Taking Score
NOTE: CONTAINS SERIES 2 SPOILERS. Proceed with caution! Also one instance of minor swearing.
Summary: Episode tag from close to the end of S02E01. John and Sherlock, friendship.
It was just after midnight that John got home, climbing the stairs and entering the flat with more hesitancy than usual. He wasn't sure what he'd find.
Sitting room, empty. Fire burning low, almost to embers. He turned to check past the kitchen, down the hall. Sherlock's door was shut.
Okay. Either Irene had left and Sherlock was in bed, or. She hadn't left.
It was very quiet. John would place good money on Irene not being the quiet type. (Not that he'd thought about it. Okay, of course he'd thought about it. But you didn't acknowledge that you were thinking about a mate's... whatever, in that way. Even if she was... Irene. And Sherlock was Sherlock. And John didn't even know if Sherlock did—)
Stop thinking about it.
He sat in his armchair, rubbed his face. A faint scent of perfume lingered. Sherlock would be able to name brand and key components off the bat, but John just got expensive. Not to mention dark and musky and a bit pheromonal. That wasn't a scent a woman wore to go down to the shops.
He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew he was blinking awake at the sound of the street door downstairs thudding closed. Feet on the stairs. He recognised Sherlock's tread, though it was slower and heavier than usual.
Sherlock appeared in the door. John half-expected him to scan the room and then walk away, and for a moment it looked like that was exactly what he was going to do. But then Sherlock walked forward and took a seat in his chair, facing John. His eyes were somewhere past John's left shoulder. John, used to Sherlock's quirks of eye contact, didn't feel any impulse to check behind him.
He glanced at his watch. It was early in the morning. Sherlock had droplets of water in his hair and on the shoulders of the coat he hadn't taken off. John glanced around in the direction Sherlock had come in. No one with him. No one else in the room. He glanced behind, down that shadowed hall. He looked back at Sherlock, still gazing past him at nothing. "No Irene?"
Sherlock's gaze flicked toward him, then settled off to the right. His mouth quirked lopsidedly for a second, with absolutely no humour. "No Irene," he said.
John watched him, trying to read that lack of expression. Sherlock's hands were still on the arms of the chair; no agitated moving of fingers. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if Sherlock was okay, but he knew that would just cause Sherlock to withdraw. He'd come in here; he wanted something. Surely? Company, if not conversation.
"How was Harry?" Sherlock said, not looking at him still.
"All right," John said. Hung over, in truth, and hiding it poorly, but he was too exhausted to have that conversation now. Sherlock was right about Harry's failures, but he didn't see that John already knew, didn't understand that he had to keep hoping and trusting she'd really stay dry this time. It was a conversation that was fraught enough to begin with, and with Sherlock it had all manner of hidden minefields, most of them residing in the drawer of the desk and that loose floorboard under his bed that they both pretended John didn't know about.
"So what happened after I left?" John said, and then his brain caught up to the words, realised how it sounded. Hurriedly he added, "With the – 007, I mean. What you were trying to work out."
Sherlock looked up at him, gaze blank. His eyebrows came together for a moment. "Coventry."
John frowned at him. Something had happened, something big; Sherlock didn't have to stop and think for a deduction he'd made a couple of hours ago. He could remember a train of logic to the letter weeks later, handy when John couldn't read his notes while writing up a case.
"Coventry?" John said. Coventry and codes, than rang a bell. "Coventry, that old WWII rumour about the bomb they knew about?"
Sherlock looked at him again, brief flare of warmth in his eyes that died out after a second. "Exactly."
John sat and thought under his gaze. "You mean," he said, "no, hold on. That plane, the 007—" He looked at Sherlock. Sherlock rolled his fingers for him to go on. "You don't mean – there's going to be a bomb on that plane? And they know?" Sherlock's gaze dropped down to the arm of John's chair. "Jesus Christ," John said, unsure what to feel. Horrified and outraged and a bit sick, but at the same time inexpressively tired. He knew about expedience. "Just what kind of source is this, that they're protecting? What could be worth—"
"Mycroft had a solution," Sherlock said, voice oddly monotone. It wasn't his deduction monotone, flat tripping out of facts and observations at breakneck pace. This was just... a dead tone. "Fill the aeroplane with corpses and fly it unmanned. It was all in place."
