A/N: Hello, everyone. This story wasn't planned and it wasn't worked out and it wasn't really a plot bunny either. It was a sudden, intense, downright frightening experience and it needed to get out. It is based on a very- I don't even know what to call it really. A Sherlock picture I found on dA, drawn by *y0do. I suggest you look at it after reading this fic. Here's the link (remember to remove blanks):
deviantart. com/ art/he-who-waits-behind-the-wall-207272424?q= gallery%3Ay0do%2F26786669&qo=36
I should probably tell you that I'm German and I have never seen Regent's Park Tube Station from the inside. Also I've never written angst before. Please leave me a review to tell me if it was any good at all. There will be a chapter two to wrap it all up, I think.
He Who Waits Behind The Wall
There was no warning.
John has been out for exactly seven minutes and twentysix seconds, though he will likely never know that. He left for some grocery-shopping, then came back after half of the way because it was colder outside than previously expected and he wanted to fetch his scarf from the wardrobe. He first left the flat to the scratching jigsaw sound of a moody Sherlock's violin, and finds it shrouded in an eerie calm that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
The door to flat B is closed. He could just take his scarf, get the milk from the supermarket like he ought to, and be back in under twenty minutes. Surely Sherlock is just fine in there, flat on his back on the sofa grumpy and bitter as usual. Surely the man is just provoking him with this, because he has to have heard John coming back in. Mood or not, the man hears everything.
„Sherlock?"
No sound answers his silent call. It isn't that abnormal for one like Sherlock, he thinks. It's fine, it's all fine.
Except it isn't.
As soon as he is out in the crispy cold air again, he notices what he failed to notice while he was still inside the building. Only now that it is gone does the smell register in his mind, and it sends him right into a downward spiral of fear. The last time this smell filled his nostrils, out of the blue and unexpected, he had been dying in the sand under the nonforgiving Afghanistan sun.
Blood.
Inside, the air has been thick with the metallic, sickening scent of fresh blood.
He has difficulties to get the key back into the lock - fumbles with his gloves in nothing short of desperation, manages the door open, flies up the stairs stumbling over his own feet and cursing them, cursing himself, just cursing because it reminds him so much of that time and back there cursing had been all that still bound him to the living. He doesn't resort to praying, not yet. Not before he knows what's going on. His right hand finds the door handle while his left fishes the cellphone out of his coat pocket, typing away almost on its own accord.
Emergency.
Just this one word, because that much he knows, that much he can deduce. The rest is up to his guess at this point. He texts it to Lestrade, then to Mycroft. Probably the wrong order. He doesn't have time thinking about this right now. Instead, he pushes the door open and plunges into the darkness that is their flat. This is wrong, because though the sun is setting outside, the lights should be on in here. The smell is worse now, so much worse, seeping into his brain like poison and he can't see anything. Where is the light switch? He feels for it along the wall and his hand touches something slippery before he finds the object of his desire. Waterslimeacidanythingbut. Suddenly he is afraid to turn the lights on and now that is just downright ridiculous, he hasn't even been gone for ten minutes, what could possiby have happened?
„Sherlock?"
The silent darkness seems vicious enough to try and actively devour him. He presses the switch.
Mycoft's men find him eight minutes later just there, kneeling on the floor, unmoving but for his heaving chest. They stop next to him in the doorway to discuss possible strategies in hushed voices when Lestrade's car can be heard outside and they vanish just out of sight. Then the D.I. takes their stand behind him, not even breathing, not moving at all, until a heavy hand lands on John's shoulder and snaps him out of it with an audible gasp. He tries to think, tries desperately to grasp a single thought from his empty head and can't. The silence between them stretches on and on until it becomes something touchable, something dark and dangerous and he can't stand it any longer or he might very well shatter right there.
„It isn't his," he says and his voice steady enough that he hates himself a little. „Can't be, it's impossible. There is no way a single human could bleed that much."
It is true, and it doesn't make him feel better at all.
Mycroft steps past them. When did he arrive? What is he doing? What is anyone doing here, those people don't belong here, it is just wrong wrong wrong- Sherlock. Where is Sherlock?
„Invoking the feeling of chaos. With out order."
It is only a whisper, but everyone's attention is immediately on the older Holmes who is now standing in the middle of the room, carefully avoiding the small pools and the dripping ceiling as much as he can. He's contaminating the crime scene, John thinks and finds himself utterly uncaring about it. He doesn't know what is more striking about the situation- that his own home has been turned into this in ten minute's work; that Mycroft risks to distort evidence with his actions; or that Lestrade is right here watching. He doesn't care about either possibility.
