On Religion
She'd been found dead in Westminster Abbey. Nothing taken from her pockets or her fingers. Dead in the cloisters, strangled. Dimmock had the entire area cordoned off, and called Sherlock Holmes as quickly as he could.
Sherlock Holmes hadn't answered. Instead, it was the slightly-flustered voice of his assistant.
"Yes, Dimmock, was it?" Doctor Watson's voice came through, backed by the grainy sounds of a suffering violin.
"Is Mister Holmes available?" Dimmock asked, casting an eye about at the sudden unease that struck his team.
"He's, ah—Sherlock, put the poor thing down for a sodding minute, will you?" The last was shouted at full lung strength with the phone taken away from his mouth, still loud enough for Dimmock to yank his mobile away from his ear in shock. When he spoke again, it was back to calm and sincere, and the grating on the violin stopped for the moment. "He's occupied. What can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if he could have a look at something for us," the young DI ventured.
"God, please, anything to get him out of here," the doctor hissed secretly into the phone. "Where, when? Tell me there's something interesting."
"Old woman," Dimmock began. "Westminster Abbey, in the middle of a tour."
"Ten minutes," a flustered, suddenly hurried Doctor Watson sputtered, "no, fifteen. Give us twenty. Don't touch anything. SHERLOCK!" And the line went dead.
With the afternoon traffic, John knew that a taxi is out of the question, so he forced Sherlock into the Baker Street station and down the escalator. He lied and said it was Lestrade called them in. He was fairly sure that Sherlock knew he was lying. If it got them out of the flat, John didn't bloody care.
Sherlock stopped when John steered him through the gap in the iron fence that would lead them to the big main doors of the church, and John was almost impatient enough to yank him forward. But John had seen that look on a hundred faces before. He never thought that he'd see it on Sherlock. The same fear clogging up behind the eyes of soldiers marching one by one into desert hills lined with caves was gracing the wide eyes of the world's only consulting detective about to walk onto holy ground.
For only a fleeting second, John wondered if Sherlock wasn't a vampire. He stamped it out immediately.
"Sherlock?" he prompted, and at once Sherlock shook it away and he was unreadable again. He nodded once and only moved when John lead the way, as if forging a path through fire.
A confused but obliging PC let them through the doors into the church. Of course John had been through before, but not with police escort and the eerie sound of emptiness echoing between the tombs of kings and queens and poets. The tour group had been pulled aside into one of the wings for questioning, their scared little voices echoing in the high vaulted ceilings.
They moved through a heavy wooden door and into the courtyard of the cloisters, and Dimmock was on them almost immediately. Like a kid desperate to please his parents. Ever since that cock-up with the smugglers, he'd been trying to get on whatever good side Sherlock had. Sherlock didn't care to work with Dimmock. John hadn't told him it was Dimmock who had called. Sherlock's light eyes went dangerously dark when he saw the DI coming at them, and he turned to glare brimstone at the back of John's head.
The woman looked as though she could have been sleeping, if not for the purpling bruises ringing her neck. She had sat at the stone bench circling the bright green courtyard, purse still clutched in her old fingers and the silky scarf pooled around her shoulders.
Sherlock began immediately, circling without touching and seeing what no one else had thought to. Dimmock handed the gloves over, and once he'd snapped them on, Sherlock was digging through her purse, inspecting her rings, opening her rigid eyelids. Several of the officers stirred uneasily; this wasn't Lestrade's team, they weren't used to the way Sherlock worked, and a steady murmur had already begun amongst them.
"The elderly are always so difficult," Sherlock muttered. "Don't know how to use their mobiles. If they have them." He frowned further, sighed in tight exasperation. "She doesn't."
"Well, that should say something, shouldn't it?" asked John, who had no idea what Sherlock did, but knew how he liked to go about things. Sherlock nearly managed a smirk.
