Not Rocket Science
Sherlock and John Watson are handcuffed to a bed while investigating a double homicide on the International Space Station. But Sherlock isn't sure which is more tedious: a killer on the loose or John's endless complaints.
"Jesus Christ, Sherlock, this is the most absurd thing that has ever happened to me."
But as the former soldier regrettably recalled, this was, in fact, only the second most the absurd situation he'd ever found himself in. The first, of course, was getting strapped into going to investigate this crime scene… in goddamn space, of all places.
No, you didn't read that incorrectly. In space. They were currently orbiting several hundred miles from the surface of the earth because of a string of homicides that had taken place on the International Space Station. This didn't have anything to do with him, or Lestrade, or even Britain. Yet Sherlock had felt the need to leave a less than subtle text on the private phone of the Russian prime minister simply stating that he was willing to help solve this crime quickly and with minimal personnel.
Unfortunately for Dr. John Watson, he was that personnel.
"You exaggerate the situation." Countered the detective. John couldn't see his face very well in the obscurity of the room, but the tone of it suggested that he'd rolled his eyes. As if his frustration with being handcuffed together on a bed within the International Bloody Space Station was completely unfounded.
It wasn't even a real bed – more like a hole in the wall, really. Their bodies were forcibly meshed together, each with an arm raised above their heads. Handcuffs weren't exactly commonplace on a space station, but the killer had managed to use one set to restrain them both, slipping the cuffs through the slender gap between a metal bar and the ceiling.
Also, there was what looked like a phone charger tying Sherlock's free arm to John's.
"This is likely my twelfth." Sherlock added after a brief pause. "And that's only because I am still actively trying the erase the time my clothes were stolen during my time in university."
"You showed up to Buckingham Palace in a sheet," reminded John. "So it's hard to imagine you being uncomfortable with a situation involving nudity."
"My nudity, no." he said in a flat voice. "The nudity of approximately thirty other men and women, yes."
But there was no time to acclimatize to that unsightly revelation, because there was a pounding coming from somewhere that was, surprisingly, not his frantic heart.
"Oh, God… that's the murderer. Practicing his swing before he bludgeons us to death." Groaned the soldier.
"Don't be preposterous." Scolded Sherlock. "If he'd wanted to kill us, we'd be dead and not temporarily knocked out and chained together. That should be easy enough for you to have understood independently."
"Oh, I'm the preposterous one? Maybe what I really don't understand is why you got us caught up in this situation to start with."
"Oh, not this tirade again…" lamented the dark-haired man. "You were made perfectly aware of the situation before coming here."
That statement finally sent his companion over the edge.
"No, you listen here you lunatic – I did not sign up for this." He snapped. "This is orders of magnitude worse than anything you've ever gotten me into."
"I said we were going to a station. Did we not go to a station?" Was his matter-of-fact reply.
"I fell asleep on the plane ride to Russia and woke up in a sardine can of a rocket being launched into the bloody sky. I nearly had a heart attack, Sherlock."
"Your cardiac integrity is more than sufficient to avoid an infarction under large amounts of stress." He sighed, tilting his head down towards his considerably shorter accomplice until his ear was against his shirt. "Though now it appears you're developing an erratic heartbeat."
"Face off my chest, please." John requested, leaning away ever so slightly. "So why aren't we dead?"
"Because the killer is searching for something." Informed Sherlock. "He tortures his victim for information and then releases them from the airlock. It's not one of the astronauts that's the murderer. There was a stowaway."
He furrowed his brows with disbelief. "How could you possibly have deduced that?"
"One hears things from their older brother." Shrugged the detective. "Whispers and secrets and a safe hidden away so far, it's impossible for thieves to reach. Well, most thieves, as it turns out."
"So… what's that banging sound?"
As if knowing that is was being talked about, the sound became more insistent. Louder.
"I would assume that he's locked the rest of the crew in the air lock and means to use them to extract information from us."
"And would you say that's a certainty or a hunch?"