Without much thought he follows Mycoft's eyes, scanning the walls and windows- windows lined red with symbols and signs that look too wrong, too twisted for a proper language or a code. He remembers a different kind of symbols on them, yellow spray paint put there in an attempt to look dangerous. How laughable that now seems, how downright ridiculous it was. He thinks he can make out letters in the sprawled, smeared mess, but no words, no coherent sentences. Mycroft can. He is a Holmes and a Holmes knows everything. Be it by means of books or computers or security cameras or homeless people or plain deduction really, they always know everything.
Homeless network.
It registers in his mind only now, but it is really so obvious and shining and so very glorious. There was a girl on the corner of Baker and Downing Street, a girl huddled into the doorway of an old apartment building. A hobo.
An opportunity.
Slowly, he backs away, feels Lestrade's eyes on him and Mycroft's whose men are now searching the area for clues. Lestrade doesn't call backup because the government is here. Both police forces and government only continue to stare at him and John somehow manages to get down the seventeen stairs and out the front door, and onto the street, and then he is running.
The girl is still there.
Waiting for him.
He knows her, and she knows him, they have passed Sherlock's questions and the resulting answers back and forth many times and when she looks up at him now, the eyes in her dirty face are bright and awake. He finds a banknote in his jeans, not bothering to look at it, and she gives him a scrap of paper in exchange. Then she gets up, tightens the ragged blanket around her slim frame, and disappears into the night.
Regent's, it reads.
He walks back to Baker Street 221 in a dreamlike state, intending to get his browning and then get going, and instead runs right into Lestrade who is just leaving the building. „They are gone", he says and grimaces. „I called in forensics, after Mycroft had finished. They'll be here shortly. His men found bloody footprints somewhere, they said, but I don't know..."
John doesn't listen anymore. He walks right past the inspector, through the living room (around the puddles, don't think about it, don't look up) and to the desk where he keeps his old army gun locked up in a drawer. It has been left there undisturbed. It isn't anymore. He pushes it through his belt, adjusts his jumper and coat over it, walks back to the door and outside and past Lestrade again. The man is still talking. John still ignores him. Soon enough he is running, waving for a taxi.
Regent's Park.
It is pitch black by the time he arrives and freezingly cold. No one is here but the occasional pedestrian hurrying home. John enters the space between the trees cautiously, but without hesitation. He closes a hand around the handle of his gun and feels hot fury boiling up inside him. Let anyone try anything funny, he'll be ready. Oh, and he will make them pay.
He walks past a park bench, reduced to a dark shade in the blue night, and something glitters in the headlights of a car that's passing the park. He turns on his phone, ignores the unread text messages, and uses the screen to illuminate the words. Most of them are smeared and scattered, but the message is still readable, and that's what he will focus on. Not the blood. Not the dark. Just those letters.
he who waits behind a wall
Wall. Wallwallwall. There are no walls in a park, just trees. Regent's, just Regent's the note says. Not the park then. Not the park. The Street, but there are so very many walls and so many people. Regent's. The Tube station. He is running again, always running, finding the way by memory alone, because he can't see a thing in between the dark shades of the trees. Is it raining? His vision is all watered down- ignore it. Not important right now, not ever important enough.
Regent's Park Tube Station is closed down, with red-and-white wooden bars blocking the entrance, and that is really not natural, because why would they close this station, so he has to be right about this. Has to be. He jumps right over the barricade and races down the stairs where flickering light bulbs illuminate concrete walls and the smell of stale alcohol and piss is downright sickening.
The station is huge without the usual mass of pedestrians, huge and wide and empty and the lights are not nearly enough to illuminate the dark corners that loom everywhere. John pulls his gun out of his belt and holds it in front of him. His hands are very, very steady and his breath forms white clouds in front of his face and there is nothing but silence to greet him. His steps are too loud in his own ears.
„Sherlock?"
Something is dripping.
Dripdripdripdripdrip.
He doesn't need his phone now because the flickering lightbulbs are enough. He almost wishes they weren't.
in his right hand he holds the candle whose light is shadow
Candles. Now where is he supposed to find candles? Light is shadow, to that he can relate, there are too many shadows here and not enough light at all. Candles are for dead people. Wrong train of thought. Sherlock is ambidextruous. Now how does that help him? He doesn't know, he is just so confused, he doesn't know what to think and Sherlock's coat was gone.
What?
Sherlock's coat. The black swishy dramatic coat he loves so much. It was still there when John first left the flat and by the time he came back, it was gone. Maybe this is all just a stupid stupid game and Sherlock run off without telling him. Or texting him. Left litres of blood splashed all over the flat. And has been gone ever since. Unlikely, not impossible but highly unlikely. He raises his gun again and takes a steadying breath that he doesn't need. He is steady, and calm, and he will fucking kill everyone who dares stand in his way now.
„Sherlock, if you are here, answer me!"