"Late fifties," the detective began. "She lived alone, but not until recently. Five months, going by the last time she had her hair done. A widow; the husband died not unexpectedly. Probably something pedestrian: cancer, or an aneurysm. Her ring is the most-loved thing on her, and she's a woman who surrounded herself in it. The care-worn hands, a housewife's hands not a laborer—DO SHUT UP," he shouted quite suddenly, rounding on a pair just behind him, whose murmuring had stopped dead at the murderous look in his eye.
John was used to Sherlock's outbursts, and he didn't so much as flinch. But what seemed the strangest was that it seemed to have effected Sherlock of all people. He rubbed his hands together nervously, and his eyes shifted in their sockets to all of the staring faces that surrounded him. He started pacing. Hard and quick. That was disconcerting.
"She..." He stopped speech and feet, anxiously gathered himself, then began both again. "She's alone in London. Sightseeing from... from..." He pulled off the gloves Dimmock had given him, tossed them to the flagstones, quickened his pace. "From Sheffield. She..." His head snapped from face to face, each more skeptical than the last.
"Sherlock?" John asked, taking one step forward.
"Don't interrupt me," he snapped, but his conviction was shaking. He passed a hand through his hair, gathered a steady breath. "She came from Sheffield... two days... three days ago. Stop talking for seven bloody seconds," Sherlock cracked at last, actually cursing (a new phenomenon to John's unaccustomed ears) and practically raising the buttresses with his new and frightening volume. "Dimmock, control your rabble!"
John hadn't heard a single man or woman speak since Sherlock's first outburst, and Dimmock leaned close into John to ask: "What's wrong? Is he sick or something?"
"Not a clue," John uttered worriedly, medical instincts kicking in instantly as he processed every symptom Sherlock's body was shouting. Tension in his neck and shoulders, palms sweating, elevated breathing, and he was snapping again at someone John didn't know on forensics.
"I know what I'm doing!" Sherlock shouted, grabbing all attention again. "She... She..." Two frustrated hands scrubbed his hair as if digging for thought. "Stop your pedantic murmuring, you insufferable IDIOTS!" The last was like a shot, and everyone took it to the chest.
John finally stepped in and pulled him away before he could do any real damage, excusing them from the suddenly judgmental eyes of Sherlock's biggest fan Dimmock. He backed them into an unexpectedly wide and open room, away from the police, away from the body, tucked into the wooden-floored chapter house and completely alone.
"What's wrong with you?" John insisted, and his voice hissed back at him in a way he didn't like, so he changed his tone before Sherlock could answer. "Sherlock?"
The taller man had the advantage of escaping upward, and he lifted his chin away, turned his head and frowned deeply. The noise of the brigade outside was muffled by distance, but John knew they were talking about Sherlock. People do little else.
And, for the first time John had ever witnessed, it was effecting him. The talk, the place; something was making the fingers of Sherlock's left hand shudder, even if just the slightest.
It was instinct. John's hand rose warily from his side and brushed once at Sherlock's arm. The detective met his eyes, but said nothing. So John's hand stayed there, an anchor to the roiling sea in Sherlock's eyes.
It worked. Somehow, it worked, and the tense string that had been coiling up into Sherlock's middle from his every extremity began to unravel. He even let loose a pent-up breath (and he looked downright ashamed to be showing it all, baring emotion when he seemed so sworn against it).
"Talk," John prompted calmly.
It took Sherlock a moment to gather the words, but he did. "I haven't been inside a church," his voice dripped with rancor on the word, "for twenty-two years."
It didn't seem too strange (strange enough for an unwarranted outburst), though John wondered how many cases he'd had to have refused in order to stay away from holy ground. "Why?"
"My father was killed in a church." His voice had gone darker, almost as if there were a hitch to it. And it didn't look as though he'd be able to stop. "Two men and a woman with guns. My father was praying for Mycroft; he'd been sick, and father thought that a candle at an altar would be able to help him. Idiot," and the word bit more than usual. Sherlock didn't meet his eyes.