"A hunch." Sherlock admitted. "But I highly doubt any of us would survive if the killer finds his treasure."
"So we're dead, are we?"
"Not today, if we're lucky. But I'll need you to do something for me." He told him quietly. "We need to place our hands, tied together as they are, into the front of my pants to find my lockpick."
"A lockpi- you had a lockpick?" sputtered John. "And we've spent this entire time talking?"
"Yes, I keep one in the pocket of my briefs." He said coolly, flexing his fingertips against the doctor's. "You seemed rather upset and you'll forgive me if I didn't trust the hand of an enraged ex-army physician so close to a sensitive part of my anatomy."
"You know I wish I could say that you were wrong, Sherlock," he realized, exhaling slowly. "But let's just focus on getting out of here alive."
With a nod of assent, the detective guided their arms over his trousers, his expression going slate-like once their hands slipped beneath the fabric. John had more difficulty masking his emotions than the stoic man before him. He was no prude – god no. But there was already so much homoerotic subtext in their life that he tried to keep out of the ears of the media. .. all he needed now was to be murdered in cold blood while his hand was in Sherlock Holmes' goddamn trousers.
Perhaps if Molly conducted their autopsy, she'd leave that bit out of the report. But he knew the chances of their corpses ending up from the International Space Station to Saint Bart's as being 1,000,000:1.
"John, your arm's gone slack and I'd like to begin using the lockpick, if that's alright."
Startled, John retracted his hand from his friend's pants. And he prayed the heat of his cheeks wasn't a moronic blush.
"I'm nearly finished." Informed Sherlock after several seconds, but John was distracted not by the man's words, but by a shadow appearing behind him.
"Sherlock!" he roared throwing himself at the figure behind him just as the soft click of the handcuffs opening reached his ears.
In a flurry of limbs and grunts, he was above the potential assailant, gripping his neck tightly as they floated in midair. That was when he noticed several key things all at once.
One, if this was in fact the killer, than it was hard to imagine how the petite thing beneath him managed to overpower two hulking male astronauts. And two, Sherlock seemed to have gotten the gender wrong.
"The murderer's a little girl?"
"Don't let looks deceive you, John." He could hear Sherlock's voice behind him. "That's Nina Koregeva. Twenty-four year old Ukrainian assassin for hire. Her compact body type makes her ideal for a mission of this nature."
Gingerly, Sherlock's hand reached over John's shoulder and picked up a small syringe from where it lingered beneath the killer's splayed locks of blonde hair.
"Is that how she knocked us and the other astronauts out?" the doctor inquired.
"It seems so. Hardly a lethal substance. She only needed them unconscious long enough to place them into the air lock for questioning." He deduced swiftly, drawing the assassin's face closer to his by the scruff of her neck.
"Who hired you?"
After a string of what sounded like Russian profanity, Sherlock twirled the syringe in his fingers and plunged it into her arm.
"She's not going to be off any use to us right now, but I'll have Mycroft examine her later." He stated, pushing himself across the room. "The rest of the crew is likely trapped in the airlock. Let's remove them and – "
His plans were interrupted not by a sound, but by the entire body of the station lurching forwards without warning, managing to throw them across the room and against a metal wall.
"Stupid, stupid... it's obvious." Lamented Sherlock, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. "Our assassin's employer never wanted what to take was on this ship. The grease on the killer's hands and the fuel on her sleeves indicates that she was tampering with components of this ship. Her employer must have given her instructions on what elements of the ship to disable. Wires to cut. Systems to overload. This entire metal heap is about to go hurdling into the atmosphere."
"It was a suicide mission?" clarified John.
"Yes, whatever is on here someone wants to destroy. John," he said, locking eyes with the other man. "Get the crew out while I see what I can do."
"Sherlock," retorted John. "You know nothing about space and you're going to try and fix a spaceship?"
"This isn't astronomy, John." Said the man, sounding peeved. "It's just rocket science."
