~xXx~
Construction and several bothersome detours coupled with a lackluster cabbie put Sherlock in front of 4576 Anlaby Rd. at precisely 7:13. He was late. Sherlock hated being late.
Pushing his frustration down, the detective made his way towards a rundown paper mill. It was the only building on the block, and—inconveniently—it was one that he recognized.
Look, I made a mistake. I sent something to Sherlock for safe keeping and now I need it back, so I need your help.
Sherlock pulled open the heavy iron door, listening as the metallic sound bounced across the maze of aluminium and cement. He paused after his first step over the threshold, allowing the sound of his entrance to die around him. He listened intently, his senses honing in on finding another presence in the large room. Fortunately enough, there was nothing. He expected that, as before, Moriarty's henchman had dumped the body and hightailed it back to the wretched hole from whence he came. Either that or he was sitting with his sniper rifle in hand, his crosshairs hovering just over Sherlock's heart.
Deciding that neither scenario really pertained to his main goal, Sherlock began making his way farther into the mill. The smell was unwaveringly putrid—even worse now that the humidity of summer held the stench in the air like a thick cloud. Why Irene would've chosen to bring John here, of all places, was beyond him. Maybe because it was so unlike her. Or maybe it was because she'd truly had nowhere else to go.
You flirted with Sherlock Holmes?
At him. He never replies.
No, Sherlock always replies. To everything. He's Mr. Punchline. He will outlive God trying to have the last word.
Sherlock began making his way up a metal staircase, his feet subconsciously drawing him to the very spot where he'd first heard the two conversing. Statistically he knew it was a horrible place to start. The building was quite large and there was an abundance of suitable rooms in which a body could be stashed, but something was telling him that he had to start there….at that place—in that hall. He'd heard something there that he hadn't quite worked through yet.
You jealous?
We're not a couple.
Yes you are. There. "I'm not dead. Let's have dinner."
He was standing now in the exact spot he had stood before, when he had first heard the sound of Irene's voice and thought his heart would burst through his chest. He was standing in the exact spot where he'd looked at the screen of his phone and reality had hit him across the face so hard that his head had spun. He'd heard the words, playing like a record heard through earmuffs, but he hadn't paid them any attention. Frowning, Sherlock continued forward and into the open space of the hall. This—he looked around—this was where John had been standing. And then he saw it. There on the floor, not ten feet away, was an arrow painted in blood.
Sherlock walked over to it, and as he drew near, the dim light gave way to another arrow. And another. The muscles in Sherlock's legs grew tense as he continued down the corridor, arrow after arrow passing beneath his feet as he wove through the seemingly endless maze of cement. His lungs burned as he drew in the rancid air and the space just beneath his ribs began to pulse with a stabbing pain, but he pushed through it.
The arrows came to an abrupt end just outside a white door, marked with a large red X. Taking a few moments to catch his breath, Sherlock stared at the two stark lines of blood. They were still quite vibrant, meaning that the liquid hadn't been exposed to oxygen for long. It had been painted under an hour ago. The lines were clean as well—obviously painted with a brush instead of fingers. Perhaps this puppet didn't like getting his hands dirty either.
Satisfied that he'd seen all he needed, Sherlock pushed the door open and slipped into the room. It was a small, barren space, with cement floors and a long rectangular window that let in a grey film of light. There was a broom closet in the left corner, also markedly barren. Finally, the detective let his eyes slip to the ground. What awaited him was not what he expected.
There were two bodies. Two. When there should've only been one.
Both were laid out exactly as Sylvia's had been: laying face up on a tarp with their limbs spread, and their eyes wide and staring. Sherlock shifted closer, his nerves twittering beneath his skin. The victims were two men this time—one Caucasian, and one Middle Eastern—both dressed in their country's respective military dress: Britain and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan or Iraq?
Sherlock shook himself, willing his mind to focus. He noticed a small piece of paper tacked to the Afghan man's jacket, fluttering like a feather in the still air. Sherlock swooped forward and ripped it off, his eyes running over the intimately familiar writing.
Ah, Sherlock. You remember how changeable I am, don't you? Don't worry, you'll still get that body I promised tomorrow, but these two really go best as a pair. Sort of a yin and yang thing—can't have one without the other. You'll understand soon.
Jim
Snorting, the detective stuffed the note into his pocket and bent his knees to hover over the Afghan man. He'd been shot in almost precisely the same place Sylvia had—left side of the chest, just beneath the fourth rib. Sherlock thumbed the bullet hole in his jacket thoughtfully. The shot had been fired from 500 metres, minimum. Moriarty's puppet was starting to show off now.
He was a slender sort of man, with gaunt hollow cheeks that were blanketed with a thick matted beard. After a few sweeps of his other features, the man's occupation wasn't difficult to identify. His hands still reeked of gunpowder and oil, and the wrinkles around his left eye were deeper and more prominent than that of the right, as was ought to happen after peering through a scope for extended periods of time. A sniper. A good one too, judging by his age—most snipers didn't stay alive long in the heat of combat. But why would Moriarty have his henchman travel all the way to Afghanistan just to shoot one of their snipers?