John didn't know what to do. His parents were living in Blackpool in a puddle of booze hazed over in cigarette smoke. His aunt died six years ago, but she'd been loud and unpleasant (God rest her) and she certainly hadn't been murdered. He'd consoled patients, soldiers with dying comrades, but this was Sherlock. He couldn't possibly attempt to sympathize, and Sherlock would know if he lied, and Sherlock would step away and hate him for weeks.
So he didn't say anything. So he set his second hand on Sherlock's other arm, squared them solidly.
He didn't expect Sherlock to clutch him back, long white fingers gripping his elbows in reply. He didn't expect Sherlock's weight to shift, for him to bend at the waist and into him, pressing his forehead to John's with a careful weight. Even with Sherlock's dark curls in his vision, John could see Sherlock's eyes shut tight, painfully tight. To keep out something even more painful.
"I don't want to be here, John," and even he hated the candid turn of his voice; he pressed his lips into a solid line, gathered himself. "I want to go, please."
"Dimmock—"
"To hell with Dimmock," Sherlock snapped, and his fingers tightened. "John."
And it was enough to do him in. John Watson, the pushover. He couldn't stand up to that voice, even if he'd wanted to. He had a penchant for giving into Sherlock's whims all on his own, but it was almost too much to watch the ivory facade chip down to nothing right in front of him.
John cleared his throat. "All right, to hell with Dimmock."
Sherlock uttered a shuddered sigh of relief, opened his eyes. He released John's arms, only for his fingers to reappear a moment later cradling either side of John's face. Sherlock pressed a long kiss where his forehead had been moments before. Lingered there, feeling John's pulse against his fingertips.
He felt very bare, looking at John so close, looking him right in the eye and feeling read. So that was what it felt like. It was humbling. Knowing that everything you were thinking was open for someone else.
John was breathing shallowly, and his throat bobbed. Opened his mouth, changed his mind, wetted his lips as eyes never wavered. It was Sherlock's turn to feel John's fingers clutch tighter at his arms.
And it helped. Somehow, it did.
John's nose brushed his when he tilted his head back, to the side. Sherlock didn't waste a moment, and he leaned in to meet John's open mouth with his. John fit his hands in curls, back of the neck, lead the movement of Sherlock's mouth with his. They pulled each other closer, lined up to fit and clutching for dear life. Sensory overload, pressed chest to chest with John's mouth moving perfectly under Sherlock's, matching move for move. Lips and tongues and hot breath exchanged, languid and knowing but needy.
Fingers slid (still shaking) through John's short hair, and it near broke John's heart. Teeth clashed when one of them pulled back for breath (which was it? neither knew for sure), but it was John that clamped their mouths back together, soothed back Sherlock's tongue with his. Soothed, calmed, comforted.
"Oi, this is a church!" came a young woman's voice from somewhere near, and Sherlock was afraid it would end with a snap, a stumble, an embarrassed shuffle. But John didn't move. Oh, he could love him for that. Maybe John saw it in his eyes. John didn't budge, kept his hands in Sherlock's hair, noses and foreheads pressed together, just breathing.
"Let's get the hell out of here," John muttered, and he only moved away to knit his hand tightly with Sherlock's. He pulled the detective after him, past the gaping PC, past DI Dimmock and the questions he was already hurling at their backs.
They took a cab back to Baker Street. They could afford the traffic. Bent nearly in half to tuck his head into the crook of John's shoulder, Sherlock sent off one last jab to Dimmock.
Suicide. Dull.
SH
AN: I know I should be finishing up On Sport, but this wouldn't leave my head. So I had to write it, or slash was gonna sneak into the nonslash I promised my Lady Dan. So I swear I'll get back to the other, I just HAD TO WRITE THIS. (it helps that I love writing these two so much.) Hope you enjoy my little slip, leave us some love, and don't forget to STAY AWESOME!