I've been holding this one for a while, unsure if I should post it. It's complete, as are all of my stories before I begin posting. I will update regularly until it's all uploaded.
Un-beta'd. You can blame me for grammar and Brit-speak errors.
Although I admit that owning these characters would be nice, I'm not nearly that creative. I thank the creators of Sherlock for allowing me to play with their toys.
Chapter 1:
A short, thirty-something blonde woman rushed, panicked, into a sterile, vomit-colored room. After taking a brief moment to get her bearings, she pushed urgently to Sherlock Holmes. The detective looked unaccustomedly out-of-sorts and was, incidentally, sopping wet and covered in blood from mid-waist to his shoes.
"How is he?" the woman demanded, her eyes wide.
Detective Inspector Lestrade angrily responded to the rude interruption of what had been, to this moment, a whispered two-way argument. "And just who in the Hell are you?"
"Harriet Watson, I presume," filled in Holmes, with the air of a man who didn't have time to point out that water is moist. "He's been shot." Having supplied the distraught woman with all relevant, currently available information, Holmes returned to his conversation with Lestrade. "It cannot possibly JUST. NOT. BE. THERE."
Lestrade took an unconscious step backward, not certain whether he should be responding to John Watson's sister's worry or to the unprecedented level of what could only be called 'passion' reflecting from the usually cold Sherlock. Making a decision, he opened his mouth to respond that the gun in question could, indeed 'not be there,' and was, in fact, NOT THERE, when Harriet Watson interrupted again.
"He's been shot? I know he's been shot! Some police woman told me he's been shot! How IS he?"
"I DON'T KNOW how he is," responded Holmes, gesticulating wildly with blood-smeared hands. "If I KNEW how he was, I would have stated such. Now if you don't mind, HARRY, I am speaking with a colleague in the hopes of learning WHO SHOT HIM."
"As far as I'm concerned," interjected a good-looking black woman who had been standing to the side, "you shot him, Freak. Or you may as well have. People who spend too much time around you are bound to eventually get shot."
"Don't do that." Holmes' voice was suddenly, dangerously, soft; like the hiss of a whip before it snaps. He focused burning eyes upon the speaker, all but daring further comments. "Don't imply that John was forced to follow me into that alley, or even to spend his time with me. It cheapens his choice. It dismisses him."
"EXCUSE ME?" began the woman, Donovan, raising her hands and stepping toward Holmes, "are you…"
Her protest was cut short by Lestrade, who stepped between the two and cleared his throat. "Doctor," he said, redirecting all eyes toward a woman who had entered wearing surgical scrubs.
The new arrival asked "Sherlock Holmes?" and when the man stepped forward, continued "May I speak with you privately?"
Holmes quirked his head sharply to the side, and demanded perhaps too loudly, "Why?"
"I have some sensitive medical information to share with you. You are listed as Doctor Jonathan Watson's emergency contact."
Harriet Watson's face flushed, and she stepped forward, only to be stopped by Sherlock's long, thin, outstretched hand. There was dried blood curling along the crevices and under his fingernails. He didn't look at Harry, addressing only the doctor. "How is he?" he demanded.
Taking this as permission to speak, the woman glanced needlessly at her chart. "He's stable. He's being taken to surgery now. The bullet passed below his right lung, tearing his diaphragm and damaging both his liver and his right kidney. Until the surgeons take a closer look, there is no way to know how extensive the damage is, but his lung seems intact." She turned what Lestrade thought of as completely unnecessarily gentle eyes upon Sherlock Holmes, and offered, "We have some scrubs you could change into if you'd like some clean clothes." Again unnecessarily, the doctor reached to put a comforting hand upon Sherlock's shoulder.
Lestrade raised his eyebrows, ready for an inevitable snide remark from the Consulting Detective, but it never came. His ordinarily contact-averse associate didn't even look at the doctor's hand. Instead, Sherlock glanced down at his ruined clothing and his naturally pale features turned a shade of green Lestrade had never seen in the man. Could the ever-observant Sherlock have REALLY missed the copious amounts of blood on his trousers? The DI looked, really looked at Holmes for the first time in more than an hour, and his jaw dropped open. Could it be that the sociopathic Sherlock Holmes was SHAKEN? Lestrade was so startled that he missed Harry Watson's next words, picking up only the doctor's response.
