Shock
A/N: So, I don't own Sherlock, in case you hadn't guessed that yet. :) And I hope you are all enjoying the story so far! I'm going to be uploading the rest of the chapters over this rest of this week and the next. Feel free to leave reviews, etc.
Oh, and the principal characters of this short story (it's around eight smallish chapters) will be Mycroft, Sherlock, John, and another character I invented for the purposes of the narrative.
And here's the second chapter!
John is standing under an awning, cold hands in his pockets, watching the rain pour down. It dances merrily along the pavements, oblivious to his tense stare. Mycroft stands across from him, his ever-present umbrella pointed at the watery ground.
"I suppose you want to know how Sherlock's doing," John says.
He's tired of these meetings. If Mycroft wants to know more about his brother, he should come over to 221B and talk to Sherlock himself. The Holmes never do anything normally, he thinks, and pointedly continues to stare at the falling rain and not the tall government man. I'm sick of this charade.
Mycroft says lightly, "Well, yes."
Out of the corner of his eye, John sees him glance at his expensive watch, and he tightens his lips in annoyance. He's the one being inconvenienced, not Mycroft; he'd been shopping at Tesco's before Mycroft's unmarked car had pulled up and taken him away.
But he takes a deep breath, exhales. "He's fine. Doing as well as can be expected. He's been different ever since he – ever since he got home, but that's understandable."
"And?"
"And he's eating, if you want to know that, too," John says, growing exasperated. "He's still doing his experiments, and working on cases and everything. He's fine. Look, if you really wanted to know, you could come over and see for yourself."
Mycroft hums to himself, amused, and taps his umbrella sporadically against the pavement. "That would be interesting. No, I don't think so, Dr Watson. You know we don't really get along."
Now John looks at him, at this colourless man outlined in equally colourless lines of rain. Sherlock and his brother had used to get along (somewhat); at least they had been on speaking terms, enough so that Mycroft was able to come over to the flat. This sudden distance is new and unsettling. But he knows not to pry. Not yet.
"Anything else?"
"No," Mycroft says. He raises his umbrella, fumbles for a moment with the catch, and then whirls it open. The fabric shades his face, drops his features into a grey darkness. "Take care, Dr Watson. We wouldn't want you to lose your way in this wild world."
He steps quickly away into the rain, and John stares after him, blinking hard. What was that?
Had Mycroft just quoted from Troilus' Withe Papers?
A few hours later, having tried and failed to drive the needling almost-quotation from his mind, John retrieves his laptop from the couch and flips it open. He is about to type Troilus' name into the search engine when he stops, stricken.
He can't search online; Mycroft is surely monitoring his activity. If he doesn't know yet that John is a Withe, he'll grow suspicious at this sudden interest in Troilus' work. John pushes his laptop shut, clamps his mouth in a tense line, and stares blankly at the capsizing, too-full bookshelf across the room.
Sherlock, who's been breaking things in the kitchen, comes into the sitting room. He is followed by a long trail of sulphurous smoke.
"Using that?" he says, and reaches down to take the laptop away.
John lets him, still thinking about Mycroft.
He doesn't have any of Troilus' essays; he was very careful not to check such books out from the library or buy them at used bookstores. He's had to rely on his memory, but he can't quite recall the one he thinks Mycroft was quoting from. Sherlock knows the quotations, but he doesn't want to ask him in the flat.
Sherlock taps away on John's laptop, frowning at the bright screen, and John looks over at him.
His friend is slumped against the wall, wearing shirt sleeves and sulphur-stained trousers; his tousled curls look as though he hasn't brushed them in a week. This is because Sherlock tends to run his hands through his hair when he's agitated.
John thinks to himself, watching him, that Sherlock's been agitated ever since he came back.
"Fancy a walk?" he asks, jerking his mind away from that subject. It's still too painful to remember, that grey empty feeling when his best friend was gone. Not gone, but missing; dead. Dead in every sense of the word, except the most important one.
"Where to," Sherlock murmurs, still tapping.
