The next day was anything but a normal Tuesday.

It began when John was awoken at 5:30 by what sounded like a muffled explosion and the sudden, overwhelming scent of sulfur. Eyes stinging and watering, hand clapped over his nose and mouth, he forced himself to count backwards from ten before he found Sherlock (who was nowhere to be seen and was almost definitely behind this) and punched him in the nose.

Their closet door swung open and a cloud of steam poured out, the already pervasive rotten eggs smell intensifying. Sherlock was in the corner, one hand pinching his nose closed, the other fanning the steam out of the closet.

"Sherlock, what the hell are you-" John began to sputter, but Sherlock waved him off.

"It's fine. The fumes aren't poisonous. Although I'm afraid your jumper's a bit of a loss. I'd apologize but I think I'm doing you a favor; it's the particularly vile Fair Isle one."

John stared at him, open mouthed, then pulled his covers over his head and tried to go back to sleep.

(This ultimately failed due to the fact that every time he inhaled, he got a noseful of sulfur.)

Sherlock didn't attempt to make any sort of amends for the incident that morning, although he did lean over John's shoulder as they sat together at breakfast, squinting down at John's biology homework that he was trying to finish before class.

"Number one is A, number eight is D and number thirteen is C and based on the questions that your teacher's assigned, you're almost definitely having some sort of surprise exam today, so you'll want to prepare yourself. And the fumes weren't poisonous, honestly, so you can stop worrying about that already."

"Erm…thanks," John said as he began to erase the incorrect answers that he'd already penciled in. "And I wasn't worried about the fumes. I trust you."

Sherlock blinked in surprise, and then rolled his eyes. "First mistake, John. Also, after classes today, we need make a visit to-"

"Hi, John. Um, good morning, Sherlock. Mind if I join you two?" It was Sarah, holding a cup of tea and a bowl of yogurt, giving them a hesitant little smile. Her hair was pulled back in a sloppy braid, but a few pieces stuck out stubbornly (and something about that made John's stomach do a nervous little twist, and he grinned involuntarily.)

"No, of course not," he said, pulling out a seat for her at the same time that Sherlock said "Yes, actually I do."

Sarah's smile faltered and she moved to stand back up. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize that-"

"No, no it's fine," John said tightly, kicking Sherlock under the table as hard as he could. "Isn't it, Sherlock?"

"Of course," Sherlock answered, scraping his chair back and scooping up his books. "I've got to go. Front gates after class, John. Don't forget." With that, he left the dining hall, still trailing a faint scent of sulfur in his wake.

(John wondered how long it would be before he killed the bastard in his sleep.)

"Is he always like that?" Sarah asked, swirling granola into her yogurt and looking intently at Sherlock's vacated seat.

"Almost always, yeah. And sorry for that, by the way. He didn't mean it, honest."

Sarah laughed. "It's fine, John, really. Where are you two going after school? I swear, it's like all you do is sneak off campus with him. If I didn't know you better, I'd say you were a couple or something."

The tips of John's ears went pink and he choked a bit on his toast.

"What? Me and Sherlock? No, god no. We're not…no. And we've got to go do a…a thing. A thing in town. An errand."

Oh god, he really did sound like an idiot.

But Sarah just gave him that bright grin again (and his stomach was a nervous knot by this point and he wondered if this was what hell was like: stammering like an idiot when talking to a pretty girl and having to deny accusations of dating your roommate.)

(Most likely, yes.)

"A thing in town? Why, John Watson, I think you're keeping secrets from me," Sarah said with a grin, elbowing him gently in the ribs.

(Oh god, was that flirting? Was she flirting with him?)

(Be smooth, he told himself.)

"Um. Did we have French homework?"

(And that was the end of that, because even John knew that flirting was practically impossible when all you could think to bring up was your .)

The rest of the day went by blessedly fast. Art History was made tolerable by Sherlock scribbling down deductions about their classmates and slipping them onto John's desk on neatly folded bits of paper (although John nearly got them caught by squeaking slightly at the one that read Girl two rows ahead of us with the peroxide blonde hair has STD and its sequel Got it from our Art History teacher.)

(After that, Sherlock's deductions grew increasingly outlandish, and John grew more and more scandalized until he looked over to see Sherlock's shoulders shaking with silent laughter and he realized that he had been tricked.)

(And he knew he should be angry, but despite himself, he started laughing too.)

At the end of French, Sarah leaned over and whispered, "Have fun on your secret date with Sherlock in town." The ends of her braid brushed against John's shoulder and his ears burned pink again.

"He's not my date," John muttered as he shoved his books into his bag.

"Good," said Sarah. Before he could think of anything to say in response, she'd turned a corner in the hallway and had disappeared.

Sherlock was waiting in the same spot as the day before, eyes locked on the screen of his mobile. When John approached, he looked up for a second and then immediately went back to typing.

"You did well on your Biology exam, didn't you?" he asked without glancing up once. When he finished typing out his text, he tucked his phone in the pocket of his trousers and hopped over the wall.

"How'd you know?"

"Despite the fact that you've almost definitely got reading assigned tonight, you don't have your Biology textbook with you. Overconfidence is the surest path to failure."

John rolled his eyes, clambering ineptly onto the other side of the wall. "Thanks for the vote of confidence. But speaking of Bio, I talked to Molly today. She said her dad's already done the autopsy on Tabitha Brooks."

Sherlock stopped several paces ahead of him and waited for John to catch up. "And?"

"No signs of any real struggle, no scratches or cuts or anything like that. And there's traces of a neurotoxin in her bloodstream, the same neurotoxin that the apple was laced with. One bite, that's how potent it was. One bite was enough to kill her."

Sherlock frowned. "But if the poison was in the apple and not delivered through an injection or something of that sort, how could they force her to take it?"

"Maybe she just thought it was a normal apple?"

"Please," Sherlock said with a derisive snort. "She was bound and gagged before she was killed, John. She had at least some knowledge of the situation. But how would you force someone to poison…did Molly say anything about bruising? I know there were no signs of a struggle, but any light bruising?"

John took the folded piece of paper out of his pocket and skimmed over his notes on what Molly had told him.

"Actually, yeah. Besides the bruises from the bindings on her wrist and ankles, there was a round bruise right along her hairline."

"A gun," Sherlock whispered.

"Pardon?"

"She was forced to take the poison, although the killer wanted to make it appear voluntary, as if she hadn't known the apple was lethal, just like the real Snow White. The killer was pressing a gun to the side of her head." Sherlock demonstrated this by poking a finger very hard into John's temple.

"Hence the bruise."

"Hence the bruise, exactly. Whoever this message is for, the killer's very intent on seeing that it's received. It would've been a lot less effort just to shoot her rather than going to all the trouble of arranging a scene out of a fairy tale."

"It would've been a lot less effort to just not murder her altogether."

Allen Street was a dead end tucked away in a back corner of the town, lined with a few small shops and houses. The end of the street was dominated by a ramshackle house that looked like it was a strong gust of wind away from collapse. The front gate was festooned with bright ribbons of yellow crime scene tape.

"Sherlock, looking through the files and the autopsy reports are one thing, but breaking into a crime scene is-"

"Not what we're doing here today." Sherlock had only given the moldering wreck of a house a second's glance; instead, his focus was on a tidy little shop that they'd stopped in front of.

"And it's almost definitely illegal to- oh. It's not?"

"Of course not. The murder was over two days ago and it didn't even occur at the house. There's nothing of use there."

"Then why are we here?"

"I need to see a man about a book."

Above the shop was a sign that read in slightly faded red letters PECK'S USED AND RARE BOOKS. It looked as if it had been there nearly as long as the decrepit house, but it looked neat and cheery, despite the fact that the books in the display window were covered with a thick layer of dust.

"If anyone in town would know anything about the storybook page left behind at the crime scene, it's the bookshop owner. Besides, Brooks was a rare books dealer. She might've done business with Peck at some point." From his bag, Sherlock took out and unfolded a sheet of paper- the picture from John's mobile of the page from the crime scene, blown up to full-page size and photocopied.

"So what are we going to do, just go in there and say 'Oh yes, hi, we're just two school kids who just so happen to have evidence from the recent murder that's supposed to be for police eyes only could you please tell us more about it?'"

"Yes." With that, Sherlock swept through the door, leaving John standing alone in the street. John stood there for a moment, wondering when his life had become so utterly strange, and then followed Sherlock into the shop.

The bell above the door jingled as they walked in, but the store was seemingly empty, no one manning the checkout counters or standing between the long rows of shelves. The lights gave the room a cheery, albeit slightly fluorescent glow, and heavy beams of sunlight streamed through the high windows.

"Hello? Mr. Peck?" John called out into the empty store. Sherlock had disappeared into the labyrinth of shelves and darkness.

From a back room, there came a rustling and a small old man wearing a sweater stained with mustard emerged.

"Can I help you boys? Are you looking for something in particular?"

"We need your help with a rare book, sir. For a project. A school project."

(God, where was Sherlock when he needed him?)

Peck frowned. "A rare book? And you two are St. Bart's boys? Well, come into my office, I suppose."

