This takes place in our present (so after S3E1 and before S3E2). It was originally inspired by the song Sometime Around Midnight, by The Airborne Toxic Event, which I highly recommend.
This is dedicated to my lovely friend Mel.
"God knows where she is now."
After Midnight
Sometime around half eleven, Sherlock Holmes sat ramrod straight at a pocked and ring-stained wooden table, feeling in turns both magnanimous and irritated beyond measure, with a growing bias towards the latter.
A tumbler of scotch sat untouched by his right elbow; it had been placed there either by John or Lestrade, and though the alcohol didn't tempt him, he was fighting the impulse to beg a cigarette off of someone. Fortunately for his self-control smoking in pubs had been banned for years, and he couldn't find the motivation to push his way through the crowd to reach the designated area, despite his vanishing tolerance. The afterglow of the solved case had long since evaporated and he was growing restless again, although it wasn't the usual cerebral itch he got when his brain began to stall and crave another endorphin rush. It was a vague unease he couldn't place, and his inability to categorise it rankled him further.
This wasn't how he had envisioned the evening, though he supposed he had only himself to blame for that bit of naiveté. But he had been particularly pleased with the resolution of the most recent case, which had involved the murdered trainer of the queen's racehorse Estimate, a surgical scalpel hidden in the eaves of a Zone 2 tube stop, a disgraced ex-Ladbroke's bookmaker, and a rather territorial border collie, and when Lestrade had suggested they have a celebratory drink, it had almost sounded appealing in his rush of euphoria. He had envisioned himself holding court and explaining each induction in detail, while both John and Lestrade nodded in appreciation and John took notes for his blog.
John had known better, though—of course he had—and so when Sherlock had first agreed to go he had looked shocked, but intrigued.
"All right then," John had said, raising his voice as if in good-natured challenge. "If you can make it through a round for each of us—that's three—then I'll come over to yours and wash up your chemistry glassware for an entire month whenever it's needing done. It's the only washing-up you ever manage, but I know you hate it."
Sherlock had waved away John's apparent doubts with jovial dismissal, high on his triumph, but Sherlock had overestimated how far his elevated mood would take him, and John had appraised the situation with far better accuracy. Only in retrospect did Sherlock appreciate how well John had pre-emptively manipulated him.
At first things had proceeded just as he had imagined they would. They had arrived during the tail-end of the post-work drinks clientele and the late-night crowd had yet to make an appearance, and most of the tables and booths had been empty. Sherlock and his colleagues had in fact discussed the case, and he had felt strangely content and companionable in those moments. It was a glimpse at the sort of camaraderie that he rarely experienced—few were willing to socialise on his terms, and he was inclined to socialise with even fewer—and he was gratified to think that perhaps they had both fully accepted his place in their lives again.
In the 90 minutes that followed, however, the atmosphere had taken a decided turn, as had his mood. As Lestrade and John grew more inebriated, they lost interest in the details of how Sherlock had pulled all the pieces of the disparate puzzles together to create one cohesive but complex narrative, and Lestrade had even loudly interrupted him to complain that he was tired of 'shop talk.'
Both he and John found snickered jokes about some apparent buffoon named Boris Johnson and the cast members of a television programme inexplicably called Towie more interesting than the way he had realised that a bloody scalpel found hidden in the West Kensington Station ticketing hall was connected to their case (CCTV footage showed that the bookie had deliberately walked to the distant end of the platform to board the last car through the last set of doors, and West Ken Station was the only one on that direction and branch of the District Line where the exit was also at the very end—not that they'd cared), and the feelings of warmth and acceptance had faded into resigned complacency.
Being the odd man out and feeling both superior and resentful as a result was nothing to which he wasn't accustomed, though. It didn't account for his unnamed discomfort and restlessness, which seemed to be escalating as the bar continued to fill with revellers.
By quarter to midnight there was little standing-room remaining, he had witnessed an increasing number of people spill drinks on others in the crush, more and more glasses were taking over the tabletop as their owners crowded in around them, and he could see a queue stretching from the doorway down Fulham Road, but John's quid pro quo was compelling enough to keep him in his seat. His friend had chosen his bribe well.
Still, the wait was tedious. A DJ had started a set and the music had grown loud, jarring, over-synthesised, and unfamiliar, and it competed with the muffled roar of the pub's intoxicated patrons and the drone of a television commentator who was recounting an Aussie Rules football match happening ten time-zones away. The cacophony pressed into his eardrums and made it almost impossible to concentrate, to think. If he could only tune out the drone and retreat within his mind, none of the irritating external stimuli would matter, and he wouldn't care that he was surrounded by every incarnation of inebriated human cliché. He counted no less than six couples in drunken embraces within the immediate vicinity, and his lip twitched in distaste. A couple standing right in front of his, John's, and Lestrade's table had started to grapple with blind passion, and though he found them distasteful, he also couldn't seem to look away.
