AN: Sorry this is taking so long! I started a new position at work, and the training has been wreaking havoc on my spare time and my sanity. Hopefully, I can have another chapter up for you in the near future. Thank you all for sticking with me this far, especially with the erratic way I've been updating.

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock, or any of the characters herein. I bow before the talented Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Gatiss, and Steven Moffat for the privilege of borrowing their characters for a bit of fun. Thank you, gentlemen, for sharing them with the world.

Chapter 9 - Blast and Grab

Not many things can make Sherlock Holmes feel queasy. He deals with dead bodies on an almost daily basis, and he experiments on severed limbs and miscellaneous organs in the interest of scientific progress (read: because it's fun). He studies murder for God's sake, and has done so since he was little more than eight-years-old.

Observing John Watson, who was a captive for almost thirteen hours before he essentially saved himself, fill his empty stomach with nearly three pounds of dry-rub-spiced ribs was enough to make Holmes' iron stomach feel like it was on a bloody carnival ride. It was like watching one of those nature shows where David Attenborough remarks dryly on the prowess of a feeding hyena. John even went so far as to crack the leftover bones open to taste the marrow within.

Horrifying, but no less fascinating, was the way John utterly ignored anything else that Lestrade had kindly fetched for them to eat. He seemed so focused on getting as much protein into his body as he could, that he ignored the cooked pasta and vegetables completely. Sherlock wondered briefly if this sudden voracity had anything to do with the fact that, less than an hour previously, John had sunk his teeth into the wrist of another man and nearly chewed off a hand.

With only four ribs left, John seemed to realize he was being stared at by his charge, who was looking quite green with nausea. Swallowing his mouthful, the doctor ran his tongue along his sharp teeth in contemplation before blushing and daintily resting the bone in his hand on his plate. After a moment, the doctor said self-consciously, "Sorry. I get a little," he hesitated, "rapacious after a mission like, well, like what just happened. I'm not, umm, I'm not going to, y'know, try and," he blushed deeply and stopped speaking, turning his attention to poking the bone on his plate almost despondently.

"It isn't," Sherlock ventured in a soft, cautious voice, "because you tasted blood?"

"No!" John shook his head emphatically. "It's like a response to an overload of adrenaline. It makes me crave protein and iron." He smiled in a self-deprecating way, "I once ate four whole jars of peanut butter and two quarts of creamed spinach after my unit repelled an ambush attack outside of Kabul. Our chef vomited outside after the first jar."

The detective snorted, hiding his relief that John wasn't about to turn cannibal before his eyes. "I would think a combat-trained soldier wouldn't be so squeamish."

"Yes, well, training can't really prepare you for several people coming into the mess tent and digging into Skippy like it's the only food they've seen in months," John said as he speculatively eyed a plate of tofu and noodles. When Sherlock pushed the plate towards him, the doctor looked slightly taken aback. "Take what you want," John softly requested, pushing the plate back towards his charge. "You need to eat more than I do."

"I will content myself with the chicken and rice." Sherlock pushed the plate firmly back towards his Defender. "There is plenty of that, and I am not partial to the taste of sponge."

John chuckled and flashed him a bright, grateful smile. "Good thing I'll eat pretty much anything."

Putting down his empty plate, Sherlock put his chin in his hand and contemplated the man before him. Curiosity peaked, he asked, "Is there anything you can't eat?"

For a moment, the doctor chewed thoughtfully. He swallowed, a bit loudly, then said, "Not really. There's stuff I don't like the texture of, but I'm not allergic to anything."

"What about mould?"

Pointing his fork menacingly across the kitchen table, John growled, "Are you planning on trying to feed me carrion or poison? Experimenting on me?"

A tense silence filled the air, then Sherlock sighed deeply, "It's just for the purposes of scientific enquiry, John."

John put down his fork slowly, and fixed Sherlock with a stern glare, "If you even think of trying to feed me something potentially deadly, I will smother you in your sleep."

"As you wish," Sherlock smiled crookedly, already plotting various ways in which he might slip something into John's daily food intake to undermine that threat.

The way John's eyes narrowed gave Sherlock the impression that the doctor did not, in fact, believe for one minute that the consultant had actually let the subject drop. Instead of speaking any further, though, John opted to start basically shovelling tofu and noodles into his mouth. The sight of that was even worse than when he had demolished the ribs. Sherlock kept his mouth shut and turned his eyes back to his own plate, trying to fight off another bout of nausea.


As the spring continued to roll on through the city, a string of unnecessarily wet weather turned London into little more than shades of grey. Fog turned into showers, which became loud thunderstorms or miniature deluges, and the criminal population seemed to have hunkered down to avoid getting soaked. Sherlock couldn't decide if he was utterly bored with the lack of mysteries, or if he was thankful to have empty hours which he could fill with various experiments.