John followed Peck into the back room, nearly jumping out of his skin when Sherlock melted away from the shadows to fall in behind him. Peck's office was cramped and cozy, filled with overstuffed armchairs, teetering stacks of books covering every available surface.

Sherlock took the sheet of paper from his pocket and slid it across the desk to Peck.

"We were wondering if you could tell us where this is from," Sherlock said, leaning back in his chair and pressing his hands together as he watched Peck inspect the paper.

"I don't…where on earth did you boys get this?" Peck said. As he handed the paper back to Sherlock, his fingers shook and his face had gone very pale.

"Please, Mr. Peck, could you tell us what it is?" John tried to keep his voice as polite and gentle as possible.

Peck took his glasses off and rubbed at his face with a sigh. He suddenly looked very tired and very small.

"Unless I'm quite mistaken, that's a page torn from one of the very first printed editions of The Brothers Grimm. Now you have to understand, this would be a very rare book, a very valuable book. For someone just to tear pages out of it…well not only are they destroying something very important, but also very expensive. It's a tragedy, it really is."

"Yes, but is there anything important about this book? Anything of recent significance?"

Peck started to shake his head and then paused.

"There is one thing," he said, opening a desk drawer and rummaging around in it. From it he took a magazine, some sort of antique books collectors quarterly, it seemed, and flipped through several pages until he found what he was looking for. "See that article there? There are only ten copies or so of the very first edition of The Brothers Grimm left in such perfect condition and just last month two of them were stolen from a museum in Dresden. Just disappeared, right under the guards' noses."

Sherlock took the magazine from the man, scanning it over quickly. There was a picture of two books, slightly battered looking and bound with brown leather, and the (fairly atrocious, when it came to bad puns) headline A GRIM THEFT. "And they haven't been recovered since?"

"No and they probably never will be. They'll have been sold on the black market by now to private collectors or dealers who aren't afraid to dabble in the shady side of the business."

(John had to suppress a snort at the sound of that- the shady side of the rare book business.)

"That's a shame," Sherlock said, his voice filled with a hollow politeness. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Peck."

"But I still want to know where you two got that picture from! Where could you have-?"

But Sherlock was already striding out of the office and turned around for a moment to shout over his shoulder.

"Have a lovely afternoon, sir!"

"Wait!" Peck's voice was tinged with desperation and John felt a mix of pity and discomfort.

"Thank you, sir," he said, and left the office as quickly as he could.

"You know," he said once he caught up to Sherlock in the street. "You didn't need to do that big dramatic exit. Bit rude, really. He'd been nothing but helpful."

Sherlock shrugged. His attention was fully engrossed in a little book bound in dark green leather.

"Fine. Just ignore me then."

They walked through the streets in silence until suddenly Sherlock stopped dead in his tracks.

"Oh," he said, so soft that John could barely hear him even though he was only a few inches away. "Oh!"

"What is it?"

"Hungry?"

"What?"

"Hungry, are you hungry?"

(John was hungry, but he didn't see what that had to do with whatever it was that Sherlock had found in the little leather book.)

"Sure?"

"Follow me, I know a place whose owner owes me a favor."

John followed Sherlock towards a little café a few streets over. The inside was uncomfortably warm and stuffy with a sticky tiled floor, but there was a heavenly smell, a combination of garlic and flour and basil that made it all too clear to John's stomach that lunch had been several hours ago.

"Sherlock Holmes!" The man behind the counter broke into a wide grin and came around and clapped both Sherlock and John in a bone-crushing hug. He was staggeringly large with cropped gray hair, and he spoke with a thick accent- Eastern European, probably, or maybe Greek. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"My friend's hunger, for the most part. Mr. Moldovan, this is John. John, this is Mr. Moldovan."

There was another bear hug from the man, though this one was just for John.

"Any friend of Sherlock's is a friend of mine. Though this one is maybe not just a friend?"

John flushed.

"No, we're not- I'm not his- Christ, we're just friends."

Moldovan laughed, a loud, raucous thing that seemed to shake the walls of the café.

"Of course you are. You keep it secret. I understand."

"No, really we're not-"

But Moldovan was already steering them towards a little corner table in the crowded dining area of the café.

"Best seats in the house. I'll be out in a minute with food, don't worry."

John fidgeted in his seat, uncomfortably aware of how red his face was.

"Sherlock, doesn't it bother you that he thinks that we're-"

"Look at this, John." Sherlock seemed completely oblivious to what John had been saying, and he thrust the little leather book into John's face. "When we were in Peck's office, I nicked his date book- oh, don't look at me like that- anyways, I nicked his book and look at this appointment from two weeks ago."