"I'm sorry; I don't have you listed here."
"I MUST be listed," Harry whined. "I'm his sister."
"I'm sorry. I'll speak to him when he wakes up."
"When will that be?" interjected Holmes.
"I'm sorry." Replied the doctor, and Lestrade decided he was tired of hearing those words from her. "I just don't know. We'll know more once surgery is complete."
2 HOURS EARLIER
Lestrade completed his circuit of the uniformed officers who stood at regular intervals around his crime scene. All had returned from canvassing the neighborhood, looking for witnesses to a particularly heinous triple murder. Unfortunately, the residents of this less-than-savory portion of London had an unhelpful attitude toward police at best. Apparently, not one 'witness' had seen a thing.
Lestrade had, in fact, had difficulty convincing the illustrious Sherlock Holmes to investigate a murder in this neighborhood at all; the occurrence was as Holmes had callously stated, "ordinary." The consulting detective's interest had only been piqued by Lestrade's sharing of a series of photographs of the bodies. The three victims had each been shot in the small of the back, paralyzing them from the waist down. Each, apparently while still alive, had been stripped, drained of all blood with near surgical precision, and upon exsanguination posed so that the three bodies collectively formed a large circle. Their accumulated and slowly coagulating blood had been left in a large, round glass bowl in the circle's center. Upon seeing this, Holmes had moved from singularly uninterested to giddily happy in naught-point-three seconds.
As Lestrade returned to the grizzly tableau still residing in the wide alley between two tenement buildings, he observed his sociopathic consultant. Holmes was stretched out grotesquely, having placed himself in the position of one of the bodies, which had been moved a meter or so aside to allow for Holmes' experiment. He looked dead; a thought the DI's mind determinedly slid away from.
The consulting detective's flatmate (friend? Colleague? What the Hell was John to Sherlock anyway? The pair had been through far too much for Lestrade to fathom their true relationship.) John, stood over him grimly snapping photos and markedly NOT speaking in response to one of Sherlock's rambling monologues. A light rain had started some time before. Holmes, face up to the drizzle and lying in a slowly forming puddle, didn't seem to notice the water slicking back his black curls or that his rather obviously expensive coat was soaking through. John shrugged uncomfortably as a trickle dripped from his hair and down the collar of his jacket.
Lestrade had come to like John Watson, and enjoyed both speaking with the doctor and reading his blog. He couldn't, for the life of him, understand how such a man—how ANYONE—could live in the same house with Sherlock Holmes for two years, let alone how he'd regained his footing under later circumstance. Watson had somehow made Holmes almost human, had kept the detective alive even in death, and Holmes gave Watson…something. The intensity of…was it life?... in John before, during, and after Sherlock's absence…Lestrade once again dismissed that thought as he approached the pair. "Anything?"
"Obviously." Holmes' eyes opened suddenly and he jumped up from his now-sodden resting place. He pointed vaguely to his right. "He's not from here. He lives East of here. Some distance, I'd presume, from his stride, but reachable on foot had he not been dragging three dead people when he arrived. He was in a hurry when he left, probably because someone saw him posing the bodies. That's why he left the car. He's not professional at this type of thing, at least not yet. You'll find the gun a block or two East of here, in a gutter or some such. This wasn't as interesting as you had led me to believe. Maybe in a year or two, once he catches his stride…"
Sherlock abruptly stopped talking as a man in the nearby crowd broke and ran, headed East. Lestrade, Holmes, and Watson, along with a nearby uniformed officer, fell immediately into pursuit. For Holmes this meant running, without explanation, West and then South at the first crossing alley. John started toward the runner, noted his colleague's direction, and did an abrupt about-face to follow Holmes. Lestrade and the officer continued East. Some thirty seconds later, Lestrade pulled up suddenly when an unmistakable gunshot rang out, echoing from the nearby buildings.