John seemed to take the inclement weather with the same amount of calm as he did his charge's stormy moods. Once his ankle healed from his ordeal, he returned to his morning jogs, regardless of the amount of precipitation falling from the heavens. The only sign that he was bothered a bit by the English damp was the appearance of a tube of heat liniment on the top of the toilet tank, which was applied liberally to his left shoulder almost every morning.

It was hatefully peaceful, in Sherlock's opinion, for about two weeks. In that time, the consultant solved eight cold cases, twelve house burglaries (completed by four different people), four art thefts, a car theft, two drug-related murders of little import, and a dog-napping. The only crime of note was the discovery of a dead smuggler in a car boot in Doncaster, but Sherlock solved it in a single day after realizing that the only person capable of getting through the paranoid victim's security measures was his butler.

The real surprise was the sudden, horrifying arrival of John's nightmares. Sometimes Sherlock was hard pressed to remember that there was a man living in the upstairs bedroom and not a bloody howler monkey. Granted, the sounds were of short duration, but that didn't stop them from being sickeningly petrifying. The consultant never saw John after he woke from the traumatic terrors that haunted his REM sleep stage, but he could hear the man pacing the room upstairs for hours after the sounds had quieted.

At first, Sherlock was alarmed by the nightmares that drove the Defender from his comfortable bed. But after two weeks, he was just as tired of them as John seemed to be. The doctor was visibly exhausted, with dark circles beneath his eyes and the lines of his expressive face deepened to make him look years older than his actual age. It would do neither of them any good if the dreams continued, for if the doctor was too tired to keep up with his charge, they could both rapidly find themselves in a bad spot.

One night, as Sherlock sat in the darkness of the living room, listening to the thundering storm directly overhead, John yelped upstairs and began to whimper like a beaten puppy. Clinging to the last of his nerves, Sherlock thumped his head against the back of the sofa as he fought not to race up the stairs and just shake the man awake. It would serve him right for intruding on Sherlock's peace.

Not that he wasn't sympathetic in a way; Sherlock knew John had done and seen enough in life to feed the nightmares of a dozen men. But for the love of all that was scientific, Sherlock could not figure out why the man had yet to get over it. Couldn't he just take a damn sleeping pill and get through a full night's sleep?

The pathetic whimpers gave way to furious snarls as the thunder outside began to fade. Somewhere outside in the city there was a low whumpf of sound and the ringing of car alarms, and the snarls turned into a sharp screech that must have startled John into wakefulness. There was an almighty thud from the ceiling, and Sherlock snickered to himself as he realized the doctor had fallen out of bed.

To the consultant's surprise, John came crashing down the stairs a moment later, the whites around his eyes just as visible as the glow of his pupils. The doctor's nostrils flared as a flicker of lightning threw his face into sharp relief. He darted to the windows as another loud concussion of noise came from far nearer than the last, and when John became visible in the light from the street lamps, Sherlock realized the man was trembling.

Rising slowly, wary of startling his Defender, Sherlock moved towards the windows until he was standing directly behind the doctor. John was breathing very rapidly, almost panting, and his whole body seemed tensed tighter than a bow string. Taking in the man before him, Sherlock's eyes caught on John's left shoulder, which was visible for the first time around the edge of the tank top John wore to bed.

Barely visible in the darkness, Sherlock could make out the shimmery shadow of an unmistakeable entrance wound at the back of John's shoulder. The bullet would have gone clean through his scapula, and his knowledge of anatomy told the consultant that it had nearly pierced through John's heart. Taking careful hold of the doctor's hard-muscled arm, Sherlock gently tugged until the mangled exit wound on the other side was in harsh relief.

That explained why John needed the heat liniment; the wound probably ached something fearful from the damp, chill weather. It was nothing short of shocking that John had as much mobility as he did. Sherlock could make out the edges of skin grafts and the signs that the wound had been badly infected at some point.

John perked up suddenly, his muscles going impossibly tighter as he stared at the building across the street. Turning around swiftly, he tackled Sherlock to the floor seconds before the windows of the flat shattered from the shock wave from the explosion of the building across the street. Shards of glass and splinters of wood scored the consultant's arms and feet, and John hissed in pain above him where he was in the process of protecting his charge's face.

"Are you all right?" John snarled, his voice barely audible above the high-pitched whine brought on by the sound of the blast. "Holmes! Are you all right?"

"I will be once you get the bloody hell off me!" Sherlock shoved ineffectually at the man on top of him. It was like trying to move an anvil. "You weigh a bloody tonne and a half!"

Stiffly, and with much flinching, John managed to lift himself up, manoeuvring carefully as he took in the damage around him. "Don't try to get up, if you can help it. You're not wearing shoes, and there's shit everywhere."

