"You remember the Dorchester Decapitator?" John asked, flipping through the morning's newspaper. "Have you seen the story?"
"Of course I do. It's in the pile of cases to work on later. Shouldn't take too much brain work," Sherlock replied, steadily measuring a mysterious powder that would find its way into a beaker moments later. "What story? What about it?"
"Well, you might want to remove it from the pile. It's been solved,"
"Solved?" That had certainly piqued the detective's attention. "It's a classic locked-room mystery, a series of them, actually. Don't tell me the idiots at Scotland Yard actually managed to stumble upon an answer."
John got up, bringing the paper with him. "It was Scotland Yard, but I'd hardly call her an idiot. Look, this woman solved the case in three days."
Still focusing on his experiment, Sherlock muttered that it was, "Good work, but I could've done it in two."
Rolling his eyes, John decided to leave the paper there, opened to the story he had been reading. "On that note, I'm heading out to do the shopping, since you've decided to eat absolutely everything in the flat."
"Mhm." Sherlock was no longer paying attention, going back to his experiment. John grabbed his jacket, headed for the stairs. As soon as he heard the door click shut, Sherlock set everything down, taking his safety goggles off and grabbing the newspaper his companion had left behind.
In truth, he had been following this up-and-coming Scotland Yard detective since she first set foot in Homicide and Violent Crimes. Lestrade had pointed her out in the bullpen, saying that her skills were only rivaled by his. Sherlock had nodded to her in passing, but they had hardly exchanged a word. Now, though, she was getting good. And going rogue. The Dorchester Decapitator had baffled the police for months, but almost as soon as she got her hands on the case, it was solved. It was a case worthy of the world's only consulting detective, and no one else. Yet she had managed to do the impossible.
John, meanwhile, hadn't made it out of the building yet, but not for a lack of trying. A stack of boxes blocked his way, piled in front of the door that led to 221C. He could hear music inside, someone shuffling things around. Curious. Stepping around the blockade, he knocked, hardly hesitating. Mrs. Hudson answered, calling back into the apartment. "Here's one of them now, dear. Not the one that makes all of the noise, no, John is rather considerate."
"Do we have a new -"
"Hello." A familiar-looking redhead appeared in the doorway behind her, extending her hand. "I'm Alice. We've met before, though, Dr. Watson."
"Yes, you're… you're the one who just caught the Dorchester Decapitator," he marveled. "Well done. Sherlock's been meaning to get started on that one for a while. The papers said you did it in three days with no help from the rest of Scotland Yard. That's incredible."
Alice shrugged, telling him, "Two. It took a little while to get out there on the train, and then I was sitting around waiting for the local police for a while. Two days, if you count the time I was actually out in Dorchester working on it."
"Can I… ask you something?"
"Sure."
"You really want to live here? I mean, you've heard about Sherlock, right?"
Leaning on the doorframe, Alice nodded sympathetically. "More than heard about him. Lestrade's assigned me to monitor him while I'm at work. Make sure he doesn't step on too many toes, you know? Greg understands that you can't be there all the time, and someone needs to keep the others there from ganging up and chasing him out with pitchforks."
"Oh dear god, I'm sorry."
"Yeah, I've got to go upstairs when I get all of this sorted out and let him know. I'm sure that'll go over real well. Anyway, it's nice to properly meet you, Dr. Watson. I'm sure I'll be seeing you around." She shook his hand again, taking one of the boxes from the hall inside with her. John looked back at the door, shaking his head before he departed.
Some hours later, Alice ventured upstairs, knocking on the door of 221B. There was no answer. She knew that Sherlock hadn't left, though. She would've heard footsteps on the stairs. There had been John coming back in with the shopping and then going out again. Probably on a date, judging by how he had been dressed earlier. Then there was Mrs. Hudson's steady tread, a bit different than John's because of her lighter frame and bad hip. But Sherlock hadn't gone downstairs at all. So she knocked again. And again. Finally, there was a resigned, "You don't seem to be going away, so come in."
Alice stepped inside gingerly, Sherlock not bothering to turn around and look at her. "No hesitation at the door. Strong and steady knock. Approach somewhat like a trained soldier, but silently. Not crying or pleading to be let in, but also not going away. You're not a client."
"Good, but I'm sure you can tell more than that."
"You've only just moved in to 221C, and yet you're coming to introduce yourself despite the glorious amount of unpacking you have to do. You've been inside all day, avoiding any press that could've followed you. You're not in it for the attention, then. You've been busy, but you've just been given your greatest assignment yet, or so you feel. You're certainly up for the challenge," he rattled off, finally setting a beaker on the burner, swirling a blue liquid around inside. He rose, finally turning to greet her properly. "Good evening, Dr. Caldwell."
