I woke up feeling terrible, but I chalked that up to my obnoxious flat-mate having kept me up all night again and went to work anyway. A few hours into it, though, I began to think I was actually sick—just a cold, but still, no one wants to visit a sick doctor, so I headed home early.

When I opened the door to our flat, Sherlock jumped so violently and looked so horribly guilty that for a second I thought I'd walked in on him masturbating or something, but then I saw the syringe in his hand. Up until that point, I'd never really believed that Sherlock was capable of such monumental stupidity as using drugs, despite the evidence for it. And yet there he was, lying on the couch in his pajamas and his robe, needle about to pierce his skin.

I was angry, disappointed, and worried all in the same instant, and I crossed the room in a hurry and snatched the thing out of his hands, shouting obscenities and various negative things about his character and intelligence. He let me take the drugs (cocaine, as it turned out) and he hardly seemed to have the energy to give me a mean look for my trouble.

"What are you doing?" I snapped.

"What does it look like?" he answered, letting his head fall limply onto the arm rest. "Give it back," he protested, "I bought them, they're mine."

"I'm not going to let you bloody kill yourself. I'm a doctor!"

He raised his eyebrows at me and gave me a look that said clearly, "Well, I don't think you're much of one." What he actually said was, "Relax, I'm not going to kill myself. I know what I'm doing."

"And if you get carted off to prison, how will I make rent?" I continued, and he sighed, sitting up.

"I can't take it anymore, John. I need a distraction. There are no good cases, and no leads." He meant for finding Moriarty, of course. His eyes looked haunted. It was the worst I'd ever seen him.

"Drugs aren't the answer."

He snorted. "Funny thing for a doctor to say."

"I meant recreational drugs."

"Stop being a busy-body," he grumbled, standing up rather more swiftly than I was expecting. "Give them back."

I held them away from Sherlock, which was a futile effort considering how much longer his arms are than mine. He lunged for them, I dodged; he pursued, I made a run for it, not really knowing where I was heading with a syringe full of cocaine but knowing that I couldn't just give it back to him. Of course, Sherlock caught up with me almost immediately (I think I'd decided on the kitchen sink at that point) and practically tackled me. I wasn't expecting it, so I fell over—thank God the syringe went flying across the room instead of getting jabbed into my organs. It slid under the refrigerator, and Sherlock pounced off of me and went after it. I caught his foot and it was his turn to lose his balance and fall.

This was about the time Mrs. Hudson came in. "Oh, my," she said, "Sorry to interrupt dearies, but there's a young woman here to see you, Sherlock."

"Show her up," Sherlock said, far more casually than you would expect from a man who was just literally scrambling across the kitchen floor after a fix. Standing up dignifiedly, he straightened his robe and looked down at me. "Really, now. Stop acting so childish. What I do with my veins is my own business." He stepped over me and went into the living room.

Not wanting to be lying about the kitchen floor when a guest arrived, I got up too, then sat down angrily in the armchair.

Molly walked in, surprising both of us. She looked nervous, as usual when she was around Sherlock, and more than a little hesitant.

"Yes?" he barked, making her jump, "What is it?"

"Well, um, Sherlock. Did you happen to, er, borrow anything from the morgue today?"

"I haven't even been there. Why?" His last questions was accompanied with that piercing-gaze thing he does so well.

"It's just that one of the bodies has gone missing."

"How do you misplace a corpse?" I asked incredulously, almost laughing. They didn't look amused.

"What happened, Molly?"

"Well," she began, sitting down on the edge of the couch, "I had just gotten a body in for autopsy. Car accident, young fellow, just came through the ER, dead on arrival. He was on the slab, but I hadn't even gotten a chance to take his clothes off when I got a phone call. It lasted about five minutes. When I went back to the table, he was gone."

"Did anyone else enter the morgue while you were taking the call?" The languid Sherlock of only a few minutes ago was completely gone, and in his stead was the Sherlock that is nothing but energy and motion. It's always uncanny to see him shift moods like that.

She shook her head. "No one came in. I was right by the door, I would have seen them."

"What about the fire exit?"

After a moment I remembered there was a fire door on the far side of the morgue from the main door, which led up to the rest of the hospital. Sherlock probably had a whole map of the building in his head.

She gave him an odd look. "That only opens from the inside." Her tone made it clear; Molly was wondering why Sherlock didn't already know that.

