It was just past 1:00 when Dr. John Watson entered the lab, accompanied by a man by the name of Mike Stamford. It was nearly empty but for a tall man with curly black hair standing at a table, holding a glass instrument close to his face.
"…bit different from my day," John commented, looking around at the lab equipment, and Mike grinned.
"You've no idea," he laughed.
John looked up as the dark-haired man seated himself at a microscope and rapped on the table impatiently with one hand. Mike looked over and the other man launched into a series of complicated gestures with ease and just a touch of urgency, ending with an imitation of him holding a phone to his ear.
"Sorry, it's in my coat," Mike said, and the young man huffed in irritation, rolling his unusually pale eyes.
John tilted his head, attempting to decipher the words and gestures. "Oh- Phone? Here…use mine," he offered, and the young man rose from his seat to take it from John, one hand absently lifting to his chin and then moving out, the familiar gesture striking a chord in John's mind.
"This is an old friend of mine," Mike said, "John Watson." John watched as the man looked up from John's phone, moving his free hand through another series of gestures.
"Afghanistan, I believe."
John blinked once, looking over at Mike. "Sorry?
"He wants to know which one it was," Mike explained, laughing, "Afghanistan or Iraq."
"Yeah, Afghanistan…" John said, accepting his phone from the young man. "Sorry, how did you-?"
John was cut off as an unfamiliar woman entered the lab, dressed in a white lab coat over her street clothes with her brown hair pulled back in a pony tail, carrying a cup of coffee which she handed to the young man. He thanked her with a nod, and then turned back to Mike, gesturing rapidly.
"Hey," he protested.
John raised an eyebrow, and the woman explained. "He says it's unfortunate that you don't seem to understand him, because Mike is terrible at translating."
"I translate well enough," Mike grumbled from across the room. "I'm near as good as Molly, he just signs so bloody fast."
John laughed once as the young man rolled his sharp blue-gray-green eyes exaggeratedly, then touched the woman's – Molly's – shoulder lightly to get her attention and tilted his head questioningly, brushing a slim finger across his lips.
"It wasn't working for me," she said, obviously answering a question, and the young man shrugged, flicking his fingers in a lightning-fast movement as he moved away from her towards the far end of the table.
"Okay," she said, her voice falsely bright and unaffected, before vanishing through the doors.
"…he wants to know how you feel about the violin," Mike said abruptly, translating again, and John turned back to him, confused.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"He says he plays the violin when he's thinking," Mike explained, "and sometimes he doesn't talk for days on end. He wants to know if that would bother you…he says potential flatmates should know the worst about each other."
"You told him about me?" John asked, but Mike shook his head. John turned to the young man questioningly. "Then who says anything about flatmates?" John watched as the other man's fingers flashed again.
"He did," Mike translated as the man moved to retrieve his coat, pulling it on and knotting a blue scarf loosely under his chin. "He told me this morning he must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for," Mike continued. "Now here I am, just after lunch, with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. He says it wasn't a difficult leap."
John paused. "How did you know about Afghanistan?" he asked, but the other man ignored him, gesturing at Mike, who spoke after a brief moment.
"He says he's got his eye on a nice little place in central London, and that you ought to be able to afford it. You'll meet there tomorrow evening seven o'clock. He says he's sorry, but he's got to dash…he thinks he left his riding crop in the mortuary."
"Is that it?" John asked as the man swept past him, long black coat swirling around him, but he paused as John spoke, raising a single eyebrow questioningly.
"We've only just met, and we're going to go and look at a flat?" John asked disbelievingly. The man gestured with his hand as if to ask, problem?
"We don't know a thing about each other," John said exasperatedly. "I don't know where we're meeting, I don't even know your name."
Sighing impatiently, the man ran through a series of quick motions with the ease born of practice.
"He says he knows you're an Army doctor, and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan," Mike said. "You've got a brother worried about you, but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife…" John stared, shell-shocked, at the strange young man as his hands moved with incredible rapidity, listening as Mike continued to reel off snatches of information. "He says he knows your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic – and that they're correct, in fact…he thinks that's enough to be going on with."
A satisfied smirk playing on his lips, the young man yanked the door open but paused, producing a pen and notebook from within his coat and holding it against the wall so he could scribble down a short message. His handwriting was irregular but still completely legible, made up of of sharp angles and narrow loops.
He pressed the paper into John's hand and gave him a nod, waving at Mike before sweeping out of the room.
John looked down at the note in his hand, eyes glossing over the words there: The name is Sherlock Holmes, and the address is 221B Baker Street.
John turned to look at Mike incredulously, and Mike laughed at the expression on the younger man's face.
"Yeah," Mike said, chuckling fondly, "he's always like that."