It was hard fitting this whole story into two parts. In fact an epilogue will be needed so hang on for that. I had to cut a lot of things out of this chapter but I hope it still meets your expectations. Enjoy!
Sherlock
He had to find John. It was the only thing on his mind.
His options were limited, maybe if he'd accepted Lestrade's help they could have traced the call. Of course he didn't need his help.
There was a constant pang of worry stabbing at his insides, John's screams were replaying over and over again in his head.
For every injury they cause him...The detective thought furiously, I will remove one of their limbs.
Sherlock shook his head and shoved his phone into his pocket. Focus. Emotion will not help John. He needed to throw off all this anger, worry, and guilt so he could focus on saving the doctor. Still he couldn't help but feel that the whole situation was his fault. He finished a case and John became the target. It was the liability of caring about someone too much.
Caring...
Sherlock filed the thought away for later as he began to plot. He would have to locate a trafficking center, find out where they were selling off those unlucky enough to be captured. If he could get into the organization then he could find his way to the ostentatiously named leader.
His mind raced with plans.
Disguise myself as homeless. The homeless are excellent targets, no one to miss them.
He turned and ran back to Baker Street, pushing his exhausted body because there was no time. There was no high, no thrill, involved in this case to keep him going.
He got back to the flat, dragging in bits of snow with his shoes. No doubt Mrs. Hudson would have his head. He tried to ignore the battered living room, if he pretended the overturned furniture and the shattered lamp were just the usual clutter...
He paused for a moment. Laying, thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, was one of John's jumpers. Sherlock's eyes rested on the familiar sight, and his pale fingers ran over the soft material. He lifted it to his nose and breathed in John's scent.
"I'll find you..."
Sherlock
If anyone saw the shambling and tattered figure walking along the street, the one that donned a bulky jacket a size too big and some messy looking stubble, not a one would suspect it was actually the famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes in disguise. He was good at hiding who he was, sometimes he'd come home from a case still in his makeup and nearly give John a heartattack just for the fun of it.
He'd been walking this section of street for awhile now, the first sign of dawn had yet to show so it was still dark out. Dark enough to steal someone away without being seen. Sherlock walked down the most dangerous alleys and passed by the gathering places of criminals, playing himself as bait. If he kept at it long enough...
"Hey you."
Sherlock turned, a rough looking man holding a cigarette was gesturing to him. He shuffled over and the man looked around for a bit before talking again.
"You look like you could use some work, mate." The man said in a low growl.
"You got work?" Sherlock disguised his normally eloquent speech behind a more casual accent. No need to tip the man off to his real identity.
"Yeah, mate. Good work. You interested?" The man let out a puff of smoke into Sherlock's face, not that the nicotine addict minded.
"Why not? What do I need to do?" Sherlock shrugged.
"Me and my boys, we'll be around in a few minutes. We can take you to where you'll work." The man nodded. "Just wait here, I'll go get 'em. Wait here, mate." The man dropped his cigarette and crushed it underfoot, working ash into the gritty snow. Then he turned and left to gather his associates.
Sherlock shifted from side to side, impatient to get it over with. He was wasting too much time, by this point they'd be drugging John and selling him to the highest bidder. With any luck Encantado would be saving him for a special buyer, that could give Sherlock some extra time to find the doctor. Once John had been sold it would make it that much harder to find him.
"Hey, mate." The gruff voice came again, and Sherlock prepared for transport.
He was struck in the back of the head with something heavy and solid, and everything went black.
Sherlock
It wasn't the first time the consulting detective had woken up in the back of a van. He wasn't planning on doing it again.
He was blindfolded, but he could hear just enough of the action on the streets to tell where he was. He tried moving his hands and found they were bound with rope.
Child's play. He smirked and let the knife he'd been concealing in his sleeve drop into his hands.
Once he was free he tore off the blindfold and blinked in the darkness of his surroundings. There was enough of a barrier between the back of the van and the driver's seat, but Sherlock could hear the driver and his passenger muttering to each other through the two fenced off windows. There were two other people in with him, a man and a young girl. The man was shivering in some sort of panic attack whereas the girl lay against the floor. They hadn't bothered to tie or blindfold her, and one look at her eyes told Sherlock why. She was under the effects of heavy drugs, no doubt she'd been passed through the circuit for at least a year. Sherlock felt disgust rising up in him, but he didn't have time for these two. He'd have to save them by taking down Encantado.
He slid to the back of the van, making minimal noise so as not to alert the driver just yet. He would stay here until they reached their destination.