His lips thinned and he rolled his shoulders back, irritated with himself for the hot, prickling sensation of discomfort that watching them caused, and how it seemed to touch upon why he had grown so tense over the course of the past hour. Seeing the slide of a hand down a back, fingers twining into locks of hair, the pliant press and parting of lips was still unappealing to him on a rational level, and yet it sparked something latent and darkly alluring within him.
But why? he thought in frustration, and his face pulled into a reflexive scowl as he shifted in his seat. This...susceptibility hadn't been a problem for him before; he had always been above that sort of thing, and he had the experience to substantiate the claim. He had never drunkenly snogged a stranger in a bar (obvious they were strangers), not even during the nadir of his addiction, but he had been to scores of bars identical to this one for the purposes of observation and data collection. During those times he'd had no difficulty in tuning out the over-amplified music and had remained unaffected by the overt, hyper-prevalent sexuality that crackled around him. He'd observed his subjects with the academic detachment of a zoologist then, but now—now his suit constricted in all the wrong places and seemed to chafe against his skin, and his shirt felt far too tight across his chest.
He squeezed his eyes together and scanned his memory for reasons why he might now feel unsettled in this type of environment, for what could have happened to account for this new (unwelcome) sensitivity to other people's lust, and almost as soon as he had made the inquiry, the answer came to him.
Oh. Obvious. The Woman had happened.
He felt his shoulders square and his spine lengthen at the thought of her, and his hand shot out to grasp the glass in his hand, though he did manage to refrain from actually drinking any of the spirit. Still, he swiped at the condensation on the tumbler in agitation and swallowed as he sensed an uptick in BPM that even the thought of her caused.
It had been several years since he had first met the enigmatic and magnetic Ms. Adler and the rubric of his life had shifted in a way he'd never anticipated, but it had been even longer since he'd felt the need to refresh his familiarity with young adults' socio-sexual rituals and patterns of inebriation. Before meeting The Woman he had been a somewhat different man. His younger self had been committed to the ascetic's choice to abstain from anything sensual, mostly so as not to bias results through personal involvement, but also because he couldn't imagine himself relating to someone in that way and he didn't think it necessary to feign the acts when he could observe from apart. And when he had, he had been so ingrained with that mindset that he'd been able to remain unaffected by the sexual energy that had surrounded him.
He still saw the value in that decision and he understood how he had come to make it, but he also had to acknowledge that the insight into certain types of motive he had gained had outweighed any problems his subjectivity might've caused. They were insights he wouldn't have understood if anything had been feigned, so he'd been right in that sense, but he had long-since acknowledged and accepted that all his sentiments for The Woman were genuine. He now knew what it was like to feel passionate enough about someone to kill for that person, and in theory he could extrapolate from that same intensity of feeling to understand why someone could also kill the person they loved. He wouldn't hesitate to kill for The Woman if he had to—and he had been prepared do so in Karachi, before they'd even become intimate. Nonetheless, with the knowledge and understanding that came with sexual experience came the loss of a certain type of imperviousness as well.
His eyes narrowed as he recalled how much time he had spent in bars, drinking holes, and even brothels in the past two years that were all far coarser than this place, and how he hadn't been struck by this uncomfortable awareness. But then, on those occasions he had been occupied with work, whether it was to keep someone under surveillance, gather intel on local rumours, use a card game to achieve all manners of ends, or plant seeds of like or dislike to be sowed later in the plan in operation at the time. So lack of mental occupation must be partially to blame as well.
He gave John's face a furtive glance, then slid his phone out of his jacket pocket. He'd attempted to pass the time this way earlier and John had made him put it away, but his friend was well past noticing now. Both his and Lestrade's faces had adopted the rosy glow of intoxication, and Sherlock noted the glassy sheen of their eyes and the escalating volume of their voices and laughter. With a small, grim smile he turned back to his phone, and accessed his inbox.
He was halfway into an intriguing email about a blackmail letter found inside a locked safety deposit box, when a warm current of air wafted across his face, and without warning the dark, chaotic setting of the bar vanished along with his preliminary thoughts on the case, and he was knocked sideways into a part of his Mind Palace that was comprised of pristine white furniture and was bathed in bright, golden light.
