As they waited some way off from the poor imitation of an operating room in what might be a simple living-room, Greg kept an eye on the doctor patching up John. At the very least, the man looked like he knew what he was doing: he had the right instruments and was working fast, efficiently, his hands steady. Some of the tension eased from his shoulders at the sight, which is when Sherlock chose to pounce.
"What is he, Lestrade? How could you keep this from me? It's… it's mind blowing! And believe me, I'm not saying that lightly." Sherlock loomed over him, crowding him, demanding.
There was no way Sherlock, of all people, was going to let this go. Once he had a mystery in the palm of his hand, he had to solve it, take it apart and put it back together again once it made sense. Until then, he wouldn't relent, not for anything: food, sleep, hygiene, common sense… Nothing. But he would have to, just this once.
"A promise," Greg said.
"What?"
"Promise me you will never tell anyone about this. No one. Under any circumstance. Never."
Greg nodded to himself, satisfied his demand left absolutely no loopholes Sherlock could exploit.
"But it's the most interesting case ever! It's a ten. It's more than a ten! Why would you keep it from me? From the world?"
"Because it's not a case, Sherlock. You saw him: he's a person! Can you imagine what would become of him if this got out, if even just your brother knew…"
"Baskerville," Sherlock finished, his enthusiasm apparently dimmed at the memory of the military facility he had broken into.
Greg nodded. Mycroft had sent him there after his wayward little brother, "to keep an eye on him", and he remembered the place just as well as Sherlock. God… their experiments. They'd be very interested indeed in such a unique specimen as John. They'd probably open him up, cut him into pieces to see how he ticked, how they could use him, replicate him. Greg shivered at the memory of the Hound, seeing John in its place.
"I won't," Sherlock said. "I promise."
Greg nodded, glanced at the doctor who was finishing up his work by turning his wolf into a gauze-mummy.
"Not here. Meet me at my place."
Sherlock arched an eyebrow.
"You brother is always spying on you. Make sure he doesn't. I don't want him wondering what's so interesting about my place all of a sudden and find. him ferreting about."
Thankfully, Sherlock didn't argue the point and left before him. Maybe he was being paranoid, but he was not putting John in any more danger. He'd promised to take care of him and he got him shot instead. He wouldn't fail him again.
Greg was exhausted by the time he made it home, but he carefully laid his wolf on the sofa and made sure he hadn't pulled his stitches, but it seemed Sherlock's shady doctor actually knew his stuff. Speaking of the devil, Sherlock entered through the kitchen, as quiet as a ghost. Greg hoped he had picked the lock responsibly. He didn't fancy having to pay a locksmith first thing tomorrow because the drama queen wanted to make an entrance.
"Any change?"
"No. Just sleeping it off. It's not unusual when he transforms. It wears him out."
"From the beginning, then," Sherlock ordered and sat next to them. A promise was a promise, so Greg told him how he met the wolf, how he went back for him on a hunch, how he was acting strangely and how he confronted him about his true nature.
"I think he's an idiot," was Sherlock's only contribution up to that point. "He could have just… licked himself or whatever it is dogs do, and you would never have known."
"What if he wanted me to know? I mean, come on, he was drinking my tea, sitting in my chair… that's not very canine behaviour."
"Still, it was quite a gamble. Lucky for him, you're an idiot too."
"Oi!"
Sherlock grinned at him and it looked genuine. Greg was eighty percent sure it was genuine, which meant he was teasing him? Sherlock Holmes wouldn't do something as "pedestrian" as that, but the man in front of him looked nothing like the hardened consulting detective he brought on crime scene and more like the kid he got off the streets and who was high as… shit!
"Sherlock," Greg said sternly and stood in front of him so he wouldn't try to run. "Did you come here straight from the doctor's?"
"No, I made a very public appearance at St Barts," he said, showing off a stethoscope that had been half buried under the great collar of his belstaff. "To lose my brother's tail on me, like we discussed. What's wrong?"
"Get up," Greg sighed.
"Why?" Sherlock asked and shrank in on himself in a very suspicious manner that reminded him of bad times in the past.
"I'm patting you down. Come on, up you get."
"You're being ridiculous," Sherlock scoffed but stood, arms raised while Greg started going through his many pocket. "Just because there were drugs there doesn't mean I took some. There are drugs on every street corner, you might as well pat me down everytime we see each other."
Greg ignored his rant and checked his sock elastics, his belt and his shirt collar. He knew all of Sherlock's tricks when it came to hiding drugs, but it appeared he was clean. His eyes looked clear too, focused, so what was with the jolly attitude?
"Satisfied?" Sherlock huffed and dropped back in his seat.
Greg only grunted, not wanting to give Sherlock the satisfaction of being right. He got that too often already.
