A/N: I've no excuse. It just flowed this way.
Still not British, a writer, or a detective in a deer stalker hat. -csf
IV.
'What are you seeing?'
John surprises Sherlock as the investigator works over his better microscope, the one he brings out for a blood or saliva sample. There's no question over what Sherlock is analysing right now, John grudgingly admits, rubbing the crook of his elbow. The endearing detective demanded the paramedics got a sample of John's blood, to look for narcotics or whatever toxic substances used to knock out the doctor. The paramedics did their job; they stood their ground in adamant refusal to bleed their patient for a demanding accompaniment with no authority or medical degree. The row became fierce and Sherlock was not shy to use his best weapon at hand. No, not John's gun, in Sherlock's coat pocket. It's a nice weapon, but not Sherlock's best weapon. John's eyes widened drastically as he started hearing about the two paramedics love life in graphic detail – one of which had a fetish John wasn't quite aware existed, and perhaps he could have done without knowing – and, head hurting and body aching, the doctor decided "enough!" and cut through the argument by a speedy expedient. John grabbed the equipment out of the ambulance's neatly stocked drawers while Sherlock argued with the paramedics and going nowhere (both metaphorical and literally), and got the first vial filled before one of the young scene attendant noticed.
'Oi, don't do that!' he shouted, indignant.
John handed the vial to the detective who, methodical and precise, proceeded to label the sample before tossing it to a coat pocket.
Those coat pockets can remind John of lab coat pockets for some reason. Although he suspects it's not normal protocol to pocket blood in a lab.
'I'm a doctor, gentleman, and I can bloody well draw some blood on my own without—'
Sherlock's quiet admiration was short lived as the wave of cold vertigo noticeably hit the doctor, drained the rest of the colour from his face, and nearly knocked him off the gurney he sat on.
'Some doctor you are!' the spiteful paramedic trumped. Sherlock came very, very close to socking the man he now thoroughly despised; he would have, if he weren't holding up a very precious friend at the time, his hands better engaged.
Lestrade would have appreciated the company in a sensitivity training session, the one the inspector still needs to finish, given that he got interrupted by an SOS text message.
John smirks, as he ponders his recollections. Finally back at Baker Street, with a heavenly brewed cup of tea and sat on the collapsed springs armchair that is less-than-secretly his armchair now (and he wouldn't have it changed for a new one), he watches, over the back of the chair, Sherlock insist on performing analysis on his blood content from the severely deficient kitchen-lab.
Sherlock doesn't want to leave John, or drag him to Bart's. Another kindness from the mad detective.
John is not too concerned over had he may have been injected with; everyone but the doctor seems to notice this. The reason why John is not concerned is because John hurts. His joints hurt, his head hurts, and his soldier pride is badly wounded. And also because he knows enough of what he was injected with. Unlike Sherlock, he doesn't care about the precise drug. He can feels its effects, and the way it's working it's way off his system, and that is enough for John. This isn't, after all, his first time being drugged by a criminal mastermind in the way to Sherlock Holmes.
He could tell Sherlock just that. Maybe he already has. Sherlock won't listen.
Finally John relents. He's been brooding over the attack as a soldier debriefing superiors – what happened, where he went wrong, what he should have been looking for, why he let himself get caught. Trying to learn valuable lessons. With a tired sigh now John tries to brush away those near unkind thoughts and focuses on his traumatised partner. The one that saved his life with a constancy of true friendship.
He gets up, slowly paces the distance between the two abnormally quiet men.
Sherlock is all angles and planes under the sharp contrast from the overhead fluorescent tube's white light, as he leans over his microscope in near intimacy. John opts to lean against the glass panelled doors that separate the kitchen from the living room, and looks on, waiting for a crack in the detective's focus.
Sherlock looks up at once, still only millimetres away from the eye piece. Dividing his attention.
'John.' It sounds like a quiet statement, not a question, but John answers all the same, too proficient at reading Sherlock.
'I'm alright now.'
The investigator's gaze hardens. 'Don't do that.'
'Do what?' John is not even surprised. Sherlock knows how to read him too.
'Sugar-coat.'
'Am I doing that?' the doctor evades.
Sherlock's eyes snap up again, hard as steel. In the cold fluorescent light, they look all grey, fully analytical.
John counts it as a victory. Sherlock is comfortable doing this machine analysis, it grounds him like nothing else.
Sherlock's gaze takes apart the soldier innocently leaning against the door frame. John isn't perturbed.