He blinked in shock and was back at their cluttered table again. The surrounding noise returned to full volume as if someone had released a mute button, but the sound that dominated everything else was the roar of blood in his ears caused by what he had just experienced, and the scent that had triggered it.
He would know that fragrance anywhere. Casmir. It had once so infiltrated his senses that he'd tried to mitigate its affect on him by creating an index of scents on his website. His attempt to incorporate it into his work and therefore neutralise its power over him had not proven successful, as his current reaction to continued to attest.
The slurred chatter to his left paused for a moment and in his peripheral vision, Sherlock saw John's grey-blond head turn towards him.
"Sherlock, you all right?" John's eyes darted down at Sherlock's untouched drink, then back up to his face, his expression a question.
Sherlock barely registered it, and didn't bother with giving any acknowledgement. He had half-risen from the table, and his eyes were darting erratically across the crowd.
Plenty of women wore that perfume, he reasoned with himself. The research he had done for the index had shown that over the previous decade her preferred scent had remained a consistent high-seller; it did not—could not—mean anything.
It provided the best explanation for his restless mood, however. It wasn't just the combination of sexual experience and lack of mental occupation that had contributed to his uneasiness; he must have unconsciously detected the perfume, and it had filtered the way he perceived the interactions of the couples around them, making him relate in a way that he never would've without its influence. Scent was, after all, the most triggering sense in terms of mood and specific memory. The olfactory bulb nestled close to the amygdala, which processed emotion, and the hippocampus, where associative learning took place.
And even before The Woman was anything more than a fascination to him, he had forged a conditioned memory that linked that scent with her. The fragrance had lingered in the fibres of his coat for weeks after she had returned it, and every movement had sent it wafting upward, instantly reminding him of her clever, watchful eyes and her smile that said she was enjoying a private joke, probably at his expense. It had made it impossible to forget how he had been physically attracted to her, even while her texts served to remind him of her intellectual allure as well. Still, he hadn't had the coat dry-cleaned, just as he hadn't changed the sound of her personalised text alert.
Those early interactions would forever influence how he saw her and define their dynamic, and they in turn were inextricably linked to that scent, so that it evoked all his subsequent memories as well. It was layered over everything, infusing all with a distinct, intoxicating allure—much in the same way it had her skin.
Yet that didn't mean that the inverse was true: that whenever the scent of Casmir was present, she was as well. What an accommodating world that would be.
He looked into John's concerned blue eyes and felt foolish. To cover his embarrassment, he raised the glass, made a smile that felt and probably looked more like a grimace, and took one long pull of the smoky, searing liquid. Almost at once he felt light-headed, and though the jagged irritation he felt at the din of the bar and the crush of too many people receded and mellowed, the secondary sensation amplified into a palpable sense of yearning. It wasn't necessarily a longing for something physical, or at least not only that; it was also a long-familiar desire for the easy mutual understanding Lestrade and John shared now.
He had friends, even—somehow, implausibly—a best friend, but there was only one person with whom he'd ever had perfect simpatico, with whom he could share a look and be confident that the full meaning of his intent had been understood, and who could see the entire spectrum of who he was rather than the carefully-curated portrayal he felt comfortable showing—who saw beyond his battle armour, so to speak. But God knew where in the world The Woman really was now.
The heater above the door sent another sandalwood and citrus–scented wave in his direction and then she was there, in image after image that materialised in his mind as if from a projector he couldn't shut off. Her smooth, ivory legs wrapped around a tangled flat-sheet in the high-rise apartment of a CFO out of town for a stakeholders conference. Her triumphant expression when he couldn't come up with a retort to something she had said. The rare but not unfamiliar glimpse of depth in her eyes when she looked into his, her face serious and tender. Her laugh, low, melodious, and amused.
His eyes flew open and he felt a nauseating injection of adrenaline into his bloodstream at that last memory, which hadn't been an image conserved in his memory at all. It had been sound, live and immediate, and it had come from metres away.
Without thinking he jumped to his feet again, upsetting the table and spattering beer everywhere, and he ignored John and Lestrade's surprised shouts to search through the crowd once more. His eyes snapped from face to face, looking for blue eyes and a sharp smile, but all he saw were gyrating bodies, flashes of pink and blue lights glinting off the rims of glasses, and blank, inebriated grins.
He clenched his teeth, ready to conclude that the physiological architecture of his brain must be overriding the logical order of his mind, to make him believe The Woman was in the bar when such a thing was impossible. Usually the infrastructure and superstructure worked in productive harmony, but of course The Woman would cause an exception to that, as she did so many things.