"There are ways around that."

I spoke up. "But wouldn't it have set off the alarm?"

"It's not that kind of fire door. It's just a one-way exit, not wired to anything."

"Ah." Well, so much for being helpful. "So you're saying that someone opened the door from the outside somehow and stole a body. But why?"

Sherlock shook his head slightly. "I'm not saying anything. I haven't seen the evidence." Without further delay, he was up and whirring off to his room to change.

Molly and I sat in awkward silence for a moment. I clapped my hands together and said, "Well, I guess that means he's taking the case."

She made a high-pitched whining sort of noise in response. Thankfully, once Sherlock is motivated to do something, he doesn't waste time about it, and he was back in the room soon enough, pulling on his scarf and coat.

One painfully awkward cab ride later, we were in the morgue at Bart's. To me, it looked like it always did. Shiny, a little too clean, you know. Disinfectant smell. Rather creepy, but nothing out of the ordinary, at least to us mere mortals.

We stood by and silently watched Sherlock as he flitted about the room, looking at random things, eyes blazing. He poked and prodded at the fire door for a while, then opened it, inspecting the lock, I imagine.

"No, this isn't right," he said at last, letting the door close. His eyes roamed around the ceiling. "No, no. It's all wrong."

"What's wrong?" I asked impatiently. He was doing that thing again.

"No one came in through the main door," he said, turning around, pacing, running a hand through his hair. "And there's no other way into the room."

"What about the fire door?" I asked.

"No one has opened it from the outside. You can use a wire to flip the latch, but the design of the door makes that harder—the wire would have left marks. There are none. No one opened it from the outside."

"How about—" I looked around, then at the ceiling, "the air vents? They look big enough to—"

But he was shaking his head. He opened his mouth to explain, but Molly, of all people, beat him to it.

"This is a morgue. The air conditioner is separate from the rest of the hospital, a closed system. We keep the air pressure in this room lower than in the rest of the building so when you open the doors, air comes into the morgue instead of out of it."

"Because," Sherlock cut in, "disease would spread otherwise." He narrowed his eyes. "You're a doctor; you should know that."

"I worked with the living, not in a morgue." What they said did ring a bell, though. "Maybe I just deleted that information?" I joked.

He smiled slightly, then continued. "The vents look big enough from here, but where they exit isn't. So no one got in through the vents."

"And there are no other ways. So." I looked around, helplessly. "Who took the body? And how? And why?" That last question was bothering me the most. What was the point in stealing a body? There was some money in selling organs on the black market, but it seemed a stretch to go to such trouble to steal only one at such a risk. Organs were usually sold by the morgue attendants themselves, who had plenty of bodies and lots of time to harvest them. And they didn't take whole bodies. Next of kin tended to notice that sort of thing.

Sherlock met my eye, and I had the sense that he was working through the same questions, only probably at about a hundred times the speed. "Who and why come later. How is what matters now." He pressed his fingers together in front of his lips. After a moment, he frowned deeply.

"Molly, tell me about the body. How did it die?"

"He," she answered, emphasizing the pronoun, "died in a car accident. I didn't get a chance to ascertain the cause of death, because it was stolen before I even cut off the clothing, like I said. I assume blunt force trauma—"

"Never assume," Sherlock snapped. "I need to think," he murmured to himself, beginning to pace again. "Arrrgh," he exclaimed, "that's not possible—no. It's just not probable."

"What?" I asked, irate. "Come on, out with it. I know you want to impress us with your genius."

Sherlock walked up to me. "We have established that no one entered and took the body. So that means—"

"The body is still here!" I exclaimed, then glanced around. "But where is it? Who hid it?"

He rolled his eyes. "Molly was the only one in the room aside from the corpse. No one came in. The body is most certainly not still here. And if it's not here, but no one took it, then—?" He ended in a questioning voice, trying to guide me to the answer.

I wasn't seeing it. "I don't know. I mean bodies don't just get up and walk off—"

Sherlock smiled. "Don't they?"

My mouth dropped. "Dead people don't walk around, Sherlock. I would know, I'm a doctor!"

"When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be true."