"Why would I need drugs when I have this?" he added, his eyes riveted on the wolf's sleeping form.
A shudder ran through him at the manic gleam he saw there. The same he had for locked room mysteries, serial murders and any other deaths by unconventional methods. It was far from reassuring.
"I feel like I need to remind you he's a person, not one of your science experiments."
Sherlock waved off his concern, took off his coat and adjusted the stolen stethoscope in his ears. Playing doctor, then. Seeing no harm in that, Greg let him examine John, his clinical eyes dancing over the prone form the way it did over dead bodies at crime scene. He inspected his fur, paws, ears, teeth, pulse, wound… Nothing was left unchecked and Greg was surprised none of it woke the wolf. The examination came to a stop and Sherlock sat back, fingers crossed under his chin in contemplation.
"Well?" Greg prompted, gliding his fingers absent-mindedly through the silky fur. "What can you tell?"
"A lot, not that it will help. It… He shows all the characteristics of being a canis lupus, a grey wolf, but twice the average size and weight, a golden coat is not that unusual in such specimens, but he seems to be greying prematurely given his approximate human age-"
Sherlock stopped and bit his bottom lip, hesitant, something Greg had hardly ever seen before.
"His heartbeat is that of a wolf. Lucky for him, he was turned into a large canine breed so the difference in heartbeat is only about 20%, but I think it's aging him faster than he would as a man. If he stays much longer in this form…" Sherlock did not need to finish his sentence.
"But he can't stay in his human form. He told me he can only hold it for few minutes at a time, and he didn't look well while he was."
"We have to get his story out of him. All of it."
"Not now!" Greg protested.
John had just been shot for Pete's sake. Sherlock had never been very good with assessing a witness' health, mental or physical, but this was a new low. Sherlock growled at the rebuttal, but didn't insist.
"Give me your laptop, I'll do some research in the meanwhile."
Greg didn't hesitate. If anyone could help John, it was Sherlock, so he handed over his old laptop, not bothering to give him the password. He knew better.
He must have fallen asleep, lulled by his wolf's slow steady breaths and warm fur. It had been just over two hours since he'd left Sherlock to his research judging by the clock on the mantelpiece, an ugly thing his ex wife had left behind but that he'd come to like as a companion of misfortune. Sherlock was still typing away, pausing as he read, typing some more, the cycle rep aging itself like a well oiled machine. He didn't even react when Greg stood and stretched. He checked how John was doing, but there was no notable change. He could do with some tea though.
"Tea?" he asked, unsure how to interpret Sherlock's answering grunt.
He made him a cup anyway, with milk and sugar because he could use the extra calories. He chuckled at the unexpected domesticity. He never thought he'd be having Sherlock over and that he'd be behaving himself. If Mycroft was spying on them, he must have the wrong idea entirely.
Sherlock did, in fact, want tea. He snatched the cup right out of his hand and downed half of it like a barbarian even though it was scalding hot. Greg sat to enjoy his and was greeted by a whine. John was blinking sleep out of his blue eyes, his tongue lazily lolling out.
"Tea? I can go make you a bowl if you want?"
The wolf pivoted instead towards him and lapped the hot beverage right out of his cup.
"And I thought Sherlock was the rude one," he muttered.
"John," Sherlock said, making the wolf's whole body tense up.
"Sherlock!" Greg admonished. "He doesn't know you know."
"Well, now he does. Can we get on with it or do we really have to waste time with idle chit-chat? It's not like every heartbeat counts," Sherlock finished snidely.
Damn him. Greg hated that he was always right. Why did he even bother trying to argue with him? He stopped trying to stay in between him and Sherlock. The man was stubborn enough to just push him out of the way.
"John," Sherlock said, addressing the wolf in a strangely formal way that had John snap his head up towards the consulting detective, ramrod straight and still, looking every bit the soldier standing at attention and awaiting orders.
"Do you think you can transform? I need more data, specifically on the day you were changed into a wolf for the first time."
The wolf shifted again, closed his eyes and then bobbed his head in that slow up and down movement.
"Are you sure? It might affect the wound and cause you more pain," Greg warned.
John looked at him, his sea-blue eyes so expressive as to be unnerving, but he could read the determination there, plain as day. One thing he knew through wolf-John was that he was as stubborn as a rock.
"Alright, you're best judge."
The wolf shape began to shift, grow, smoothen into pale expanses of skin. Greg belatedly pulled the blanket from the back of the sofa to throw it over John's naked form, grimacing in sympathy when the bandage ripped free and fell to the floor. The stitches seemed to hold however, the bullet wound itself too small to be impacted by the stretch of muscles or bone as they shifted.
Sherlock nodded as if confirming something by seeing him in human form.