'You're dizzy, fuzzy around the edges. You're using the sliding door to steady yourself. You've never been a lazy man, and you hold ingrained contempt to the way I treat the furniture when I walk over the coffee table, sit perched on my armchair, or autopsy body parts on the kitchen table. Slouching is not your ingrained posture, John. And you respect furniture, wallpaper and doors far more than they ever earned your respect. Definitely dizzy, trying to anchor yourself to a vertical position. Not to mention the residual pain. Going by the stiff angle on your right leg, I'd say joint pain, not muscular or soft tissues deep. Joints protesting over being paralysed by an unknown drug, and kept in a stiff stretched out position, encased and paraded. As if you fell asleep on your leg and it prickles with pins and needles, and your joints feel as if your movements are jagged and unnatural. You expected as much, and were willing to hide this from me. Inference, you're a credulous idiot, if you thought I wouldn't find out. Moreover, you believe it will wear off, so you aren't too concerned. You're a fine doctor, and I believe you. But hiding it from me, John? That denotes guilt, you've assigned yourself some of the blame. You are accepting your fate in typical John Watson stoicism. It's no good. You can't blame yourself over my failing to get you rescued earlier and hope I won't notice the swap. You can't fall on your sword for me, John. I should have got there earlier. I should have known you were in danger.'
'You had no way of getting there earlier, you ridiculous overachiever.' John says this with a straight face, it's a fair fight after all. John admits silently to trying to shield Sherlock from the aches and pains. He's unwilling to debate them in his own mind too.
And Sherlock really is an overachiever. An endearing one at that.
Sherlock blinks, then grins. A huge, slightly out of whack grin, that is Sherlock's most authentic grin. John feels some of his own aches melt as he lets Sherlock's grin wash away some of the recent traumatic experiences. Finally he comes over, grabbing on to the counter and the kitchen table as he makes his way to the unoccupied chair.
'Tell me what you've got so far', he invites softly.
The detective hums, as if in approval of John's John-ness at last.
.
'Do you think he's done?' I ask, reservedly. 'You clearly won the last fight.'
Sherlock leans back in the kitchen chair, allowing the dark shadows away from the overhead lamp's pool of light to encompass his eyes.
'I don't think he's ready to throw in the towel just yet.'
I nod. Suspected as much.
'Do you think he'll go after a random victim again, to rebuild his confidence? Or he'll fixate on me, or turn to another important person in your life?'
Sherlock shakes his head solemnly. I frown.
'You have a lot of other important people in your life. You are loved, Sherlock.'
The detective shudders openly at the declaration. Sherlock doesn't do overtly emotional.
'If you insist', he opts not to contradict me, though. 'However, may I point out that the others you are referencing to, however few they may be, are not known in the public domain, not as you are?'
I take the teaspoon to twirl the tea I'm already halfway through. Tense, needing a mechanical task to ground me. The released whiff of fragrant tea nearly does the job.
'So it's going to be me again?' I ask raising my eyes to fix Sherlock directly with my gaze. It's a bit of a relief, actually. Mycroft would make a terrible victim, for to catch him would take years of professional stalking and stealth manoeuvres. Not to mention bypassing his umbrella. Mrs Hudson as a prized catch, on the other hand, would make my skin crawl. Mrs H must always be protected. Molly is not as helpless as she may seem, often surrounded by scalpels and bone saws with which she is very proficient, one can't forget she briefly dated a gay criminal mastermind and had him watch a teenagers' rom-com series with her. As much as Molly is my friend, I wouldn't have sat through a whole box set, I imagine scalpel torture was involved at some point. Lestrade as well, he—
Lestrade.
Greg.
Sherlock senses the shiver trailing down my spine, or hears my gasp. When he looks at me, he knows something is terribly wrong.
'John?'
Lestrade. Of course the killer knows about Lestrade. The DI is the link that brought the Curfew Killer to Sherlock's radar.
Lestrade is the highest prize.
My eyes finally meet Sherlock's.
'Shit.'
.
John has taken the first cab Sherlock hailed to go to DI Lestrade's home address. Sherlock follows in his wake in a second cab, heading to Scotland Yard's headquarters. Between them, they constantly ring the detective inspector's number, and Donovan's, Anderson's, Dimmock's; anyone they can contact in Lestrade's squad.
No one has seen or heard from DI Lestrade since the abandoned warehouse investigation got called off.
Sherlock hates presentiments. He refuses to believe in them. They can fester inside you and cast a shadow in all logic, deforming it. This is a good time to keep that heavy weight sinking in his stomach promptly ignored.
Lestrade. The greyish haired inspector is an old acquaintance from the time Sherlock came onto the London scene. Lestrade was the first to see a spark of brilliance in the chaotic madness that was Sherlock before his Work took shape, direction and started commanding Sherlock's better life decisions. The inspector believed in the amateur detective, no matter how many times a young, foolish junkie let him down by giving in to his cravings, or was a no show. In those days, Sherlock often tried to push Lestrade away, if only to prove everyone leaves him. In some instances he was successful. Their interactions were on and off for years, until the two's bond increased when Lestrade quite by chance walked in on the pop-up crack house Sherlock was about to overdose in. Or maybe there was a case. There definitely was a file, a manila file. And while Lestrade got derailed in his investigation of the premises by the humane effort to stay with the self-injuring addict on his way to a heart attack, keeping him company until the ambulance arrived, trying to keep him awake and focused (as much as one can be coherent with a heroin overdose buffering his senses; heroin, Sherlock's choice to numb his hyperactive mind to a blissful silence, about to stop his heart permanently), Sherlock's straying eyes grazing the file and Greg telling him, as a distraction, about the case that brought him there, that got him there in time to try and save this man's life. That was when Sherlock first deduced a criminal and the way in which the crime was perpetrated to the inspector. Greg just blinked, speechless. It made sense, it was clever, ingenious, really, and the rag of a young man huddled in a dirty corner, shivering and having a hard time standing back against the wall, had seen the solution from Greg's recollections of a case file. It was brilliant, unheard of, and possibly Sherlock was actually the killer, disassociating while confessing to the murders in a drawled speech, about to go into cardiac arrest. Lestrade squinted hard as he focused on those metallic eyes, now unfocused and blurry, and Sherlock being too much into shock to keep up the usual act, Greg saw the hurt and vulnerability in those eyes. And he vowed to see that man, that brilliant young man, back to health.