Two Wednesdays ago, there was an appointment written down in smudgy black ink: Noon- T. Brooks, review new wares.

"So he did business with Tabitha Brooks? D'you think he could have something to do with the murder, then? Known something, maybe?"

"It would make sense. The murder took place only a few buildings away from his store. The message might've been for him. He could've had something to do with the theft of those books from the museum. After all, you saw how unsettled he was when he saw the page from Brooks' murder."

Moldovan had reappeared, with a plate of some sort of flatbread with cheese and bits of olive and chicken and spinach, which took John's attention off of Sherlock's for a minute. Moldovan gave them a wink as he walked away, and for what felt like the hundredth time today, John's ears went pink.

"But why kill Brooks if it was Peck who was involved with the theft?" John asked, his mouth full of flatbread. "I mean, say the book got into Peck's hands somehow and someone wanted it back. Wouldn't it be easier just to kill Peck and steal the book back rather than kill Brooks as a warning and hope it works?"

"Brooks might've had something to do with the theft too. After all, Peck said that the book had probably been sold on the black market to either a private collector or a dealer who wasn't afraid to get his or her hands dirty." Sherlock didn't have a meal of his own, but was still stealing olives off John's plate when he thought John wasn't looking. "If both Brooks and Peck were involved, the killer could just be getting rid of two problems by killing her. He'd be warning Peck that he knew that he had something to do with the theft as well as getting Brooks out of the picture altogether."

"So you think that Brooks and Peck were somehow involved with the theft but something went wrong- the deal went sour after the book had already passed into their hands, and the thieves want it back from them?"

"That's a possibility, yes. Peck's definitely involved in some way. He wouldn't have had such a strong reaction otherwise."

John gave a low whistle. "Hard to believe he could be involved in some sort of black market theft ring when he looks like someone's dotty old grandfather."

"Judging by appearances alone is for idiots, John."

"Ta, thanks for that. And I can see you stealing my olives, you bastard. I'm not blind."

Sherlock gave a low chuckle and proceeded to make a dive for the last olive, which led to John swatting his hand away, which in turn led to them fighting over the plate while trying to hold in their laughter (which led to John seeing Moldovan winking at them from across the room and realizing that they looked an awful lot like a couple and oh fuck his face was red again.)

(Fuck.)

They hardly discussed the murder or the theft or Peck's possible involvement in the black market for the rest of the week, except for Sherlock randomly dropping bits of information he'd found into conversation.

(When he'd told John how much money the book was worth, John had spat out tea all over the table. There was no way in hell that a book, a rare book true, but a bloody book could be worth eight million quid.)

But by Saturday morning at breakfast, Sherlock had turned to John and announced that they needed to go back to the bookstore.

"Why?" John had asked, trying without success to catch Sarah's eye from across the dining hall. "We can't honestly confront him yet."

"No, not that," Sherlock had said impatiently. "It's the magazine he was showing us. I want to see that article. I haven't been able to find it online. Besides, I should probably return his date book before he gets suspicious."

And so after lunch, they'd made the ten-minute walk into town again, this time under a faint gray drizzle of rain. The raindrops matted down Sherlock's hair, giving him the appearance of a wet sheepdog, and when John had laughed at this, he had given a withering glare and rubbed unsuccessfully at his head.

Once again, when they'd entered Peck's shop it was empty, with no sign of Peck, although the door to his office was slightly ajar. John took a step forward to go further in, but Sherlock put an arm out to stop him.

"Look," he said, crouching down next to the closest shelf and beckoning John over. "The shelves have been moved. The dust has been disrupted."

"You think someone's broken in?"

"That's what it looks like, although whoever it was obviously didn't want anyone to know that they were here. But look at the till. It's obviously been forced open, but all the change is still there. Whoever it was wasn't looking for money. They were looking for something else."

"The book?"

"The book."

Sherlock slipped into Peck's office, while John looked behind the counter. Sherlock had been right about the till; there was a dent in the metal from where it had been smashed open, but when John slid it open, all the banknotes were still neatly nestled in their individual drawers.

"John!" Sherlock's voice was soft, but there was an odd quality to it, a disruption to its usual glacial calm. "John, I think you should come see this."

Sherlock was standing in the doorway of Peck's office, which appeared to have undergone the same careful intrusion as the main part of the shop. But the contents of the office weren't what Sherlock's eyes were fixed on, or what made John suddenly feel very cold and very dizzy.

On the floor of the office, in a rusty puddle of congealing blood, gun still gripped tight in his hand, was Alfred Peck.