A/N: A bit of Mike Stamford here. One piece only. -csf
.
'Hey, Watson, did that new janitor find you?'
Oh, it's Mike Stamford. We've been seeing each other more now I sometimes come to St Bart's for a shift or two. He looks nice and well rested, much unlike me at the end of two consecutive shifts, I notice.
I stop myself from rubbing my face in the last possible second, and quickly discard my disposable gloves.
'Who's that?' My gloves snap in turn as the latex is stretched away.
'He was asking about you earlier... You know – ginger hair, he's got a bit of a limp, a squint and a hump, the poor sod, but he won't let us have a look. Says he was born that way, as if he had chosen it himself. Anyway, it's not about any of that, he wanted to talk to you about a patient of yours. Apparently he saw your patient arriving earlier when he was at the door.'
That's a new one, to be fair, but—
'There are confidentiality rules forbidding me talking to janitors about my patients, or anyone else for that matter.'
Mike chuckles. 'Maybe the sod dreams of studying at night to become a doctor. With the day job it would take him some thirty years...?'
I drop my bag and face Mike straight on. 'Come on, don't put him down. He probably knows as much as you do, if you think about it.'
'Probably', Mike backs down with the same easy ways he has always had. I should be thankful for that, as it was this that made him get two words with a difficult, eccentric genius like Sherlock, and later introduce me to the amazing man. The rest is an ongoing epic tale of friendship that sucks me into Sherlock's whimsical and warped world every time I leave my normal work at the NHS.
'I'll keep an eye out for the new janitor. He probably has false pretext, and what he really wants is for me to get Sherlock's autograph.'
'You really think that?' Mike is pensive while he ponders me, for some reason.
'Don't worry. I'm the one who always does Sherlock Holmes's autographs anyway.'
.
'You're late, is everything alright?' I ask as Sherlock, the man himself, bigger than the world, comes pick me up from Bart's at the end of the double shift, in Mrs Hudson's generously lended luxury car. I keep saying I can take the Underground, but this is a habit Sherlock wants to keep from the height of the London lockdown days, at least after my longest shifts. Either because he fears me sleepwalking while standing and ending up lost on my way home, or because it reaches the limit of his solitude's endurance and he misses me. Nah, this is Sherlock, the man who dissects pig eyes for fun, he always finds himself a way to be entertained while I'm gone.
'I'm not late', he decries. He's in a stroppy mood, then. 'You're early, John.'
'It's my finish time.'
'Exactly. You never leave on time. You know I enjoy your predictability, John. Must you be so inconsiderably inconsistent?'
I chuckle, knowing better than to take him seriously. Sherlock's expression softens considerably, dropping a certain edge of agitation within.
'Come, I'll take you home, John. I may need you for a case tomorrow.'
Feeling my aching muscles I disguise a yawn and a stretch. 'You about a case next week?'
'A week is any randomly selected set of seven consecutive days, John. I'll choose for you when "next week" starts.'
Right, the arrogant sod.
'Do I get some sleep first?' I challenge, opening the passenger's side car door.
'Obviously, my dear doctor, you are of no use to me in your current state', Sherlock declares seriously, before getting behind the wheel.
'Ta.' I graciously give away any but the autonomic decisions for the rest of the ride, falling asleep in the comfy seats of Mrs Hudson's car, much to my friend's dismay.
.
'How's our genius child, John?' Mike asks me as we trade a few words by the nurse's station. As a lecturer, Mike has got to put some hours into real medicine every year. I'm not strictly supervising him, but I'm keeping an eye on Mike regardless. It can be daunting to return to the organised chaos of the A&E. All fast track responses and quick diagnosis, it's miles away from the classroom's classical study of anatomy tomes and historical breakthrough diagnosis.
'Sherlock is doing alright. Things have mostly returned to normal, except Sherlock still mysteriously refuses to allow clients into 221B. He rather meet them anywhere else, even at an abandoned quarry or some dark deserted woods... He can be a bit blasé about his safety, I guess with overexposure to crime and gore he has become more desensitized than the average person.'
'He's lucky to have you, John.'
'I'm not his keeper. I just hope he's winding me up most times. And a British Browning can sort a few jams too.'
'Don't play yourself down, we have a good idea that you take good care of Sherlock.'
'Who's we? Nah, I don't. More like the other way round, really. He's quite fascinating, and the way he— Sorry, am I in your way?' I interrupt myself to ask a hunched over uniformed man with a broom doing a poor job of sweeping the floor.
The man has stealthily moved closer and closer to us. Now he shies away, I don't even get to see his face.
Mike looks bemused too.
He grumbles rudely, as if my concern annoyed him more than me being in the way, and moves on without acknowledging me further.
'Oi, mate, this is that doctor you wanted to see', Mike calls him back.
'Busy now', he hisses audibly, and waves a broom like a pantomime's prop.
'It's alright', I wave Mike to stand down. 'He knows who I am now. Don't think I can do much about that back and shoulder hump, though. Didn't see the squint.'
'You still think the man is a medicine enthusiast?'
I shrug. 'We all need a hobby. And the two of us know someone with a far more questionable hobby. By the way, Sherlock sends his thanks for the liver samples, he's pickling them.'
Mike's smile is as easy-going as ever.
'Next time don't let me know, John!'
.
This time Sherlock is already impatiently waiting for me as I leave the hospital. My haggard look a stark contrast to his pristine slick suit and artistically disarrayed curls. Still I seem to notice a slight tinge of tiredness in him, and worry a bit:
'What have you been up to? Are you overworking yourself in a new case?'
He hums, pondering me all too attentively.
'Psychological analysis would claim you are projecting your own feelings onto me, John. I assure you it's quite useless, as I can see the ingrained exhaustion in your tired, aching muscles, the contracted shoulder ligaments and the perceptible delay in reaction times that hang about your person, John. Dinner at Angelo's?'