Finding nothing else of interest on the Afghan's body, Sherlock moved over to the Brit. The man was of average height and weight, with sandy brown hair and green eyes. It was immediately apparent that he hadn't been an ordinary foot soldier—a patch in the form of a red cross on his left sleeve marked him as a nurse. Same fatal gunshot wound. And for the first time, the detective found himself wondering why he placed the shot in the chest. After all, most snipers preferred a shot to the head when they could afford it, and this sniper obviously had the skill to achieve such a shot. So why the chest? Why risk his victim surviving? Shaking the questions away, Sherlock fingered the collar of the man's shirt and felt his fingers slide against a ribbed chain.
His brows furrowed as he pulled the man's dog tags out from under his shirt. This was an interesting turn—the fact that the puppet had left identification on this man and none of the others. He'd wanted Sherlock to know who he was.
He ran the pad of his thumb over the blood-smeared disc, pulling it close so that he could make out the inscription. Bill Murray. Sherlock frowned. Bill Murray—he knew that name. Where did he know that name from?
Met up with Bill Murray. Not the film star. He was the nurse who saved my life when I was shot. He's got married.
John's blog. He'd read the name in John's blog.
The dog tags fell from Sherlock's fingers as he sprang to his feet, his eyes darting frantically between the two men. Yin and yang. The man who killed, and the man who healed. The man who'd shot John, and the man who'd saved him.
But…how…?
Pockets. He'd forgotten to check the Afghan's trouser pockets. Sweeping forward, Sherlock pressed his hand into the man's left pocket. Nothing. Then the right, and he found his fingers sliding over the edge of folded paper. He pulled it out quickly and unfolded it. It was in Dari—a language Sherlock wasn't as familiar with as he would've liked—and the parchment was old and the ink was blurred and smeared from handling, but one thing was perfectly clear. There, marked in bold lettering in the bottom left corner was the letter 'M'.
This wasn't possible. This wasn't—
Sherlock started at the sound of a door opening and closing in the distance. Every muscle in his body froze, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as his ears strained to hear something in the following silence.
"Hello?" the soft voice of a man echoed.
Sherlock glanced around hurriedly, stuffing the Dari letter into his coat pocket. His first instinct was that Moriarty's sniper had returned, but he immediately cast the notion off. A sniper would've been more discreet. Maybe a homeless person then? It didn't really matter—he couldn't risk being seen next to two recently murdered corpses without a disguise. The sound of footsteps traveling up metal stairs rang down the hall. Sherlock glanced desperately at the window—not enough time to open it, much less figure out if there was a safe place to land below. His eyes whipped back over to the entryway. He couldn't risk venturing out into the open hall either. Only one option left then. As swiftly and silently as he could manage, Sherlock darted to the side, propelling himself towards the broom closet.
"Mycroft? Where are you?" the voice sounded again, just as Sherlock was about to pull the door shut.
His heart stopped. John?
"Mycroft!"
John was here? Why would John be here?
"Mycr—what the bloody hell?" There was a pause. "What the hell is the paint for? Couldn't you just—" but then John trailed off, most likely in a string of curses.
Paint. The arrows. But then that would lead him here. Sherlock's eyes snapped to the bodies. But he didn't have time—he didn't have time to move them! Blood racing, the detective wrapped his fingers around the steel handle and pulled the door shut, leaving the barest sliver of a crack through which he could peer.
The door to the room creaked open. "My…" John's voice cracked, "…croft." Silence seemed to engulf him, and Sherlock could somehow feel every atom in his body vibrating like an electric current. John moved forward. One step, then two. Or had it been three? The rhythm of his steps was off.
"Oh, God."
And finally Sherlock could see him. He seemed…smaller than before—the line of his shoulders hunched and drawn in, his bad leg held at a strange angle. But even so, just to see him there, real and alive and still breathing made Sherlock's chest ache.
John stumbled forward and fell to his knees, his hands hovering over Bill's feet. "This isn't happening. This isn't happening," he whispered, taking in shallow, uneven breaths. "You're dreaming, John. Wake up. Oh, God, please let me be dreaming."
Sherlock turned away—he couldn't stand to see that look on John's face anymore. Why would John be here? Why? Mycroft would never bring him to a place like this. So had the puppet led him here somehow—picked him up the way same Mycroft always did perhaps? Sherlock pushed the notion away, somehow unable to bear the thought of John being anywhere near one of Moriarty's deranged psychopath lackeys. But the image of John, wired up to the neck in Semtex, came upon him unbidden.
There was something very wrong about this. John. John was the connection. Obvious. But why?
Find out what it means.
The statement was too vague. What it meant to who? To Sherlock? To Moriarty? To John? There was no direction in the instruction. And Moriarty had done that on purpose—Sherlock knew he had. Yet even so….the letters…the letters were the key. And Sherlock knew what they meant. He knew…
Find out what it means.
"Hello?" John's shaken voice broke through the haze of Sherlock's mind. "Greg? Yeah, it's John." Sherlock turned back, and saw John with his mobile pressed to his ear. His hand was trembling, and his nails had been bitten back nearly past the skin. "Look, I—I found something. