"Sherlock?" John called to his flat mate across the kitchen.
Sherlock groaned in reply.
"Sherlock?" John called a bit more forcefully.
"What?" Sherlock snapped.
"That can't be good for the sofa."
Sherlock stared at his flat mate from where he was lounging upside down across the couch, his feet were dangling in the empty air and his head hovering inches above the floor, coal-black curls sweeping across the dusty surface lazily.
"Well, John, what the sofa doesn't know won't hurt him!" he barked.
John rolled his eyes and set his cup of tea on one of the few clear spaces on the kitchen table. The rest of the table had become a veritable swamp of tubes, glass vials and pipettes; all left-overs from one of the largest chemical experiments John had ever seen Sherlock do. It literally took three days, and Sherlock was awake and working the whole time. John would pass by the kitchen in the evening and early morning on his way to work and find him moving slowly, observing the reactions diligently and writing down his observations monotonously. It was at these times John would liken Sherlock to a robot more than a man.
He watched him on the last hour of the last day of his experiment, when Sherlock should have been collapsing from exhaustion and starvation. The man was gaunt, paler than usual, but radiating a previously untapped energy that made him tremble with expectation. His eyes were blazing with subtle anticipation and his fierce gaze was fixed on the broiling glass beaker, which lit up dully above the weak orange flame.
His breath escaped his lips in a subtle shudder, as his long, white finger danced over the piston of the syringe. The suspense was etched clearly across his face; every feature was as still and immobile as a stone as the final stage of the experiment was finally upon him.
Gently—very gently—Sherlock squeezed. Clear liquid spurted from the stem of the needle, splashing onto the thick blue substance in the beaker, and then suddenly the entire solution turned bright yellow.
John didn't pretend to have a clue as to what Sherlock might have been experimenting on (or about) but he could tell it was a success when the usually withdrawn man leapt into the air, whooping with delight, dropping the syringe and clapping his hands together triumphantly.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" he shouted full of joy.
John stood back sipping tea and smiling. More than half of Scotland Yard was convinced that Sherlock was a real sociopath, but it was moments like these that reminded John just how human he could be.
But of course, after the work came the depression.
It had been fairly bad this time, and John could see that the lack of work was taking its toll on Sherlock. The wall was in shambles, the strings on his precious violin had been sawed through with hours and hours of violent playing which had driven John from the flat, and the room itself was in ruins from where Sherlock had torn apart everything looking for his cigarettes.
"I need some! Get me some!" Sherlock demanded upside-down. His cheeks had taken on a rare rosy hue from all of the blood rushing to his head.
"I'll give you something…" John muttered angrily.
"Make it cigarettes!" Sherlock shouted.
"No."
Sherlock flipped himself over and in a flash he was standing, in the next second he was pacing, like a caged animal.
"Moriarty's minions are out there somewhere, but the streets are completely silent, Scotland Yard could have a holiday, there hasn't been so much as a jay-walking in weeks! I'm tearing myself apart! Cigarettes!"
"Maybe Moriatry's evil plan was to make you go crazy from boredom all along. Don't give in Sherlock; you're playing right into his hands!" John smiled from above his tea and drained it in one gulp.
Sherlock glared at him, daring him to test him today. He was as moody as a school girl and John knew that he should try to tiptoe around him, lest he should explode.
Suddenly Sherlock bound across the kitchen in three long-legged strides. John looked up and Sherlock was peering into his face, expression completely unreadable.
"Oh, How I envy you John."
"You envy me?"
"It must be so nice to be so stagnant for so long. It must be so peaceful in your little brain."
John scoffed as he moved around Sherlock to deliver his cup to the sink. "No need to be rude, I'm sure something will come up for you soon."
John heard footsteps and looked up expectantly towards the door, could the answer to his prayers possibly have come so soon?
"It's just Mrs. Hudson." Sherlock said reading John's expression.
"Package for you Sherlock." Mrs. Hudson cheerfully called into the flat.
"Leave it there Mrs. Hudson." Sherlock exclaimed, immediately seeming more jovial, leaping over one of the chairs and practically running to his room.
"Were you expecting something Sherlock?" John asked, fearful of another round of experiments.
"Nope!" Sherlock called from his room.
"Then why are you..." But his flat mate was already gone and his bedroom door closed with a snap. "Okay…" John muttered dismayed.
John picked up Sherlock's package from the table and weighed it in his hand.
"Thanks Mrs. Hudson." He said. She nodded cheerfully and exited the flat as quickly as she had entered.
"Heavy, small, dense…" John tallied his own deductions in his head as he flipped the package over in his hands. "Man's handwriting on the postage; very neat though…Ah, a book."
"It's a book Sherlock." John sang across the flat, for once proud to have deduced something before his slightly-amazing flat mate.
"Really, what book?" Sherlock called back.
"Can I open this?"
"You haven't opened it?"
"No."
"Then by all means…" he said casually emerging from his bedroom fully clothed in a suit, smoothing down nonexistent creases elegantly.
John tore away the brown paper in narrow strips and placed them carefully in the waste-basket. He knew that if he didn't ensure the paper was in the basket now, he would find them again on the floor later, another random piece of junk added to the collection that was forever building at 221b.
When he had completely uncovered the title of the story he almost dropped the book, which instantly seemed to take on a more significant weight.
"Sherlock…This book…"
"Yes John?"
"This is THE book," He exclaimed holding it arm's length, as though it were faintly poisonous "It's Moriarty's book, the one from the case with..."
"I know the one. Thanks."
John glanced over the cover once more, searching for anything, anything, which would suggest a prank or a switch.
Beige, hardback, thick, with a green wreath around the title "Grimm's Fairy Tales."
In truth it could have been just another book; no doubt that more were published than just the one Moriarty chose to use, but the edges had been damaged by time and repeated use.
And John had seen the book; all objects from the fall incident, really, in his dreams for months. He knew just by looking, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that that book was THE book.
Sherlock eased the book out of his hands and turned it over a few times, scanning it mutely with his eagle eyes, picking out little details invisible to John's limited observational skills.
"How did it get out of evidence locker?" John asked, his eyes flashing from Sherlock to the book, anticipating some great deduction that would somehow give light to something yet unknown.
"No idea." Sherlock said opening the cover and flipping lazily to the table of contents.
"Do you think it's Jim?"
"Obviously." Sherlock snapped, a bit unkindly.
"So he's alive…" John murmured worriedly. He'd actually been afraid of just that for some time, but it seemed silly to say anything.
After all, the newspapers and the telly had both confirmed that Jim Moriarty was stone cold dead upon the roof.
There had been no doubt from either Lestrade or Molly on that point.
But then again, the same was also said of Sherlock Holmes.
"I'm not sure." Sherlock said shutting the book and tucking it under his arm. "It's not like he's the ONLY criminal out there ready to mess with us. It could easily be one of his clients or minions hungry for revenge."
John scoffed. "Would you PLEASE not sound so…so…" he searched a moment for a good word "…excited about this? This might be serious!"
It was Sherlock's turn to scoff, and turn up his chin for good measure. "Ha! Serious? How? No one could possibly pose as much of a threat as Moriarty. Plus, if I'm not mistaken they've given us the whole premise for their plans right here!"
He knocked against the book's hard cover and it make a hallow sound; a sound that was so perfectly normal and safe that John faltered momentarily in his conviction that the book itself held some of the malice and evil that its previous owner had instilled.
"Besides. Even if the papers and the news cannot be trusted, you know you can trust me, John. I saw him."
Sherlock was now staring at John intently from across the room. His eyes were like blazing chips of ice that bore into John's forehead as he took a seat in his favorite chair.
"I saw him. I saw the gun. I saw the blood. I saw the…" Sherlock (unbelievably) paused for a moment, reliving the day and remembering the experiences. "The…the light, if you will, leave his eyes."
Sherlock moved solemnly across the room. He seemed to be almost floating, with only the occasional dirge-like tapping of his expensive shoes against the floor to suggest he was physically moving at all. The excitement had all but left his eyes, but the traces of mirth still tugged at the corners of his mouth.
John could see, he was happy to have a case (?) but more than frightened at the possibility of Moriarty being involved.
Anyone else would have missed the almost indistinguishable signs of emotion on the mask-like face of Sherlock Holmes, but John wasn't just anyone.
"All right. I believe you." John said. And it was true for the most part; he did believe in Sherlock Holmes.
But when cases involved Moriarty, there was little John found to be unbelievable.
Though for the moment his fears were abated.
"Okay… So what about the book?" John asked.
"I need more data." Sherlock said with a wave of his hands.
"So you don't know?"
He was rewarded with a scathing look. "No, I need more Data before I can draw any conclusions. Conclusions at this point would be erroneous."
"If you don't know it's okay to say you don't know." John pressed, fighting the smile that was turning up the corners of his lips.