Finally the van came to a stop and the kidnappers slid out of their seats complaining about the cold as casually as two non-criminals might.
Sherlock balled his hand into a fist and grabbed the rope they'd used to tie him with in the other. The doors opened and Sherlock came face to face with the man that had approached him earlier, he landed a good punch to his nose and another to the stomach before the second man ran to subdue him. He wrapped the rope around his neck until the man passed out from oxygen deprivation, by this point the first kidnapper was recovering from his blow to the face.
Sherlock jumped out of the van and onto the man's chest, the kidnapper's head hit the ground with a sickening crack. He moaned and was out cold like his partner.
Sherlock took a step forward, then looked back. Sighing he climbed back into the van and used his knife to free the other man.
"Where the hell am I?" The man screamed, and Sherlock covered his mouth with a hand.
"Try not to alert everyone in the surrounding area and listen if you have the brain capacity for that." He sighed. "Take that girl there and go find help. The hospital would be good. Now run."
Then the detective jumped out of the van to see where he'd ended up.
They were parked outside a nondescript building, most likely at the back door. The shipments would come through here and the buyers would come in through the front door.
Of course there was no guarantee...no chance that John was here. This was just the first step. He had to find someone higher ranking then the fools he'd just laid out, someone who would know their boss's location.
Sherlock picked the lock on the door and slid inside without a problem. The hallway was dark and the whole place smelled like smoke and booze.
The hallway was lined with doors, and at the end of the hallway Sherlock could hear voices. Out of curiosity, Sherlock opened one of the doors and instantly wished he hadn't. He'd seen it before of course, but even the hardened detective that some suspected of being an emotionless machine could still be disturbed by the monsters he hunted. In each room was a girl tied down to the bed, her eyes glassy with drugs and her sheets stained with vomit and various other bodily fluids that weren't from her. Sherlock felt new rage, if they'd done this to John there would be no place they could hide.
He ran ahead to the room at the end of the hallway. He realized that the voices were those of bidders screaming prices.
He crept in through the doors and blended in to the back of the crowd. The room was large, packed with shady characters of all sorts: gangsters, general perverts, politicians, crime syndicate leaders and more. The whole room was a who's who of crime. Up on a stage in front were two men, one of them handling bids and the other holding a scantly clad woman wearing a dazed expression and a pair of zip tie restraints.
"Sold!" The man yelled and a white collar criminal pushed his way past thieves and muggers to claim his new prize. Sherlock eyed up the room, searching for his target.
"Next up. Male, white, good build. You can use him for whatever you like for an hour only. Personally I'd go beat him up a bit, that's how I spent my lunch break. Bids start at six hundred twenty five."
Sherlock's eyes drifted up to the stage and he froze. The odds were phenomenal, impossible even.
He was beat up, one eye swollen and various cuts visible on the bare chest and on his face.
John.
John
After he'd heard the phone call and been stabbed by both a knife and a needle, the rest of John's captivity was fuzzy and his memory untrustworthy. He had dim flashes of being dragged around to an empty room, strangers coming in and beating him while he was tied up.
There were brief moments of clarity between doses, and right now standing on the stage in front of the crowd of leering criminals he could feel his senses kicking back in. He was barely even standing, mostly held upright by one of his captors.
Any other man would have been scared, but Captain John Watson was mostly furious.
There was no reason to be scared at all really, because Sherlock was coming. Sherlock would save him.
The entire time he had been subject to various tortures, Sherlock had been the only thing on his mind. He remembered being covered in bombs and used as Moriarty's bargaining tool, and how Sherlock had saved him and looked at him with concern in his eyes. He thought about the man's amazing abilities, and he knew he was getting out of here alive. Sherlock would make sure of it.
He thought of Sherlock so often that when he saw the pale man making his way to the stage, at first he thought it was a hallucination brought on by his drug addled mind.
The hallucination of Sherlock was bidding on him, screaming ludicrous amounts of cash. John actually chuckled thinking about how Sherlock couldn't even pay his rent on time. Apparently no one else was willing to outbid him because someone shouted 'sold' and suddenly John was being dragged off to his familiar torture chamber.
Five minutes after he'd been tied up and left in the room, the man that John was beginning to believe actually was Sherlock entered the room.
"John!" He chocked and fell to his knees to free the doctor. Worrying hands ran over cuts and bruises with a tenderness that John had forgotten.
That's when three men entered the room and pressed a gun to the back of Sherlock's head.
Sherlock raised his hands, his face furious and embarrassed by the defeat. The two other men grabbed Sherlock's hands while the third kept his gun leveled at his head. Another man entered the room, and when he spoke John recognized the voice that had been talking when he first arrived.
