Wow, this chapter has been a really long time coming. Sorry for the wait, everyone. Insert giant list of excuses here. Thanks for sticking with this story and rest assured, it will not be abandoned. Come hell or high water, it will see completion.
Eventually.
Thanks to nearly all the money in John's wallet, plus plenty of assurances that Sherlock's brother worked for the government and could pull strings to get any traffic tickets and fines thrown out, the trip back to Baker Street took far less time than John thought humanly possible. By the time he stumbled out of the cab, his knuckles were arthritic from having clutched the door, seats, and during a particularly wicked turn, even Sherlock's shoulders. Several years had also no doubt been scared off his life.
"Much faster than an Uber, huh?" the cabbie said as he watched John disembark like a seasick tourist.
"Thank God we're still alive. Sherlock, you alright? Fantastic. Let's see what the emergency is."
John and Sherlock hurried into the building. On their way upstairs, each of them grabbed a weapon, nothing obviously lethal like a blade that would scare Mrs. Hudson into a suffering a heart attack, but something that could wallop an attacker. An umbrella stand near the door provided suitable bludgeons.
Umbrellas in hand, they ascended the stairs, Sherlock slightly ahead and John covering his back. Bursting into the room SWAT-style, like waving knives around, was an excellent way to instigate a heart attack in their landlady, so once they reached the top landing, John called, "Mrs. Hudson, we're here. We'll be right in."
There was no reply, negative or affirmative. Instead of rushing in, Sherlock motioned for John to stay back while the detective pressed his ear against the door. He closed his eyes, blocked out the ambient noises of John breathing and rustling and shifting position and focused solely on what was coming through the wood.
Which was a great lot of nothing.
Bollocks.
Sherlock removed his head and turned the door knob. He swung the door open wide, but kept his own body outside the threshold.
What he saw inside the room fixed him there.
Mrs. Hudson was seated in the chair usually reserved for Sherlock's perspective clients. She looked as frightened and tense as any client fearing killer hounds or assassins that Sherlock had ever seen. The landlady's hands were clenched into fists and all the color had drained from her face. Her eyes were fixed on their target, but that target was most assuredly not the two men in the doorway.
"Lestrade? What in the hell are you doing here?" Sherlock demanded.
"I think there's something wrong-" Mrs. Hudson began, before Lestrade cut her off with a sharp hiss.
Sherlock's attention snapped from Mrs. Hudson to Lestrade. Anyone who had even a casual relationship with Lestrade would have agreed with Mrs. Hudson; something was intrinsically changed about the detective inspector. As Sherlock took in more details, he realized even a complete stranger would have been able to identify several things wrong with Lestrade. His clothing was rumpled, even torn in several places. Some of the tears were edged with dried blood. There was more dried blood that had been hastily and incompletely wiped away from his nose.
Far more disturbing, however, than the implied fight or ambush Lestrade had suffered was the unrecognizable body language he was exhibiting. Lestrade's usual patient, if somewhat bumbling, demeanor had been sucked out and replaced with a smirking, utterly confident swagger that was laced with more than a hint of cruelty.
"I was waiting for you, Sherlock. And of course you brought the parasite. I really don't need that one, so-
Lestrade pointed at John and Sherlock. Sherlock raised an eyebrow. "We could have met much quicker if you'd been at your office and not neglecting...your...responsibilities... John, how are you on the ceiling?"
Mrs. Hudson emitted a shrill scream and pushed herself deeper into the embrace of the chair. She brought her knees up to her chest and assumed the closest approximation to the fetal position she could while seated.
Sherlock had seen some truly absurd things in his day, things most people would call supernatural, but in the end, all of those things had had terrestrial origins. Some of those origins had been late-night-conspiracy-theory-podcast weird, but they'd still had their own logic.
This was impossible.
"Get me down!" John shouted. He strained against the wall, but ended up looking like a mime struggling against an invisible box.
Sherlock dropped his umbrella and reached for John's struggling body, only to have his longtime friend jerked violently away from him. John rocketed past Sherlock, who was forced to throw himself to the side to avoid being plowed over by John's flailing mass. Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson watched in mute horror as John sailed around the room like a trapped bird, careening into corners and almost striking bookshelves and furniture.
After completing two circles of the room, John came to a halt so abrupt he suspected he had whiplash. Before he could even fully appreciate that pain in his neck and back, they became very small potatoes, indeed. John was thrown forward again.
Straight through a window.
"NO!" Sherlock howled. He ran for the window, his brain screaming that the fall was only one story, very survivable, especially for a military man who had endured far worse than a little tumble.
The consulting detective had crossed half the room when invisible ropes lashed around him from his throat to his ankles. He came to a dead stop, his arms pinned to his side and his legs pressed together.