"Data, data, data! I cannot make bricks without clay! I need DATA John! Without Data one inevitably begins to twist facts to suit conclusions instead of conclusions to suit facts!"
Sherlock stormed back to his room still raging about data while John smiled softly. Oh, how he had missed this. The banter, the tired sayings, the hair-trigger temper-tantrums.
Then suddenly Sherlock's booming voice halted and invited jarring silence in its place. The only noise John heard was the far-distant roar of cars on the street and the melodic ringing of Sherlock's cell phone.
"Aha!" he heard Sherlock whisper under his breath.
John stood up and reached for his wallet which was resting on the coffee table. When you live with Sherlock Holmes 'Aha' can only mean one thing, a case.
"John!" Sherlock boomed, "Grab your…" He walked out of his room just in time to see John hurriedly shove his wallet into his coat pocket. "Um…yeah." He said nodding affirmatively. "We're off to New Scotland Yard!"
#
Sherlock was silent, apart from hailing the taxi, all the way to Broadway when he suddenly and unexpectedly started to chatter excitedly about the case to himself.
"Someone with a mole perhaps, either that of someone with an accomplice with the police, or maybe just one man with the most revolutionary programming skills and excellent timing."
"What?" John asked.
"Though how he wouldn't catch it… I told him he needed to screen his men better…"
"What." John asked again, increasingly irritated.
The timing was remarkably efficient, which suggests a mole…"
"Am I still here? You can see me can't you?" John asked with a bit of anger biting at his words. He was tired of feeling invisible.
"Did you bring your gun?" Sherlock said suddenly turning to him.
"What? No! Should I have?" John asked.
"No, no…" Sherlock said turning and staring at the passing streets out the window. "It's probably nothing."
The three words which scared John Watson the most when uttered by Sherlock Holmes: "It's probably nothing."
#
John paid the cabbie as they both stepped out into the crisp London air. A mysterious breeze hinted at the oncoming autumn and miraculously seemed to carry away the ever-present scent of smog and smoke that seemed so entwined with John's perception of London. It seemed like a fresh new city.
Sherlock strode past the rotating sign with renewed vigor and nodded at the security guard outside the visitor's entrance who already had some idea of why he was there.
Well, more of an idea than John at the moment anyway.
#
Detective Inspector Lestrade ran the tips of his fingers through his choppy gray hair. He was being forced to swallow hell from three different people at one time and he didn't know how much more he could possibly take.
Then he turned and saw Sherlock strolling through the crowd of policemen with the eager, hungry gleam twinkling in his eyes; looking, for all purposes, like a dark bird of prey.
Lord help him.
#
"What happened?" Sherlock slammed the question into him as soon as Lestrade could elbow and argue his way into his office.
"Well, hello to you too." He said gruffly, more than a little bit put off.
"Good morning Lestrade." John said with a pleasant smile.
"Good morning John."
"Yes, yes, the morning is fine!" Sherlock snapped "What happened?"
Lestrade breathes deeply, letting the cool air placate his hot nerves.
"This morning, in the wee hours a little after two, Scotland Yard had a bomb scare."
"Here?" John exclaimed glancing about, as if he could suddenly identify invisible damage from the bomb.
"No, out back a bit, past parking. Someone placed a mysterious package right beneath the windows where the anti-terrorism posters are hung up."
"The ones for the anti-terrorism hotline?"
"Precisely." Lestrade nodded grimly.
"So someone with an acute sense of irony, that should narrow it down a bit." Sherlock said smirking.
"Hold on, I'm not finished yet." Lestrade said, wishing more and more with every passing moment that he had opted for that last cup of coffee instead of pouring back in the pot.
"While all the officers were preoccupied, someone delivered a body to the visitor's entrance."
"Wait…" John said "Delivered?"
"Plopped her right down on the welcome mat." Lestrade nodded for emphasis.
"Interesting." Sherlock smiled a bit.
"And no one noticed?" John looked worriedly from Lestrade to Sherlock as the older man adopted the countenance of disbelief.
"No. Frankly they were a bit concerned with no getting their arses blown off."
"You were at home?" Sherlock asked.
"I'm not here all the time, you know."
"Right, right. Who was it?" Sherlock said picking up a folder off of Lestrade's desk and sitting right next to his computer while flipping through it with the air of boredom.
We're checking for ID now; no clue who she is yet, but that's not the strangest part."
"Oh really, what's the strangest part?" Sherlock asked glancing up carelessly at Lestrade.