I began to laugh. "You really think a dead body just popped out of the morgue for a bit of fresh air? One last go round the city before the funeral?" He opened his mouth to speak, but I kept going. "Are you, Sherlock Holmes—the Sherlock Holmes, the world's only consulting detective—" my voice was dripping with sarcasm, "trying to tell me that a dead man walked out of the morgue on his own?"

"Of course not," Sherlock scoffed, not seeming the least bit insulted by my words, "He wasn't dead."

Molly and I stared at him. "I dunno, Sherlock," she said timidly, "he looked pretty dead to me."

But Sherlock had begun pacing again, eyes darting around frantically. "Molly, has the toxicology report come back yet?"

"How did you—"

Holmes rolled his eyes. "Of course there was a toxicology report. He was in a car accident—driving, wasn't he?"

She nodded. "From what the paramedic said, he was the only one involved. Drove into a pole. The report's not back yet though."

"What was the state of the body when you saw it?"

Molly shrugged. "Some cuts, nothing major. That's why I assumed it was an internal injury that killed him." She emphasized that he was dead, and I have to admit I didn't see how he couldn't be. Not like the first responder would have made a mistake like that, not to mention the doctors upstairs. And I was pretty sure she knew a dead body from a live one.

"Excellent. Yes, that has to be the way," he muttered. I wanted to shake him until he stopped being so annoyingly mysterious.

"Don't you see?" he asked us, knowing full well we didn't. "The man didn't just drift into a pole. He lost consciousness because he'd been poisoned. We'll have to phone up to the lab and tell them to screen for more than blood alcohol content and the usual drugs. There are a few poisons I have in mind—"

"But how do you know he was poisoned?" I insisted.

"Because he wasn't dead. He may have looked it, but he wasn't. How else could his body not be here? No one took it, so it must have taken itself. Think. If you woke up in a morgue, what would you do?"

I thought for a moment. "Probably scream. A lot. Until somebody told me why I was lying on an autopsy table."

"Yes, but you're familiar with the system. You'd recognize the room and know that whoever came when you screamed wouldn't be trying to hurt you. But someone who'd never been in a morgue?"

"So you think he panicked and bolted for the door?"

Sherlock nodded. "Must have. The question now is who poisoned him and why? We need to learn more about the man to find that out. Molly, can you give us his information?"

She gave us his name and address, but before we went to investigate him further, we found the paramedic who was first on the scene of the accident. He was sitting in the break room having tea—or what passed for it there—and Sherlock drilled him with questions about the accident.

We learned a lot of unimportant details, I'm sure, but of course Sherlock wanted to know everything. The paramedic was getting a little annoyed after the first fifteen minutes, but we didn't leave until Sherlock had gotten every little bit from him. The abbreviated version is this:

A woman who witnessed the man—who was named Jeremy Sanderson, by the way—drive into the pole made the call. She stayed on the scene until the ambulance arrived, and told the paramedic what she'd seen. She didn't really notice Sanderson before the accident, so she couldn't say if he'd been conscious or not when it happened. But what she was sure about was that he wasn't conscious after impact, and a few minutes later, when the paramedic arrived, he was dead. Or at least doing a really good job of acting it.

Sherlock was particularly interested in how the paramedic checked to see if the man was alive. He said Sanderson'd had no pulse, wasn't breathing, and was cold to the touch.

As we walked out of the hospital, Sherlock and I exchanged looks, and I said, "I know." He shouldn't have been getting cold, not three minutes after death, if it had even been that long before the ambulance arrived.

"So either a corpse was driving the car, or there was a poison in his system that caused hypothermia. Among other things."

"Like waking up an hour later in a morgue?" I joked. "I suppose Mr. Sanderson will have gotten back home by now."

"We'll see."

Jeremy Sanderson lived alone in a little townhouse just outside London. No one was home when we arrived, so, naturally, Sherlock picked the lock and we began to snoop around for some clue as to why someone would want to poison our missing body. His place was innocuous enough—I mean he hadn't left us a note explaining why anyone would bother to try to kill him. It was all very middle-class and boring.

I could see the frustration in Sherlock's eyes as he wondered around, undoubtedly learning a great deal of unimportant things about the missing man.

"If he just got spooked and ran out of the morgue, why didn't he come home?" I asked quietly as Sherlock poked around the man's closet.

"Lots of reasons. He's afraid of whoever poisoned him. He's afraid of the police looking for him. He doesn't have fare for a cab."