Sherlock reined in his long limbs and rested his chin on his knees, an impish grin overtaking his face. At the startled look his Defender gave him, he said, "Finally, something interesting is going on!"

John's impressive eye-roll was followed by the loud crash of a door being broken down on the ground floor. A large group of men, all dressed in the black riot-gear uniforms of Mycroft's elite Homefront Guards, pounded up the stairs of the Baker Street flat. Guns held at the ready, they crushed already broken bits of wood beneath their heavy boots as they raced to the window, circling around Sherlock like a swarm of insects.

Shaking himself like a wet dog, John knocked debris from his hair and clothes before rising to his feet with a grunt. He rocked his head on his neck, in a way Sherlock had become familiar with as the doctor's 'all right, let's do this' gesture of readiness. A rigid finger was pointed at a Guard with the concentric rings denoting a Lieutenant's rank, and John barked, "You! Tell me what the fuck is going on!"

"Three buildings in London have been destroyed by bombs, sir," the surprised man rattled off. "Mr Holmes received a video message just before the last, which indicated strongly that Master Holmes was the intended target of terrorist activity. We have been sent here to bring yourself and Master Holmes to a secure safe house."

"As opposed to an insecure one?" John snapped, his eyes tracing the floor before alighting on the coffee table. He flipped the table decisively onto its top, then shoved Sherlock onto the underside of it. "Drag'em to the stairwell on that, he's not wearing shoes. I assume you have transport for us?"

"Yes, sir, waiting downstairs, sir."

In lieu of answer, John grunted and gave the table a shove with his foot. Sherlock lurched and grabbed on of the table legs before he fell over. Smirking as one of the Guards dragged him onwards, he tossed to John, "This is going to make merry hell with the floorboards."

"Floors are replaceable, your feet aren't." The ghost of a smirk played over John's mouth. "The only 'merry hell' this is going to bring is when Mrs Hudson finds out about the damage."

Slightly sobered, Sherlock hummed in agreement. "It's probably best someone warns her to stay at her sister's until this is cleared up."

John glared at the lieutenant, who had reached an arm up to steady Sherlock as he stepped off the up-turned table. The Guard bobbed his head in understanding, "I will see to it personally, sir."

"Damn right." The doctor turned away to peer out the window, his pupils pinioning as he tried to see through the wisps of smoke in the air. His ear twitched briefly as he listened to the Guards escorting Sherlock down the stairs.

"Sir," the last guard asked tentatively, "shall we go?"

Sighing, John turned around to find the table again to use it himself, when a sharp pain in his neck flared. Lashing out at the man beside him, who danced out of the way, John lurched as the world spun like a top. Light glinted off the syringe in the Guard's hand.

"Balls," John rasped angrily, just as the world sank into darkness.


Inside the transport van, Sherlock watched the street flow by and felt a twinge of unease crawl up his spine. Why would John stay behind, he wondered, instead of going with his charge to the safe house. John was loyal to a fault, and it seemed a bit neglectful of him to send his duty off to safety without being their to check over the parameters and security of the safe house himself.

Turning his eyes to focus on the young Guard who had relayed the news to the Lieutenant, Sherlock raked his gaze over the man and let the deductions flow through his sharp mind:

Nails - short, neat, professionally manicured - calluses on his palms indicative of knife use, not gun use.

Stance is fluid - moves as if through water - dance training?

Other soldiers not easy in his presence, they set him apart but not because of fear. Unfamiliarity?

Holds a handgun as if unfamiliar with it. Continually stroking the hilt of the blade in his boot - nervous tick or habit?

Knife has seen use, boot sheath is well-made, worn, and well cared for. Hilt is mock leather - sweat will not make it difficult to hold on to - and worn to owner's grip.

Is that a needle in his pocket?

ASSASSIN? SPY?

"Lieutenant," Sherlock kept his voice low and unconcerned, "you should take this man into custody. He's not one of your usual men, and it's not because he's from another unit like he probably told you he was. He's a spy, or perhaps a trained assassin, and I'm of a mind to believe that the needle in his pocket contains some trace evidence of a powerful sedative. John didn't join us because he's been kidnapped. Again."

The way the other soldiers immediately trained their weapons on the man was gratifying. The spy hissed in protest as they stripped him of all the weapons they could find, and one of them bagged the syringe in a plastic bag. The needle was handed over to Sherlock without hesitation, and the consultant pocketed it in his dressing gown. Trussing the traitor up with zip ties, the soldiers dumped him off his seat and onto the floor.

Fingering the evidence in his pocket, Sherlock stated, "Forget the safe house, it's probably compromised. Take me to Mycroft's office instead, and when we get there be sure to send someone to bring me some actual clothing and shoes." A slow, chilling smile spread over his face. "John's going to be angry enough at having been kidnapped again. I'd hate to see how livid he would be if he found out I saved him in my pajamas."