Lestrade leaned over the desk, knowing full well that this final twist in the strange case would insatiably hook Sherlock's interest.
"She was wrapped up in a red blanket…and delivered by a wolf!"
Sherlock glanced up into empty air blankly; his mind was racing to comprehend the data he'd just been given.
"What?"
I'll show you the surveillance. Lord knows those cameras can explain better than I can.
"I thought you didn't have footage?" Sherlock shot at him.
"I didn't either," Lestrade admitted "We thought for sure that we had checked all CCTV cameras, but a few hours into the hunt we received an anonymous tip and hunted down the one camera that wasn't knocked down."
"The cameras were knocked down?" John asked trying to piece together the story of the night from the feeble blips of information he was being given.
"The power to the whole bloody street was knocked down! Can you imagine, defusing a bomb in the pitch blackness without even the street lamps to go by?" Lestrade ushered them into another room where a small telly had been set up. "I'm glad I wasn't about, or else I might've had a heart attack!"
Sherlock picked up the remote, ignoring Lestrade for the moment and mashed the buttons haphazardly. The long-suffering Detective Inspector swiped the remote from the consulting detective's hands and the scene from the night before came to life on screen.
#
A bald man in a dress shirt and tie jogged down the side walk on Broadway, sweat pouring down his face and his (frankly alarming) pockets of fat jiggling dramatically as he ran, fists pumping rhythmically in time with the noticeable puffs of breath he sucked in and pushed out of his corpulent cheeks.
The man ran, in just that fashion off screen, when the lights suddenly cut out and the whole telly faded to blackness.
Sherlock leaned in extremely close to the screen, blocking Lestrade's view with his mop of unruly black curls, but the older man didn't mind. He's already reviewed the footage no less than a dozen times.
He knew that once the camera had adjusted to the darkness the only light would be the eerie silvery glow from the distant moon that had somehow broken through the London clouds and smog, if only for a few moments in order to cast it's luminous beams on the shiny black car that slowly drives along the front of the building; invisible, except for the reflection of the moon dancing across it's highly polished surface.
Then, suddenly; a streetlight flickers to life, throwing a harsh orange cone of light onto the gray sidewalk. The silhouette of the car is clear against the pavement and with one smooth, seamless gesture the backdoor of the car swings open effortlessly and –something- crawls out of the back seat.
That something straightens up and stands, revealing it to be the figure of a man carrying a bundle tucked into the crook of its arms.
The bundle is odd, full of lumps and strange, disproportionate bulges that make it difficult to identify as anything in particular.
The man is odder. The face is completely silhouetted, but even so it is no great deduction to infer that something is horribly, horribly wrong with that face. It is a massive, ambiguous shape that one cannot possibly identify.
The man-thing steps further into the cone of garish light and suddenly, like a curtain rising to a picture show, every gruesome feature is explicitly put on display in all of the camera's high resolution glory.
A long gray muzzle of hard wrinkled skin pokes out of brown hair so shaggy and bristly it looks like a wig of needles. White, jagged teeth ooze out of the partially opened mouth, jutting in dangerous directions and giving the already-horrifying face a crooked countenance. Rage is perpetually etched onto the hideous mask and around the soulless black eye-holes.
The wolf-man gazes around suspiciously, passing over every feature of the sleeping dark city with expressionless eyes. Then he shakes his head violently in a spasm of twisted delight and lumbers forward in great leaping steps, almost as though he was actually having trouble walking on two feet instead of four paws.
The creature works his way to the lower right hand corner of the screen where the visitor's entrance door is located and he unceremoniously drops the bundle, seemingly losing his balance at the same time and falling onto his hands over top of the thing.
The bundle has now unraveled just a tad, and something falls out of it just within the range of the camera. To anyone paying close attention, like, say, a Detective Inspector who had watched the tape no less than one dozen times, the thing that now lies on the concrete is painfully obviously a limp white human arm.
The wolf-man presses the snout of his mask into the bundle and pretends to sniff it for a moment, milking his role as wolf for as long as possible before leaping up and running on all fours to the center of the screen, just like a dog.
When the wolf hits the dead center of the screen he pauses and looks up at the camera furtively over his shoulder, proving that he knew it was there the whole time.
The wolf stops and crouches on his knees, arms clutching the empty air with gnarled fingers, made to appear like claws.
In one sweeping gesture he arches his back and bows his head, bringing it up again in a graceful crescent.
To Sherlock who had never seen a horror movie in his life, this action was nearly inexplicable, but to Greg and John the resemblance was all too clear.