"Oh right." John breathed out a little with relief. "That's – yeah, that's quite clever." Presumably Mycroft had also come up with some way to fudge the terrorists into thinking there was normal pre-flight activity around the plane, maybe load people on and then get them off again before takeoff. Then Sherlock's use of tense clicked. "You say 'had'?"
Sherlock's gaze was off to the side again. "The terrorists got word the government knew."
"Oh." John examined Sherlock's face again. Something missing here. "So it was all for nothing."
"Yes."
"How did they find out?"
Sherlock's gaze lifted to the mantel. He tilted his head, expression going flat and bored, and he went
to say something, but stopped. John watched him, puzzled. Then Sherlock's eyes cut to his, his expression now completely closed. "Me," he said.
John looked at him. Stared. Several possibilities flickered in his head and flared out as impossible. "What?"
Sherlock's gaze slid off to the side again. "I told the woman," he said without intonation. "She told Moriarty."
"The—? Irene?" John leaned forward. "Irene was working for Moriarty?" That was bad enough. Then his brain flickered and reassembled this news in the context of her, of them— "She was working for him the whole time?"
"Less for than with, I gather," Sherlock said.
John sat back. "Shit."
Sherlock said nothing. Looking at him John could see the lines under the – whatever it was, that Sherlock perpetually wore: shield or mask or armour or front, wrapped up around him like a cocoon, like that bloody coat, keeping everything in and everyone out. God, how had he ever thought that Sherlock was emotionless? Back before the pool, before everything.
Are you okay? Of course he wasn't bloody okay.
"What happened?" John said.
"The cameraphone back in her possession, thanks of course to me," Sherlock said, "she attempted to hold Mycroft to ransom for the information it contained. She would have succeeded, had she not made a small error. One that lost her the game."
"And the error?"
"Sentiment," Sherlock said, rolling the word out, clicking through each syllable.
John frowned and tilted his head, confused.
"She used my name," Sherlock said. "The lock on the phone. S, H, E, R."
It took John a minute, but then he'd never actually touched the precious cameraphone; in all that time Sherlock had had it, fiddling with it and spinning it end over end, he'd never willingly let it into anyone else's hands. John had caught enough glimpses of that screen, though. " 'I am... Sher-locked'," he said slowly, and then snorted. It wasn't funny, but – Jesus. "Oh, god."
"She made a mistake," Sherlock said. "Too full of herself, too caught up in the game and her own cleverness, too... emotionally involved. Sentiment. Found on the losing side."
"So she lost," John said.
"Don't you see," Sherlock said, voice flat now, tired and a bit irritated. "We both did. Everyone loses."
John licked his lips. Sherlock's face was blank again. John wasn't going to touch that, not in a million years. Not with Sherlock's expression holding an edge of – something sharp, something brittle. He'd been made a fool of, and he'd been betrayed and used by someone he'd let himself care for, and John wasn't sure which, for Sherlock, cut the worst.
"So what happens to her now?" he asked.
"If Mycroft is feeling kind, he'll lock her up," Sherlock said. "And he isn't. He'll cut her loose and she'll be left without defences, hunted by those who were foolish enough to let her take their secrets. She won't last six months."
And again John was left to pry some feeling from a locked-down expression. Some guidance. Vindication? Sorrow? Regret? Pain? Indifference?
"She begged, you know," Sherlock said, fingers smoothing the arm of his chair. "She asked if I wanted her to beg, and I said yes. She did, and I walked away. Said, 'Sorry about dinner.'" He smiled, but his eyes were dark.
John looked at him. "You think that's winning?" he said, before he'd really thought about it.
Sherlock's gaze slipped to him. "I don't think there's any winning to be had here, do you?" he said. He didn't sound – much of anything, really. "Just losing the least."
"I'm sorry, Sherlock," John said.
"Whatever for?" Sherlock said carelessly.
John wouldn't have wished this. Not on anyone, and especially not on Sherlock. "Just am, really."
"Hm." Sherlock rose with a swirl of coat. "Think I'll play for a while, if you don't mind."
"Not sleeping anyway."
From his eyes and his posture, he hadn't been listening for John's response anyway. Standing in front of window, moonlight pooling at his feet, Sherlock lifted the violin to his shoulder and began to play, something John had never heard before. It sounded like one of Sherlock's own.
Sitting in his chair, John closed his eyes and listened to the violin weep.
END
(Thank you for reading!)