"You disappeared sometime between the 9th and 22nd of february 2006 while you were on leave. What happened?"
"Visited Koriko's mother on my leave. Was one of my men, pushed me out of the way of a bullet," John's voice was gruff from disuse, so he paused to sip some water from the glass Greg handed him, before hurriedly continuing. "Blamed me for not saving him, letting him die… She did something, drugged me, took my dogtags and next thing I know, I'm a fucking wolf. In the middle of London. She's… a sort of witch I think." John grunted, sweat dripping down his face. "Voodoo or something like that. I never believed Koriko when he talked about it, thought it was folklore, you know, just stories to scare us..."
Then, just like the last time, he suddenly folded in two and shifted back into a wolf, except this time he was panting and whining, licking at his wound.
Greg shushed him and pushed his large nose out of the way so he could clean the wound and dress it again. Confident it would hold for the night, he petted him back to sleep.
After a while, he noticed Sherlock looking at him strangely.
"What?"
"You know that's a man, right? It's not really a dog, or a giant wolf as the case may be."
Greg shrugged.
"He's been alone long enough," is all he said, but he enjoyed the contact and company as much as John seemed to, if not more.
But John was admittedly a hostage of his condition. If he had not been cursed, would there ever have been a situation where he and John would have met? Where John would have agreed to come live with him? Would he even have wanted a roommate for that matter?
Doubtful.
Which would have been a shame since he was so much better for having John in his life. Greg worried his bottom lip. What if John left as soon as Sherlock uncursed him? Because if anyone could, it would be Sherlock. Or worse: what if he couldn't stand living with human-John? He would have done the right thing by helping him, but he would lose his only companion in the process. It was a moot point anyway, because Greg couldn't very well not do the right thing and wish him to remain cursed. If he was that desperate, he might as well go to an animal shelter and adopt all the dogs. Well… he might very well do that actually, now that he thought about it. He enjoyed having a canine companion on those rare occasions John went out of his way to act like a real dog.
"Stop thinking so loudly. It's distracting."
Greg rolled his eyes at Sherlock. How his thoughts could be loud when Sherlock was the one clacking away on his keyboard like a tap dancer on steroids was anyone's guess. It's only by next morning he realizes that the tap tap tap lulled him to sleep, when he wakes up on the couch with a crick in his neck and Sherlock staring unblinkingly at the screen of his phone. His laptop's batteries must have died hours ago, no doubt.
After a few days, once John was strong enough to walk around without whining pitifully every few steps, they visited Koriko's last place of residence where he lived with his mother. John didn't remember the way but it was easy enough for Sherlock to find. Unfortunately, he also found out Koriko's mother had died a couple of years back and that the rickety old house just outside of London has remained empty ever since. Greg didn't even know what they came all the way out here for, but it wouldn't be the first time he blindly followed Sherlock's lead. Hopefully, he'd solve this voodoo mess the same way he solved murders.
Sherlock had already picked the ancient lock and pushed the door open. Greg wasn't prone to flights of fantasy, but he'd never heard a door creak in such an ominous way before, and the dark entrance looked like the mouth of some evil creature about to swallow him whole.
John seemed reluctant too, his head bowed, but it was probably because of his memories of the place. Greg petted his fur as he walked close to him.
"It'll be fine," he said, although he wasn't sure if he was trying to convince himself or John.
His wolf slunk past him but flinched back with a yelp as soon as his nose reached the doorway. Greg immediately checked on him, finding him only a bit dazed. Sherlock had gone in without trouble however and he worried for the consulting idiot who never waited for his backup to back him up.
"Sherlock!" he hollered towards the entrance.
Had the house eaten him? If werewolves were a thing, he wasn't going to be blind to men-eating houses.
"What?" Sherlock snapped as his head reappeared from the inside gloom.
"I think John can't go in."
Sherlock glanced at the wolf who was now rubbing his muzzle with one of his large paws.
"I see. I read something about that… yes… should be wood… didn't expect it to still be working… aha!"
Sherlock stopped his unintelligible mutterings and weird shuffle-dance on the house porch when he plucked something hanging from one of the rafters nears the front door. It didn't look like much: twigs tied together with yarn if he had to guess. Sherlock dropped it on the ground and stepped on it until it was a little pile of nothing that he kicked away from the porch.
"That should do it," Sherlock said confidently.
"Are you sure? It sounded painful when John tried to walk in the first time."
"As sure as a web page's content."
Greg scowled. That sounded like a resounding no.
"It's your call," Greg told John with a shrug. "I'll try first if you want."
He couldn't do much else for him. He actually felt utterly useless in this endeavour, and suspected Sherlock had only brought him along on the off chance he needed to flash his badge for trespassing or something. The doorway still looked like a malevolent mouth to the pits of hell but he walked right through it so as to reassure John.