It was howling.
#
Greg turned off the telly and turned the lights back on.
"I told you it was an odd one." He said nodding again, as if re-confirming that fact.
John watched Sherlock nervously. The man hadn't moved or said one word, but something in his manner had made John anxious, like a red flag had triggered somewhere in his brain.
"Any thoughts on the off-hand?" Greg asks thoughtlessly scratching his nose. When there is no response he turned and faced the detective, who still leaned into the black, silent screen; his hands were steeped beneath his chin.
"Sherlock?" He asked curiously stepping forward. John waved his hands and motioned a very silent, very clear "No."
Now was not the time to disturb him, he was deep, deep in thought. His mouth was moving rapidly, but no sound was coming out.
Greg looked from Sherlock to John, completely abashed to the former's new and frankly startling behavior. John shrugged in resignation, and flashed a brief apologetic smile at the nervous D.I.
"John…" Sherlock suddenly spoke in a startlingly soft and hesitant voice.
John jumped and nervously asked "What, Sherlock?"
He elicited no response from the man, who had begun twitching slightly in his furious thought process.
"What Sherlock?" John tried again with a little more force.
"I need data." Sherlock finally demanded in a booming voice that seemed to fill the whole room with startling echoes. "What state was the body in?" he turned to the D.I. very quickly with an expression that would seem, to anyone else, a bit frenzied and manic.
"No need to shout." Lestrade said, placing his hand squarely on his hips and demonstrating his authoritative manner. "She was ripped to pieces, almost unrecognizable. First-responders think she was attacked by an animal. God-forbid if a human did that much damage to her…"
Sherlock's thin hand sliced through the air, motioning for silence. "Irrelevant." He snapped.
"Sherlock." John's voice floated up as a warning from over his shoulder and Sherlock, almost unconsciously, curbed his cruel comments.
"There's no word yet so far as an autopsy goes, but Anderson's found something rather remarkable…"
Sherlock laughed; a harsh, cold, mocking sound.
"Why do I doubt that?" he said.
"Hair attached to the victim's clothes and wounds." Lestrade said curtly, feeling the implied insult, yet knowing that Anderson deserved every jibe that Sherlock sent his way.
"Blonde? Brunette?" John asked.
"Wolf." Lestrade said affirmatively. "Or… at least dog. There's no doubt about that."
Sherlock leans back on his heels; his mind is flying one-thousand miles away at speeds excess of what he wanted to contemplate.
"So." He says at last, talking more to himself than either John or Lestrade, "Someone wants us to think she was mauled by a wolf. This sounds like the beginnings of a serial killer to me."
"Oh, stop grinning." Lestrade gestures at him in disgust and the small smile slides from Sherlock's face.
"I think we should pay Molly a visit, what do you say?" Sherlock suddenly asked John.
"Huh, oh… I don't…"
"Autopsy results are back. You were right." Sgt. Sally Donovan strode up to Lestrade, her chin pushed forward prominently, as though she were balancing something on her nose that would topple off if she did not strut through Scotland Yard proudly with a high head. "Animal attacks, most of the major organs were eaten or…"
She caught sight of Sherlock out of the corner of her eye and slowed down momentarily, almost shyly, but in the next instant she sped up and related her discovery as quickly as she could, barely pausing for breath.
"…Eaten or severely damaged, the marks on the bone were hard enough to eliminate a human agent. Forensic anthropologists are testing to see what animal could have left those marks as we speak. I told them to test wolves first, so it shouldn't be long."
She reached into the folder she was carrying and delicately removed a small bundle of photographs, holding both of them out to her boss with an unspoken dignity that seemed to demand, or rather plead, for respect.
"There was one other thing, bruising around the wrist and ankle which indicates she was bound at some point. Just in case you were wondering, yes, this is definitely our division."
Lestrade smiled sadly, his fears realized and met Sgt. Donovan's eyes with a knowing look. Sgt. Donovan mirrored that look and took it as her dismissal, turning curtly on her heels and strutting away.
"Definitely murder then…interesting." Sherlock smiled. "So now then, why a wolf…"
###
This isn't my first fanfiction on , but it's the first one I'm actually trying with. I'm basically computer illeterate, and all I can really manage is Deviantart, but I'm really trying hard to understand this time and I'll update as soon as I can. Be gentle just in case! I know I suck at fomating and stuff, but feel free to reveiw and add helpful criticism (Or instructions on how to better utilize .