The man was wearing a fine suit, and his dark features were finished off with a pair of dark narrow eyes.
"I told you it was hopeless." He sighed. "Didn't I tell you you'd only cause trouble for your friend if you tried to follow me?"
Sherlock snarled like a wild animal and the men tightened their hold on his wrists.
"Knock him out. Take him to my room. When he wakes up he can watch the good doctor die." The kidnapper sighed casually, looking at his nails.
The man with the gun slammed his weapon into Sherlock's head, the detective crumpled. Unconscious, unknown to John, for the second time that day.
Then they dragged the detective out of the room, leaving John screaming Sherlock's name after them.
Sherlock
Sherlock awoke in a lavish office, an glaringly opposite room compared to anything else in the shabby building. Sitting before him with his feet up on the desk was Encantado. The tan man was aiming a gun at Sherlock with casual almost lazy attitude.
"You up yet?" He yawned. "It's time to watch Dr. Watson die."
Sherlock looked around the room using his peripheral vision. No other men. Just the two of them.
"Where is he?" Sherlock growled, meanwhile slipping the knife that had been so helpful to him all day into his hand. Normally he never used this sort of thing against a person, but this was a special case.
"He'll be in in a moment." The kidnapper smirked. "So clever, clever enough to shut down a whole branch of my finest and yet here you are with a big bruise on the back of your head and no way out."
"I wouldn't say there's no way out." Sherlock said slowly.
"There's nothing that says 'no way out' quite like a gun." The kidnapper remained him, dangling the weapon in front of him.
"I still have one last chance." Sherlock sighed, closing his eyes.
At that moment one of the men ran into the room, frantic. His eyes landed on his boss and he began yelling from where he stood in the doorway.
"Boss there's-"
"I thought I told you bitches not to bother me!" Encantado shouted, leaping up from the desk and poking his subordinate in the chest with a stiff finger.
"Boss, it's the Yard! They've found us!" The man yelled, before abandoning his leader in favor of running from arrest.
"Shit." Encantado swore, leaning out of the door to see if it was true. While he was distracted, Sherlock grabbed him from behind and pulled him back around. The gun went off and the detective was aware of some pain in his arm as the bullet grazed him.
Disarming the surprised man was easy enough, then Sherlock shut the door with a well aimed kick and dragged the man back a few steps.
"I have a very good memory." He hissed, drawing the knife out of his pocket. "I saw what happened to my friend, John, and I plan on making you a mirror image."
"Fuck off." The kidnapper choked.
"I once dropped a man out a window for hurting my landlady. What you did was much worse."
John
When Sherlock had bent down to attempt to untie John, he'd heard the men making their way towards the room. That was when he slipped his mobile into John's hand and had the doctor conceal it long enough to send for help.
John pawed at the screen with numb fingers, somehow being able to laugh at all the ignored messages from Lestrade. No doubt Sherlock was breaking numerous laws at the moment, and all for him.
He better not risk a call, someone could hear him talking. So instead he sent a text, quickly telling Lestrade of their location.
When he'd finished he dropped the phone and lay back against the wall. Still half in a daze, it was easy to fall asleep then and there.
The crazy bastard. He really did come for me.
Sherlock
"Just once, could I pick up a suspect without them being in dire need of medical help?"
Irritated, was not a word one would used to describe Greg Lestrade. Furious, maybe, or perhaps bloody pissed off. He was standing in the doorway while his men swept the building for stragglers and emergency teams evacuated the prisoners to hospitals. Meanwhile he was busy lecturing Sherlock, which was not in his job description when he signed on.
The detective, who was bleeding from a minor gunshot wound on his arm, hardly gave Lestrade the time of day. In fact he tried to push past him through the door.
"Now hang on!" Lestrade pulled the man back. "Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm going to go rescue John." Sherlock sighed, his voice tired as if he had no energy for sarcasm and wit. He just wanted to take John somewhere safe. "As I intended to do from the start."
Lestrade let go, shaking his head. "Yeah, alright. Take him to one of the ambulances, okay?"
Sherlock nodded, running off in search of the room where he'd seen John earlier. It took him a few tries but even weary and dizzy from being unconscious twice in the same day, the world famous detective still had it.
He saw John, laying against the wall breathing laboriously. Sherlock removed the oversized coat that had been part of his disguise, and wrapped the doctor in it. Then showing a great show of strength for someone so pale and thin, he lifted the man into his arms and carried him past the police and outside to the ambulance.