'I thought you were cooking tonight', I retort, still a bit stunned.
'Didn't have the time.'
'How? You don't work! You've got no cases on and all you do is lounge about with your so called scientific experiments! How lazy can you be?'
He looks fleetingly hurt, and it absolutely shatters me. That's very insensitive of me, because Sherlock often takes things said to him too literally. He will believe what I say as gospel, as if he indeed trusted me so much that I was a mirror or an interpreter to his personality.
'No, sorry', I sigh and rub my eyes. 'Don't mean a word of what I just said. The work you do, Sherlock, saves lives, it couldn't be more important.'
I see him stand a bit straighter, a fresh soft touch to his features.
'Only you notice, John. I forgive you because I accept you are exhausted. Why you insist in this meaningless job on top of our Work is beyond me, though.'
'Oi. Sush it.'
.
'Did they tell you to clean the auditorium?' I ask, to the new janitor, as I walk into the lecture room and find him staring at a wide size poster of the human anatomy used in the classes. He seems intently interested in the digestive apparatus as detailed in the diagram.
Maybe Mike was right, and this man would love to learn medicine, but is possibly hindered by the cost and time taken up by the degree. I immediately feel a connexion, and hope to help this studious soul to understand what he has not been taught but wishes to learn.
'I can help you with that, you know?'
He freezes on the spot, his back muscles visibly tensing, lower than his strange deformity, yet he does not turn around. Perhaps he's shy, or afraid I will tell him off for being loitering during his working hours, wandering into a lecture room.
'Yes', he says at last, with an accent as uncommon as his appearance. 'Yes, I would like that. Your patient, the patient rushed by you to the emergency room two days ago, he had been stabbed. Clean wound, from a small kitchen knife, serrated, in an upwards thrust, clean exit. By all accounts it should have pierced his liver, yet there was nothing on that note in his records. He suffered a mild perforation to the heart's pericardial wall. It makes no sense! The wound was clearly on the opposite side of his torso, it should have gone nowhere near. The blade was too short and the angle was not conducive to such travelling through the well-packed internal organs space. It makes absolutely no sense, John.'
I shakes my head and groan to my hand.
Sherlock Holmes.
'Really? You need to disguise yourself now?'
I guess he does, he infiltrated a hospital, but why the extra layers of deceit when the Sherlock I know would have waltzed in looking like his every day self?
The detective rapidly turns around, as if he had forgotten he was undercover, his curiosity the cause of his unfortunate faux pas.
'John.'
There is admittance, guilt, annoyance and unquenchable curiosity in his features.
'Yes, I have taken up a disguise as you call it, John. Not to explore a case, that I could easily ask you to tell me about. I have taken to the dullest job in the world because I wanted to keep an eye on you.'
'Did you just say, I was bored?'
'Yes, in other words', he retorts mustering all the dignity he can harness.
'Then why not just ask me?' I question my friend softly.
'I understand now, John. Why you enjoy medicine so much. The mysteries, the mechanics, are very much like my puzzles. They need to fit together in order to see the whole picture. It is enticing, with the added bonus that you save lives.'
'What you do is pretty impressive as well, Sherlock. And it saves lives just as much.'
'I know, my blogger keeps telling me that... John, I have studied the human nature, made the impulses of degenerate souls writhing down to crime and gore my field of work. I have desecrated graveyards and robbed decaying corpses in order to autopsy them and learn their cause of death.'
'I hope you have cleaned the kitchen table's surface with proper disinfectant afterwards.'
He smiles.
'I have studied the human body's limits and endurance, the way the ligaments hold together until their tensile strength weakens so much that the adipose deposits liquefying come undone and reveal the longer lasting bones, shiny as pearls among the wreckage. I have practised socially unacceptable tests on nameless lost relatives of other people. Yet I can never learn as much, or be as wise, as you are when you are a doctor. John, you are unbeatable in your chosen profession, and it irks me beyond my endurance is limit.'
I giggle at that.
'Sherlock, I am your mate. Why make it a competition?' I raise a proud eyebrow as he takes in the implied suggestion.
'Tell me', he finally asks.
I nod, and come closer. 'Don't you go checking out his records to find out who he was. There are confidentiality clauses attached to my profession. I would like you to respect them. Having said that, the answer you are looking for is Situs Inversus Totalis. It's quite rare, some people are born with mirrored internal organs, left and right. It just so happens that when you open them up their livers turned out to be their hearts. Dextrocardia, the heart is on the right side of the chest. I've seen that before. You are never quite prepared for it, as there are no external indicators, but you learn to expect it once in a while. As I saw the degree of his bleeding, far too much for a liver puncture, I knew something was off. I wanted him on the operating table at once. It turns out my guess was right. That's all it was. A guess. Maybe intuition is a stretch of the word. Just a guess.'
'Your guess saved his life.'
'He doesn't need to know that. Do you understand now?'
Sherlock faces me straight on with the most blue eyes, seemingly filled with admiration and something akin to pride.
'I think I'm starting to see.'
'Mike was right, you know?'
'Yes', he answers calmly. I wonder if we're talking about the same thing, so I explain:
'Mike thought the janitor wanted to learn medicine. Turns out he wasn't far off.'
Sherlock nods at that.
'Sometimes even Mike gets things right.'
Like getting us both together.
I look down at my wristwatch. 'Well, my time here is about done. Would you give me a ride home, please? If you're done being the janitor for today...'
'Just drop it, John. You never need to say please. Baker Street is not home without you.'
My turn to smile, he's already walking off ahead of me, the limp and hump and squint overproduction forgotten.
It's Sherlock that makes London home to me.
.