He floated away into a darkened corridor without any more ado, leaving John on his own with half and idea of where the air lock was actually located…
He'd met the other six members of the crew briefly when they'd arrived. Despite their heavy accents, they could understand English perfectly. It took several minutes, but he managed to find where they were being stored after vaguely remembering the quick tour he and Sherlock had received just hours ago.
"We're in trouble." He told them after removing the seal on the door and allowing them back into the station from their cramped chamber. "Place has been sabotaged and Sherlock might just be making it worst."
"Shit." Said one of the science officers. Yuri's his name, John was almost sure.
They didn't seem interested in John's help. Not that he could offer much, really. So he drifted away and began to search for his partner.
"Sherlock?" he called into the dimly lit passages. His entire situation felt reminiscent of just about every sci-fi horror film he's ever seen, which was why he ignored the sense of being watched, assuming it was just his nerves in overdrive.
But that turned out to be false. Not just a little false, but pinning him to the wall with hands around his neck false.
"You think I don't have resistance to my own drugs?" breathed a woman, the killer, with a tone as sharp as a viper's. "You think I haven't killed with my hands before? You're about to find out those answers."
But John Watson had already resolved that no, he was not going to die in space. He had gone through too much already – hounds with glowing eyes, the Black Lotus, Moriarty… so he apologized to fate as he summoned a sheer strength of will that allowed him to buck the assassin from atop his chest. He was not about to die hundreds of miles away from home with his best friend out of sight.
His time would come, eventually, but he'd be back-to-back with Sherlock, surrounded by death, with guns blazing.
"You were sent here to die. You've sabotaged this ship and we're all in danger because of it." He hissed, glaring as she dripped blood from an apparently broken nose.
"No, that's impossible." She wheezed, her accent making her words even more gnarled. "He told me that I was disabling the communications relay."
"Well, they communicated how you murdered two crewmen just fine. Don't be daft and just help us not get incinerated."
She watched him carefully before nodding, very stiffly.
Several hours later…
"Not Rocket Science? What sort of blog title is that?" queried Sherlock with a frown.
"Not a blog title, just a journal entry." Corrected John, continuing to scratch his pencil against the paper in perceived nonchalance. But there was a question that had been gnawing at his brain for some time.
"You just exploded the entire space station." He pointed out finally. "Whoever sent that killer up here got what he wanted."
"Not entirely, John. We manage to save six people, including ourselves, by retrofitting one of the modular engines to make this section of the station a functional escape pod. We may have lost our murderer and the key to truly solving this case in the explosion, but that event was a minor setback. Considering…" Sherlock smiled wryly, pulling a metal orb from the pocket of his jacket. "That she helped us find this little trinket."
The doctor's mouth was agape. "You found it. I can't bloody believe it… that's what was so important?"
"It's a code. Several supercomputer's worth of data contained in one spherical, easy to transport device that can be used to hack into almost any secure database in the world. Elegant, to say the least." He noted thoughtfully. "Thought I might give it to Mycroft as birthday gift."
"Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind for the golf ball that almost cost us our lives." John replied with a derisive laugh. That's about when he realized that Sherlock was leaning towards him, drawing intimately close despite the fact that they were in full view of six Russian astronauts.
"Perhaps certain elements of this case should be left out of your blog." The detective whispered.
"Sherlock," John had to exercise great restraint to keep himself from punching the man. "Rest assured, I plan on never thinking about what happened in that satellite ever again."
"Oh. Well, I wouldn't go that far…" he breathed, pulling away from him to speak to their other companions.
And with that, John Watson was left to ponder the meaning of those words during their very long and grueling descent to earth.
A/N: Yes, I did just create a serious story based around Benedict Cumberbatch's statement on Top Gear regarding the fanfiction of John and Sherlock handcuffed to a bed in outer space.
Bet he didn't see this coming.
And, unfortunately, now I truly wish the Sherlock solving a crime on the International Space Station was canon...
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
A/N 2.0: I received more than a few comments about making a title change, and I really think this new one catches the feel of the story much better. Thanks a bunch!