He grimaces at whatever's on the screen (something about gourmet chocolates, John half-glimpses), sighs gustily, and shuts the laptop. Then he looks over at John, and his pale eyes track across his face, reading everything: the flicker of his eyelids, the curve of his mouth, the faint indentations in his brow.
John looks placidly back at him. Sherlock's scanning has intensified since his return; it's another thing he's had to get used to.
"I see," Sherlock says shortly, and John is certain that he does. He drops the laptop onto the arm of the couch. "Let me get my coat."
They go down to the river and stand at the matted brim of the bank, bundled up against the gloomy cold. John watches leaves and trash float by on the swell of the bluish water. The river's risen since the morning's rain. On his right, Sherlock pulls a lighter from his pocket and flips it over and over between his long fingers. He's been trying to give up cigarettes again.
John says, "I had another meeting with Mycroft today."
"He said something." Sherlock flicks the lighter open and watches the flame dance, then flicks it shut again. He does it again, twice, and John watches his fingers flutter rapidly over the silver latch. "You're upset."
"I think he might have quoted from Troilus. From The Withe Papers." John swallows. "Just the end of one of the better-known ones – something about the 'wild world.'"
Sherlock slips the lighter into his pocket, his eyes turning glassy. "Ah. I wepe for song, to drone the sharpe noise, but the worlde is fulle wilde."
His pronunciation is perfect, John notices: all harsh consonants and muddy vowels.
Sherlock clears his throat and says it again, this time in proper English. "I weep for song, to drown the sharp noise – or sounds – but the world is full wild. Or wholly wild. It depends on your interpretation, really."
John nods. "That's it. I was going to look it up-"
"But you didn't, that's good," Sherlock interrupts, sounding distant. He crosses his arms (something he hadn't used to do, something he'd picked up when he was away) and glares out over the river, clearly turning this new information over in his head.
John waits.
After a moment, his friend asks, "Did he say anything else? Anything that was different than usual?"
"No," John says. "Not really."
"Then we'll have to wait." Sherlock uncrosses his arms and tilts his head to one side. This gesture John recognizes; it signals that things are whirring together in Sherlock's head, all the gears turning in tandem, and soon he'll have a mad, outrageous plan.
"Or perhaps we'll instigate something ourselves," he says.
He takes out his lighter again, produces a cigarette from nowhere, and lights it. John watches this with obvious indecision.
"Sherlock," he begins, "I thought you were-"
"I am trying to stop," Sherlock agrees, sticking the lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, "but I'm sure my brother is watching us, and there should be a good reason for you dragging me out here on such a blustery afternoon. Act angry. Go on, it's not that hard. Look, I'm smoking, see?"
He takes a long pull on the cigarette. John rolls his eyes (not in anger, but disapproval), glares vindictively, and turns his back. Then he moves away, taking exaggerated footsteps to indicate his displeasure.
"See," Sherlock says quietly, as he follows along behind him, puffing madly on his cigarette, "you just gave me a good talking-to about my resurrected smoking habit. That's why we spent so long out here, and why I glared darkly into the distance. Now walk faster. You aren't stomping enough."
"I don't stomp," John snarls, half-amused, half-annoyed. "Come on, then. I should be giving you a talking-to. I can't believe you've started again. Where are all your nicotine patches, anyways?"
The two of them argue the rest of the way to the flat, completing the illusion, and Sherlock slams the front door to add to the verisimilitude. By then he's less inclined to throw out his cigarette; John has to shove a finger in his face and threaten to confiscate his sulphurous experiment before he finally (sulkily) agrees.
Two hours later, the cigarettes are all gone, some taken by John, some thrown out the window (also by John). Sherlock is pacing up and down in the sitting room, his hands behind his back, glancing occasionally at the ceiling. But mostly his eyes are fixed, unseeing. He's thinking.
His phone buzzes on the sofa cushion, once, twice, three times, but he ignores it. Caller: Mycroft Holmes, the identification reads, but the nameplate dims, fading away as the phone stops ringing.
Sherlock continues to pace.
Outside, the glow of the streetlamps waver behind a thin mist.