I snorted. "Maybe we should go to Lestrade about this? Submit a missing person's report." After a bit of hesitation, I continued. "Or go to Mycroft? This seems shady, and we don't have a clue to go on. His people might know something, though."

You'd think I'd suggested we start murdering kittens for fun, the way he glared at me. "We have clues," he insisted. "They just probably lead to dead-ends. We'll know more when Molly texts me about that toxicology report."

As we left the missing man's house, I marveled at how very normal breaking and entering was getting to be for me, and how Sherlock always did an awful lot of illegal things in the pursuit of justice. It didn't bother me, though. Still doesn't.

We'd barely hailed a cab when Molly's text came, and when he read it, Sherlock's face got pale. Paler, I should say. He looked like he'd seen a ghost, or a puzzle he couldn't solve.

"What is it?" I asked nervously.

"I—we need to go back to Bart's." And that was all I could get out of him until we were back in the morgue.

Molly was looking as confused as Sherlock, holding the report out to us as we entered. He took it hastily and scanned it.

"This isn't possible," he murmured. "They must have botched the test. I'll have to run it myself to be sure."

"Can't," Molly said weakly. "They used it all. I was only able to take a small sample before I got that call."

He rubbed his eyes, muttering darkly about idiots. "Call Lestrade," he said eventually, waving his hand in my general direction. "Report Sanderson missing. Maybe those fools will blunder into him and we can get somewhere with this."

I made the call as we left, finally heading back to 221B Baker Street. As we walked up to the door, Sherlock finally got around to telling me about the report.

"There was nothing," he said, a little anger seeping into his normally cold voice. "No alcohol or drugs, but no poisons either, at least not the ones I know of that could have caused a death-like appearance in him. There must be a new one that I haven't heard of yet."

His eyes were almost frantic, and I knew that it would be another night filled with his constant pacing, and my cold hadn't gotten any better, either. No sleep. Again. Wonderful. At least, I reasoned, this had gotten his mind off Moriarty, and off doing drugs just to deviate from the boredom of his existence.

I remembered that the syringe was still under the fridge, so when we got in the flat I went to the kitchen, ostensibly to put the kettle on. The ruse was pointless, since Sherlock went into his room anyway. I got the drugs and disposed of them quickly, but my stealth was for nothing, because when I turned back around, Sherlock was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at me.

I thought he was going to start in on me about being a busy-body again, but before I could tell him to piss off about the cocaine, I noticed his expression. He looked happy, and Sherlock only looks happy for one reason.

Silently, he held out the phone that Moriarty had sent him, the one modeled after the phone from "A Study in Pink." He carried the thing around obsessively for the weeks following the incident at the pool—he even bought a charger for it—but gradually he began to leave it at the flat, giving up hope that Moriarty would phone him again. Sherlock never let it lose its charge, though, and on the screen there was an image, a new one.

"He's behind this, somehow. He's playing with me again." Holmes's voice was excited, eager. He sounded like a kid that's just been told Christmas is coming round again.

I didn't share in his enthusiasm. With a horrible, sinking feeling in my stomach, wondering if I was going to end up kidnapped again, I studied the photo. It was of a vial of blood, wrapped in a pink ribbon, lying on something—tablecloth, maybe, or a blanket. After a second, I realized the blanket looked oddly familiar, friendly even.

The color drained from my face. It was my blanket, the one on my bed upstairs. I wasn't sure if Sherlock had even been in my bedroom before, so I assumed he hadn't realized what this meant. Moriarty had been in my room. My room! The sense of outrage I was experiencing had a very teenager tint to it, but I didn't care. That absolute creep of a super-villain had been nosing about my stuff. And he'd left Sherlock a present there.

"John? What's wrong? You've gone all pasty."

"Think you'd better come upstairs with me," I said, annoyed at how afraid I sounded.

He gave me a look that implied he was trying to understand the immense stupidity of a lesser being. "Why?"

"Because your biggest fan left you something there."

A/N: Any inaccuracies relating to British English are due to the fact that I'm American. Any inaccuracies about anything else are due to the fact that I'm prone to failure.

Also, this story will eventually contain slight Sherlock/John moments, nothing approaching explicit, of course. Fair warning!

Reviews are greatly appreciated! This story will probably end up being stupidly long, and if you have suggestions/ideas and such, feel free to tell me.

Thanks for reading!