Then, through a crevice in the churning dance floor, he caught a flash of piercing eye contact as well as a fleeting glimpse of a turning face and a curve of cheekbone. People shifted, and the thin line of sight closed again before he had could cognitively process what he had seen, but the sight was so familiar that a fraction of a second was all he needed toinstinctively recognise it—recognise her. Every conscious thought vanished from his mind, and for a moment he felt that the place had become a vacuum, and all oxygen had been sucked from the room.
He heard John say his name as if from a great distance, and somewhere off to his left, Lestrade exclaimed in an over-loud and under-enunciated voice that Sherlock looked as if he'd seen a ghost.
If he hadn't been so staggered by what he'd just seen, he would have found that amusing. After all, hadn't he? Either a ghost by all legal standards, or, more likely, one of his own mind.
But which was it? He broke out of his shock-induced paralysis and craned his neck to sweep his eyes over the crowd, and to his disbelief he saw a sleek dark head manoeuvring towards the door. The sight combined with the alcohol and the lingering scent in a heady mix, and pushed thoughts that he only indulged in total privacy to the forefront of his mind.
"I have to go," he said, his voice low and tight.
Lestrade and John both started asking inarticulate, overlapping questions, but Sherlock had already pulled on his coat and without a glance in their direction, he took a breath and breached the pub's growing crush.
He fought his way towards the exit and at more than one point heard a curse, but he pressed forward against the resistance with a frustrated growl, ignoring the seeping wetness on the right forearm of his coat. People pushed in from all sides with relentless pressure and he was afraid he had lost all sight of the Woman-shaped apparition, but then for another miraculous fraction of a second a sliver of space opened before him. Through it he saw the arc of a hip of a painfully familiar and attractive proportion, and the wink of red soles.
He pushed forward with even more determination through the crowd, managing to stay on his feet when someone shoved hard back against him, and he finally broke through the last resisting barrier of drunken revellers, and stumbled out onto the pavement and into the cold January air. It was jarring, but he welcomed the way the chill cooled his flushed face and seemed to sober him.
He sensed a few smokers and queuers look at him askance, but he ignored them, straightened, and then spun first one way and then another under the streetlight, looking for The Woman's seductive saunter or expectant gaze. But she was nowhere to be seen, and he stood panting, at a loss for a moment, before he wheeled around on the nearest smoker.
"Woman—a woman," he barked with his hand outstretched. "Did you see a woman come through here, just now? Brunette... attractive."
The man exchanged a glance with his female companion. "Mate, even if I did I wouldn't tell you," he retorted, giving Sherlock a mistrustful look.
Sherlock felt his lip curl and his hands contract into fists, and he began to advance on the younger man, filled with sudden, irrational malice that this insignificant person should attempt to stand in between him and The Woman.
"Problem?" he heard a rough voice ask, and he glanced up to his right to see a very large, very stupid looking man in security black take a step towards him.
With difficulty Sherlock managed to contain his flare of rage, and he lifted his chin and tugged his coat straight.
"Not at all," he said through clenched teeth, "but you might want to consult a GP on that inflammation in your right ankle. A man in your chosen 'profession' could hardly afford gout."
As he turned sharply away from the dim surprise on the doorman's face, he felt the buzzing of his phone against his thigh and knew it was John, but he didn't answer. Instead he continued his search, now scanning the face of every person who passed by him, everyone waiting at the bus stop, and even the people eating at the garish late night kebab and fried chicken restaurants—despite the unlikelihood that he would ever find her in a place like that.
When John found him, he was leaning against a brick wall and smoking the cigarette he'd charmed off of a passing woman.
"What was all that about?" John asked. "If you really didn't want to stay, I get it. You've stuck around long enough and to be honest it's getting to be a bit much for us in there too, and I should be getting back home. You didn't have to make some dramatic escape. We'll still call it for you, all right?"
Sherlock said nothing, and concentrated on the consolation indulgence of the fag. John looked at it as well, and then peered at him in a maddeningly insightful way he had developed—a definite disadvantage to Sherlock's methods rubbing off on him. After a moment his expression of concern returned, as well as a touch of compassion.
"Or... who'd you see in there?" he asked.
Sherlock couldn't help it, he let out a premature breath of smoke then glanced over at John with a sharp jerk. John shrugged.
"The way you reacted, like you were taking off after someone - we did wonder. Greg insisted it was Moriarty—though obviously he is a bit pissed."
Sherlock relaxed back against the wall. "Oh. Yes. It was something like that, someone from a past case," he said, evasive though not untruthful. "I thought... But I was wrong."
John nodded, and Sherlock added, "That can happen—every few years or so." He glanced at John and attempted a cocksure grin, but wasn't sure whether he pulled it off or not.