Healthy takes a lot of layers. Mycroft Holmes was a scary yet resourceful hand at getting Sherlock through rehab, after the initial hospitalization. Lestrade was a periodical visit to the young man who now looked more groomed, stable, normal – apart from the wild curls, but they fit with the personality, rapidly returning to scanty, arrogant, distancing from the world again. Greg didn't expect to transform Sherlock into the nine-till-four worker and a few pints on Saturday afternoons. But what he saw in the rehab clinic was a man being set up to live a normal life, who would fail rapidly as normal could not appeal to him. And Greg felt like he was losing the battle to save that life that he had held on his arms, shivering and breaking, in a crack den. That is, until the day that, not wishing to miss his visitation hours for another weekly verbal abuse session, Greg arrived with a few case files under his arm, straight from overtime at work. And a spark of curiosity and interest got lit in Sherlock's enigmatic greenish eyes.
Greg took a gamble. He could get sacked for it. He told Sherlock about the case he had just solved in three weeks. Sherlock solved it in three minutes, without even looking at the crime scene pictures, where the inspector had found the vital clue. Yes, there was definitely an interest, and a gift in the lost young man. Like he had lived his entire life getting himself prepared for this. Could he become a forensic, or a Yarder? Greg was unsure, and wouldn't press the recuperating younger man. So he just showed Sherlock another file for now.
"And why are you doing this, inspector?"
Suspicion, reserve, curiosity. Engagement still.
"My team can't solve it, thought it could pass the time."
Humour, concealing the awkward location where the two reunited shouting at them as a badly kept secret.
"They're idiots and you need me", Sherlock had drawled, countering the keen light in his eyes.
Lestrade had defended his team, he always did so. But when pressed by the impatient and rude consulting detective, Greg would always admit "I need you, god help me, I do". Perhaps it was honesty, perhaps it was code. He very well knew Sherlock didn't abide by emotions, and the inspector was too much of a bloke for mushy speeches anyway.
And now, yet again, Greg Lestrade needed Sherlock, in a very different way than before.
Sherlock wouldn't say No.
.
Deceptive hope still points towards a better outcome. And therein lies both its strength and its potential to harm.
DI Greg Lestrade is a seasoned Yarder, he knows this is bad. There are no two ways about it. He's got himself in a bad situation. Now he can only hope Sherlock notices he's been abducted, taken away, smuggled like a turkey hastily stuffed in a bag in a grab and run theft.
Like the turkey snatched from Hackney last week (a pet turkey, it transpired, who keeps a pet turkey in London?), the inspector too may be in a hot stew now. He's got his wrists and ankles bound, a possible concussion, and some warm, sticky blood is staining his shirt and pooling over his trousers as he hyperventilates trying to suppress the stabbing pain shooting inside him.
Hoping Sherlock notices he's not there is plain silly, he knows the two of them share a history, but it's normally Greg chasing up the younger man; rarely the other way around, and only as there is imminent danger whilst confronting a suspect.
Greg might get the call for backup from John, just as the two storm inside this location – abandoned train carriage? – with the Curfew Killer on their tow.
Sherlock might even praise the inspector for getting there first for once, in his calculated indifference.
And Greg will try to see the humour beyond the blatant rudeness, try to believe in the socially deficient genius as a caring person.
Who's Greg kidding? He now shifts hopes to John, asking him to share a pint when John needs to get some air, preferably where Sherlock will never consider to follow him, and John noticing Greg's gone.
There's the ex-wife, who has the kids this weekend, she won't be in a hurry to call, and the children are too used to a dual family life to reach out before next weekend.
There's the squad. They'll think he may have caught the virus, so they'll ring his discarded phone, long before dropping by at his front door, even longer until they actually set up a search for the missing inspector.
There are friends and acquaintances, neighbours and strangers, but ever more in a "socially distanced" world, people have regressed in their social ways, isolating themselves in their own lives, their own troubles.
Greg doesn't quite have enough time for a "distanced" network of connections to come find him.
Greg has been stabbed. He's bleeding to death in an abandoned railway carriage on a disused track off some shanty part of town.
He lays back his head against the cold metal door and despairs.
.
TBC