"Mrs. Hudson-" Sherlock began.
There was no need to finish the sentence. The ever-capable landlady popped off the chair and ran for the door. Lestrade's eyes followed her, but he made no attempt to defenstrate her as he'd done to John. Mrs. Hudson reached the stairs and pounded down them without interference.
"Bloody hell, she moves well for an old bat," Lestrade said.
Sherlock tried to turn to face Lestrade, but found he could manage no movement beyond twitching his fingers.
Lestrade ambled over to the frozen detective. He stood in front of Sherlock, smirking an infuriating smile that showed more canine than any normal human grin.
"You are not Lestrade."
"Do you believe that, really and truly?" Lestrade replied. "Hmm, you believe something. What, pray tell, do you think I am? Go on, spit it out!"
"A human can't do this. A human cannot. It's impossible."
"So..." Lestrade coaxed
"So when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. You are not human. Which means I have either, as Sally Donovan loves predicting as inevitable every time I darken her door, irreparably lost my mind, or you are a demon."
It was like confessing a deep, dark secret that had shackled his soul for years, and then waiting for either acceptance or for someone to phone a mental hospital and request a pickup. Because it was absurd, stupid, idiotic, insane, against everything Sherlock had ever stood for. There were no monsters, there were government experiments. There was no Heaven, there was a room where your body was burned. There was nothing beyond the here and now, the physical and logical.
Except Lestrade had thrown John out a window after flying him around the room like a remote-controlled drone. Except a petite woman had nearly killed Lestrade and then screamed about demons and smoke. Except a priest was missing. Except Trevor reacted to plain water like potent acid. Except someone was murdering women in the style of Jack the Ripper, and using his paper and handwriting.
Except Moriarty was back from the dead and could disappear at will.
"And so I am." Lestrade blinked his eyes and what confronted Sherlock were oily black holes with no discernible anatomy.
Sherlock felt his mind slip. He wasn't sure if he was fainting or disassociating or throwing his arms up and plain dying, but whatever it was, his vision was going as dark as Lestrade's eyes. Which was fantastic, because he wanted no part of the world at that moment, or maybe ever again.
Just before he blacked out, he felt himself drop. His feet were by no means prepared to bear weight, so his knees bore the brunt of his fall. That jolt of pain shocked him back to basic awareness.
Lestrade had his back turned and was laughing in a guttural voice nothing like his own. Sherlock rose to his feet and looked for what was so amusing. It was John, mercifully alive and bleeding from only a few shallow cuts, aiming a gun at the detective-turned-demon.
It wouldn't work. Sherlock had read the books. He'd read them with contempt, but the knowledge resided inside his head anyway. He needed holy water (which atheists just filled their pockets with), salt (yes, the shaker in he kitchen was a bloody nuclear weapon), or iron.
That one he might actually manage!
The fireplace poker was solid iron and hefty enough to cave in a skull with a single blow. Sherlock scrambled for the hearth, praying Lestrade would remain distracted with John. As Sherlock's fingers closed around the poker, he heard a heavy thud and John grunt in pain.
Sherlock sprung around, poker raised high. He saw Lestrade had flung John across the room and was closing in on him. John had managed to hold onto the gun, and was trying to raise it.
Sherlock had seen more than enough corpses to know what blunt force trauma to the back of the head looked like; he also knew the physics required to turn the gentle curvature of the occiput into jagged bone. With autopsy images crowding his mind, he decided not to hold back.
The poker connected solidly to the back of Lestrade's skull. Sherlock put every ounce of strength he possessed into the blow. It should have split skin and fractured bone, either killing Lestrade instantly or rendering him a twitching vegetable.
It made him stumble a few steps and clutch at his head, hissing furiously the while. Sherlock and John gaped. Sherlock recovered from the medical impossibility quicker.
"Keep hitting him!" Sherlock shouted.
John stared at Sherlock. When the poker flew his way, it was nearly his skull cracked with it.
On the surface, abandoning his gun for a blunt weapon seemed like a stupid idea, but everything about this was stupid. And mad. And God help him when he tried to discuss any of it with his therapist...
Going by the sound alone, Sherlock could tell the power behind each one of John's blows should have killed Lestrade. He blocked that knowledge.
"Where are you going? Sherlock?!" John screamed.
Sherlock blocked that, too, as he tore out of the room. He thumped against the door of his own room, not quick enough with the knob, and ricocheted off. On his second attempt to operate a door like a human and not like a space shuttle careening through the atmosphere, Sherlock managed to gain entry. Once inside, he kicked some random rubbish away from his bed before jamming his arm underneath and rooting around desperately.
After landing on a number of soft, rumpled objects that were certainly clothes begging for washing, Sherlock found what he was searching for. He pulled out a can of spray paint, kissed it, and then ran back the way he'd come. He'd been clever enough to leave the door open, so there was no danger of hitting it face-first.