"See. It's fine. Well… not fine, exactly. It kinda stinks in here."
The wolf huffed and slowly walked back to the doorway, lifting a paw to the entrance. Greg guessed he didn't want to receive another shock to the nose if he could help it. The paw passed the threshold without problem and soon, the whole wolf was through. Greg could swear he'd heard Sherlock mumble he hadn't thought it would really work. Greg was so going to find a reason to do a drugs bust at his place again very soon and make sure to invite Sally and Anderson to "help".
The abandoned house was dark. It's only when he stubbed his toe on a wonky floorboard that he realized he should have brought torchlights.
Sherlock somehow navigated without walking into walls, the wanker, and he supposed John could see in the dark, which was kind of cool and something he might miss if they made him human again. Greg was just kicking dust around. He didn't even know what they were looking for. Maybe Sherlock did and even that was a stretch.
It was John who found it in the end. A construction very similar to the twig pile that had been hanged in the entrance. When they took it outside for a better view, the thing was much larger and the off-white things were not made of wood but teeny tiny bones. Not human, thank God. Canine according to Sherlock and for someone who knew so little about dogs before meeting John, he sure seemed confident of this claim. He must have done a ton of reading up on voodoo and dogs while they waited for John to recover. The
… thing, whatever it was, also has golden locks weaved around it, and metal peaking out here and there. To be honest, it looked both innocuous and terrifying. He wondered if Sherlock was going to step in this one too.
"Best way would be to find another witch to undo this juju," the consulting sorcerer explained. "But it's not like they're in the phonebook, and chances are they'd refuse to help us. It's bad form, from what I read."
After debating whether to throw it in a fire or have it exorcised by a Catholic priest, they decided to simply unwrap the thing a little at a time. Literally unravelling the juju, while keeping an eye on John. The process didn't seem to affect John at all. He was still a wolf, sitting patiently on his haunches while he stared at them unblinkingly. At least, he wasn't suffering from the dismantling, but maybe they were making the curse permanent… they were way out of their depth. When Sherlock was finished, all he had left in his hands were military dogtags.
He cocked his head at John.
"Maybe if you try shifting yourself?"
John did on the spot. Did neither of them care about their surroundings at all? Greg cursed when John was already half transformed and belatedly wrapped his overcoat around him. He glanced around, but the area was deserted. Letting out a breath, he enquired after John.
"It's different. I didn't have to fight it. I don't… I don't feel it coming back, pushing me back in the wolf."
Sherlock clapped his hands in satisfaction, the dogtags jingling from his long fingers.
"Can I?" John asked, extending a hand towards them.
Sherlock hesitated, but gave them back, staring intently. Greg held his breath once more, but nothing happened.
"So it's really over?" John asked, echoing his own thoughts.
"Can you still become a wolf?" Sherlock countered.
John blinked. His dogtags had disappeared in the sleeves of his overcoat which was much too big on him.
"I don't know. I've always had to. I never wanted to before. Still don't, to be honest."
Sherlock hummed.
"You're not going to experiment on him," Greg warned.
"Not now, of course. I'm not an idiot. He needs to rest first for the results to be conclusive."
John laughed, surprising them both.
"Sorry, it's just… You're taking it so well, and… Well, thank you, the both of you. If you hadn't been there, I would still-"
Greg patted his back, feeling a bit too choked up to speak right now, not that he'd admit it to anyone.
"If I can repay you through experiments, that's okay by me," John added, to Sherlock's delight. Poor bloke had no idea what he'd just gotten himself into. Then, he turned towards him. "I don't even know how to repay you."
"It's my job. You don't need to repay me."
John's smile told him that was not an acceptable answer, but he shrugged it off and noticed John shiver. For someone who had gotten used to a nice fur coat, he was technically starkers now.
"Right," Greg said. "Let's get you back home."
John bit his bottom lip, looking a bit lost but he followed them to his car and growled at Sherlock when he tried stealing his seat on the passenger side before apologizing profusely.
"Hey," Greg said. "If growling works on Sherlock, I might have to give it a try too."
John gave him that shy some again and relaxed. Okay, this might just work out okay in the end… which is his place, him and John… and Sherlock.
"Why are you still here again?" Greg asked him from the kitchen.
He was making more food than he had ever had to before and he didn't even mind.
"I need to supervise the subject to collect any new data."
"That'll be me," John said as he pushed passed Sherlock. "Can I help you with dinner? Sherlock said he wants to measure me. Every part of me. And I'll do anything to get out of that. You sure he's not some kind of perv?"
Greg hadn't laughed that hard in years. Yep. Everything was going to be fine.
