Floating. Floating down a river. Luckily, he had gotten stuck in a little pool off to the side while all the other bodies passed by him and perished in the rough waves. There. A body drifting along. Dead from a blunt trauma to the skull. Soon it would disintegrate. But not Sherlock.
Sherlock was fine.
/
John was a bundle of frayed nerves. A bundle of frayed nerves that could maneuver through a jumble of storage lockers pretty damn well. He had long since lost Mycroft in the dust. Once Mycroft's people could tell them in which locker Sherlock was being held, John had bolted. It had been about 80 hours since Sherlock had gone missing. John had not been a very patient or likable man in that time.
/
"It has to be the sister! Look at all the resources she has! She's forged papers and we know she isn't above abduction or murder for that matter. Without Sherlock, we'll never be able to find her before she can get all her ducks in a row and flee the continent! And she knows that," John had been talking to Mycroft. Lisa Moretti had been Sherlock's latest client. Her sister had forged her name onto their father's life insurance policy and taken all the money and the family inheritance for herself. Sherlock had been talking about identical necklaces for days and had determined that Fira Moretti was getting ready to extricate herself to some untraceable location. It had only taken 4 hours for John to realize something was wrong. Sherlock never left his phone behind on a case.
It had taken John only 12 hours to convince Mycroft to fly with him to Switzerland. It would have taken less time, but Mycroft required confirmation from his "people" that they were following the right lead.
/
It was a little strange and anticlimactic when John kicked the storage door open to reveal a futuristic egg-shaped tank. At least, that's what he thought it looked like.
Mycroft had caught up in the amount of time John stood staring in the doorway.
"We should check inside the-"
"Yes, I know," John snapped. Two hours on a small private plane and four hours in an even smaller car with Mycroft had severed any politeness or respect John had for the elder Holmes. The all-encompassing worry he was dealing with wasn't too helpful either.
John crossed to the tank and carefully unlatched the cover. He half-expected steam to leak out as he opened the lid.
He more than half-expected to find Sherlock dead inside the small tank. But he wasn't.