John saw Sherlock return and nearly sobbed with relief. All this clobbering was beginning to wear on him physically. It had from the start stabbed him in the psyche.
"Keep him occupied," Sherlock instructed. He scanned the floor for a large enough area and got to work.
"For how long?" John replied, driving the poker into Lestrade's back.
"Until." Sherlock forewent the rest of the superfluous sentence to focus on graffiti art.
Sherlock threw everything from his mind except the image he intended to copy onto the floor and the hand motions required to finesse the spray paint. In this zen state, he outlined a large circle and then began the process of filling it with a star and symbols.
John heard the hissing of the spray paint and for one wild moment thought Sherlock had chosen the worst moment in history to try huffing and getting high. He risked a quick look over his shoulder and found Sherlock wasn't inhaling the paint, he was drawing on the floor with it. That made...actually less sense.
"Three to five minute drying time," Sherlock announced, backing away from his masterpiece.
"Why do we care about that?" John asked.
"Because smudged paint kills. Take his knees out!"
John had been distracted by Sherlock's one-painting gallery and Lestrade had used the momentary cessation of blows to the head to try pulling his spine out. John barely side-stepped and delivered a fumbling blow to Lestrade's thigh. The detective inspector snarled. With a grace he couldn't have imagined during his limping days with a cane, John feinted with the poker like a fencer and then swept Lestrade's legs out from under him.
It was a clever maneuver, and gave John just enough time to hand the poker to Sherlock. For the next five minutes, the consulting detective took over the mind-wrecking work of beating Lestrade into the floor. Once Sherlock approximated those five minutes had expired and his paint was dry, he gripped the poker in both hands and slipped the iron bar over Lestrade's head.
The pressure Sherlock applied to Lestrade's throat should have rendered him unconscious. Instead, he bucked with the power of a bull beneath Sherlock, stronger without oxygen than Lestrade was on his best day. Sherlock discovered why. Where the iron touched Lestrade's bare skin, smoke welled up.
"Why's he doing that? How is he burning?" John had seen plenty of painful skin reactions in his time as a doctor, but he'd never seen spontaneous combustion contact dermatitis.
Sherlock had no idea behind the actual mechanism, but he assumed it was the same one that allowed simple water to melt someone's face off. Later, when he wasn't being taken for a ride around his flat by a hissing, cursing demon, he'd ponder it. Right now, he needed to steer Lestrade and keep him from smashing into the wall.
The poker served as a rudimentary rudder. Sherlock could, by yanking Lestrade's head violently, influence his left and right movements. Sometimes. Despite the sizzling skin and what had to be agony, Lestrade still was able to stagger his own way about as often as he obeyed Sherlock's demands.
John adding his strength to the mix swung the fight in Sherlock's favor. While Sherlock reined in Lestrade with the poker, John grabbed his shirt and pulled his forward. Sherlock was able to get both his feet on the floor and propel Lestrade from behind.
With a final grunt of effort, they wrestled Lestrade into the painted circle. John let go of his shirt and stepped outside the perimeter. Sherlock released the poker and threw himself back before Lestrade could tear him open.
The moment he cleared the circle, Sherlock fully understood the absurdity of it. This was something beyond the natural world, capable of telekinesis, of stealing bodies, of inhuman strength, and he was going to trap it with...basic geometric shapes. In a moment, the thing inside Lestrade was going to step over the painted threshold and crush their skulls against the ceiling with magic.
Only it didn't. Lestrade glared down at his feet, his lips drawn back like an enraged dog's. "Where did you learn this?"
"From the most rubbish book I ever read," Sherlock replied. He swallowed down the hysterical laughter that wanted to burst from him. There was no way- It had to be playing with him- But they'd found the same circle where they'd discovered Trevor-
"Let me out."
"Absolutely not."
Lestrade threw himself at Sherlock and ran into an invisible wall.
"Holy Christ, it actually works." John clutched a hand to his chest. "I thought you were mad, making bloody circles on the floor. I wanted to take that poker and hit you with it. Glad I didn't."
"So am I," Sherlock said.
"What are we going to do with him now?" John asked.
Sherlock replied, ""Discover who he is."
"He's not Lestrade? I mean, we've known Lestrade for years and this is not him, but at the same time it is him. It's his body."
"He's being possessed by a demon."
John shook his head. "No, that's ridiculous. You are Sherlock Holmes, not some nutter preacher, you give me something better than that!"
Sherlock ignored John's denial and stepped a bit closer to the symbolic circle. "Who are you?"
Lestrade's snarl turned into a grin that nearly split the skin on his cheeks. "Why don't you call me Jack? After a hundred and thirty years, I've grown accustomed to it."