"Alice," she insisted, shaking his hand with a smile. "And you're right. I've been assigned to follow you around and make sure you don't piss off Scotland Yard too much. Don't worry, I won't get in your way. I've just been assigned to help."
"Hmm, I don't need any help. I already have John."
Alice crossed her arms, watching as he paced to the window. "You've got a violinist's hands, and you've got rosin under your nails. That means either you've been doing a lot of work in music shops lately, or you've been playing music a lot. There's a bullet hole in the ceiling of my kitchen, which is right under your sitting room. So either someone shot at one of you in there, or you did that. I'd have bet on the latter, since you seem like the kind of person who gets bored easily but hates leaving the house if it isn't for work or for something incredibly interesting. So the local shooting galleries are out, which means you shoot at the walls. Besides the pattern is too organized to be random gunfire. You're workin on the case of a banker that;s wound up dead in a locked apartment, and the Yard insists that it was a suicide, even though we both know it isn't that simple. It's never that simple in our line of work. You've been doing these experiments to distract yourself while you wait, because you've got a lot of waiting to do. Now have I passed your test?"
"How many steps are there leading up to the flat?"
"Seventeen."
"Curious."
"Curious?" Alice asked, Sherlock turning to face her again.
"Most people see, but they do not observe. You have the gift."
"The gift?" she questioned, taking a seat on the arm of his chair. Sherlock frowned to himself, but didn't admonish her.
Pacing in a circle around the newcomer, Sherlock deduced that, "You're a busy woman, but you make time to head to the gym for some formal exercise. You're not training for your looks, you're training to be able to beat the utter hell out of someone if need be. You've had some experience in crime before you joined the Yard. Good or bad, you'll never tell. You do a hell of a lot of writing with pen and paper, even though your reports are all submitted electronically. Deduction, you keep extensive journals. You're not currently seeing anyone, but you've had some difficult partings in the past. You traveled the world as a child, but London's always felt like home to you. And you aren't intimidated by a lot, especially intellect, because you have an insatiable drive for knowledge and you're used to standing up for your beliefs. You can speak three - no, four - languages, and you do a considerable amount of cooking."
"You read the article," she acknowledged.
"That I did. Well, Doctor…" he paused, weighing something in his mind. "What are you doing this evening?"
"More unpacking, I suppose. I can see you're working on a method of detecting whether blood is human or animal, at least from your notes," she observed.
"Do you want to help?"
Raising an eyebrow, Alice had to wonder what his angle was here. The great Sherlock Holmes never asked for help. "Why?"
"It would be nice to have an actual intelligent conversation for once. I find that most of the rest of the world is rather dull, to say the least. Tea?"
"I never said I was going to help you." Alice got up again, Sherlock cocking his head.
As he headed for the kitchen, he called back that, "You have plenty to do downstairs. If you weren't at least intrigued, you would have left by now. But you haven't even gotten up, at least until I pointed it out."
That was how John found them when he came home that night, sitting next to each other at the kitchen-table-turned-lab-bench, taking notes and stirring solutions together. He had to look twice, shocked that Sherlock had let someone else touch his experiment, let alone someone he had hardly met. "Ah, Sherlock, what are you doing?"
"The coagulation of pig blood and human blood after death is incredibly similar, but can be differentiated in seconds if you have the right solution. We may have just found it. We're running more tests at the moment."
"That's why there are bloody swatches of fabric hanging up to dry in the living room," Alice pitched in, pulling her gloves off.
"Ah," John nodded, looking to where they had a clothesline set up, rags covered in blood hanging in groups. "Sherlock -"
The detective didn't look up from his notes, but told him that, "Alice here is a bit unique. Not perfectly, but fairly unique. She observes far more than most other people see. She's most definitely going to be useful."
"Useful?" Alice objected, turning to look at him in disgust. "I'd have said 'a good person to have on our side' or 'a good friend', but 'useful'... well, that's Sherlock Holmes for you, I guess." She peeled off her gloves, dropping them on the side of the table. "I think that's probably my cue. Besides, I do have a lot of work to get done. Goodnight, Sherlock. Goodnight, John. Nice to meet you properly. I'm sure we'll all be seeing more of each other."
A.N.: Oh dear, I can't seem to stay away from this one. I've been itching to rewrite an old Sherlock story, and I've finally decided to do it and improve on my last one. Not sure if I'll leave the old one up for a while, but I hope you enjoy my rewrite! (also, I'kl update as often as I can, but in about a month I'm going to see the real Baker Street, so I'll be away for a bit... and then I'll be back at school. I promise I'll do all of the writing I can before then, though, so I can still update periodically when I don't have a lot of time to sit down and write).