His voice echoes through the tunnels and bounces off the walls. There is no response, but John is cautiously moving from wall to wall, gun straight ahead- just because Sherlock isn't here doesn't mean no one is, after all- and then he spots it. A dancing, flickering dot in the black hole that's the tramway. Down on the tracks. A candle.
He doesn't even think about it at this point anymore, he just jumps off the platform, careful to avoid the electric part of the rails that will likely kill him when touched, and walks down into what feels like the giant maw of nothing. He can't see. Again. Too dark and too much alive. Then he passes the candle and there is Sherlock.
He is leaning against the wall, that much John can see. His long frame is a thin, visible outline against the darker blackness around them. „Sherlock. Sherlock, answer me." For what feels like a very long time, nothing happens. But then, finally, Sherlock's head is turned towards him, a bright dot in all the void.
„John?" The voice is raspy and deep and sounds positively horrible, but it's also Sherlock's, and John wants to cry in this moment but he pulls himself together, barely so, because they aren't safe here. He doesn't know what kind of sick joke this is supposed to be, but he certainly knows that much.
„Sherlock, can you move?"
It doesn't make sense that Sherlock would just stay here, on the tracks in the darkness leaning against a wall, if he could really just go. But the detective only gives him a very strange, very strangled sound in response and reaches out with a gloved right hand and John takes it in his gloved left hand. Too many layers, too little time to do anything about it. He picks up the candle on their way back and its light reflects from the wet parts of the wall. Wet? More letters. John doesn't want to read this, but now that he has seen the words, he can't really help it.
leaking from your eyes like liquid pain
A strange shudder creeps up John's spine and he tightens the grip of his left hand. The one that is holding Sherlock's. He doesn't get a reply. The other man just follows him, clumsily and without a word, and that is downright creepy and almost worse than the rest of the evening has been combined. It's just wrong wrong wrong.
But he'll fix this.
Somehow they make it back to the platform and John helps Sherlock up while his eyes dart back and forth, checking for danger, because he feels like they are being watched and he can usually trust his feelings.
He can't see anyone.
„Okay, we're clear. Let's..."
Oh God. Oh God, Sherlock's face. No. Nonono. This can't be. No. He stumbles backwards, drops the candle, lets go of Sherlock's hand in the process and suddenly feels very cold and very, very desperate.
„John..."
Blood. Blood around Sherlock's mouth, its his own obviously, but there no signs of an injury, the lips and skin are still intact, just bloody red and it's all over his chin too. Not even fully dry yet. And there are spots on the black coat he's wearing and the scarf and still dripping. But what's worse, what's so much worse, is the eyes.
Oh God, the eyes.
They are bleeding too, and it looks bizzare, like red tears spilling all the way down Sherlock's cheeks. The iris, usually clear and icy blue, has gone completely black and for a horrid moment John thinks that Sherlock is permanently blinded, but then he realizes it's the pupils that are dilated beyond recognition. Looking into anything bright has to burn, has to hurt and be horrible and painful and it looks so grotesque. Sherlock's skin is white beyond compare, and he looks very much like a ghost that visits you in your nightmares to devour you, and he also looks small and afraid and hurting and very, very vulnerable.
„Sherlock, listen to me. It's all right, it's me, we'll work this out. Cover your eyes. Just put your hands over your eyes, okay? Can you do that? For me?"
And for maybe the first time ever, Sherlock obeys without protest. He just raises his hands, holds them up as if he tries to look at them, and then very delicately covers his eyes with them.
John turns around, fishes for the gun in his coat, and looks at the wall.
HE COMES
He is shouting, shouting and almost screaming nonsensical words as he races up the staircase and into the free, fresh night. His legs are shaking too much. He is supposed to be calm, he is supposed to be the steady one now; instead he has Sherlock's elbow in a grip tight enough to bruise and pulls him along regardless of stairs and warnings and they nearly fall more than once and he doesn't care. His head is filled with the desperare, violent need to get away.
Then they are outside and John starts to cry in the light of the street lanterns, while he sends an indecipherable message to Lestrade and he wants to call an ambulance but he just can't breathe properly and Sherlock collapses almost on top of him, his breathing ragged and his hands still clamped over his eyes. He's in great pain, and he might very well die for all they know, and John is a godforsaken doctor and he needs to get a grip right this instant.
He gets a grip.
Slowly, he pulls Sherlock's hands from his eyes. „Keep them closed." He says and pulls the gloves off. Those white, long fingers are trembling in his, and the veins are stark blue and clearly visible. John chechs for a pulse along the wrist and finds it too strong, too fast, too unsteady, but he finds it. He pulls off Sherlock's scarf and finds the main artery pulsing against his long white neck. His skin looks pasty in the dim light, but he is breathing. He is breathing and his heart is beating and he is waiting patiently because he trusts John. Because he believes John can fix this.
Right now, John isn't convinced.
But he'll be damned if he doesn't try.