"Yeah, I get that. When I first got back to London, after – after everything with Afghanistan... it took me a good while to acclimatise again. It's only been a few months for you, and..."
Sherlock tuned out. He was familiar with John's returning-to-civilian-life story, but moreover thought that the idea that John ever had 'acclimatised' was utter nonsense. Besides, this wasn't the fallout from some traumatic event he'd experienced during his time abroad, it was the aftermath of an international entanglement of a far different nature.
Instead of listening he resumed his scan of the people passing in front of them and his analysis of the strides of the pedestrians across the road. But she wasn't there, she wasn't anywhere, and it was looking ever more likely that he had imagined her. It must have been the combination of the overt sexuality all around them in the bar, the scent of The Woman's perfume, the reminder that while he was accepted by his friends he would never be one of them, sleep deprivation, and the alcohol... And yet he couldn't convince himself that even such a combination of factors would create the near-desperation to see her that he'd felt, so perhaps there was something more at play. Perhaps he had already been missing The Woman, but had managed to keep it compartmentalised, and those factors only enabled what was already present to come to the surface.
Lestrade appeared on the pavement then, looking both harried and concerned. "You all right?"
"Fine," Sherlock spat, his tolerance exhausted. "But I've humoured both of you long enough for tonight, and since I haven't eaten or slept in days..."
Lestrade started nodding as well, and between he and John Sherlock was reminded of the bobble-headed dogs in the café window below his flat. "Fine, yeah, 'night then," he said, the slur in his voice faint but discernible." And good job again today, Sherlock."
Sherlock gave one curt nod, uninterested now in the case he had already solved.
He vaguely heard John ask Lestrade if he were heading towards the Underground, and the other man waffle about how they should ring a patrol car to give them both lifts home. He was recanting with a laugh when Sherlock made a sound of mingled frustration and irritation, and pushed off the wall. He took one final, deep inhale from the cigarette then tossed it aside and strode towards the kerb, where he waved down a taxi that had just turned the corner.
When it pulled to a stop in front of him he climbed into the backseat without another word, feeling too exhausted and unnerved to make any final efforts at sociability. All he could think of was his bed, and The Woman in his bed—no. Just the oblivion of sleep, and the hope that when he woke in twelve or so hours he could make sense of what had happened, or better yet, not spare it another thought.
"Good night," he heard John call out in the tone reserved for when he thought Sherlock was doing something antisocial, but the best concession Sherlock could make was to lift his hand in a half-hearted farewell before slamming the cab door.
The ride home was a blur of strobing light and dark outside of the window, and the passing landmarks such as Harrods and Wellington Arch were even more superfluous background than usual. Inside the taxi the rumbling white noise of the engine and the constant rocking motion soothed his agitation just enough so that the lurking fatigue could take over, and somewhere along Park Lane his head rolled back onto the leather backrest. He had just dropped into a deep sleep when his text alert sounded, and he registered it but ignored it and slipped back into unconsciousness. When the reminder alert sounded several minutes later while they were barrelling up Gloucester Place he groaned, dug his phone from his pocket, and lifted it to his face.
Unknown, the notification said.
His brow creased as he felt some alertness return, and he touched the screen to view the message itself.
Any lingering exhaustion was shocked out of him when he read the text, and he shot forward on his seat, gripping the phone with both hands and staring at the screen with incredulity.
I've always said that a cold night calls for a hot dinner.
As if by the power of suggestion his body was wracked with a chill that made him shiver involuntarily, which was followed by a sweeping, feverish heat.
He stared at the words, waiting for the letters to rearrange into a different sentence, something mundane and explicable, but they remained fixed in resolute black on white.
He tore his eyes away from the screen because as long as he looked at it he couldn't possibly think, and he turned his head to stare out at the passing streets with wide eyes.
From Park Road the cab pulled into the right turn lane for Baker Street, but as it arced out in the turn, he saw something through the window that made even the text message seem irrelevant.
"Stop the cab. Stop!" he roared, and his head and then his entire torso whipped back around to try to catch a better look at what had just registered in his mind in the form of a blinding white exclamation point.
The cabbie swore in irritation but brought the vehicle to an abrupt halt, and Sherlock exploded out of the backseat only to freeze in place when he stood, his hand gripping the top of the open door.
Irene Adler was leaning against a brick and Portland stone building on the curved corner where Allsop Place turned into Baker Street, looking for all the world as if they'd made a twelve o'clock appointment, and he were expected.
Check out my profile for the link to a great photoset by Admeliora, which illustrates the last scene of this chapter.
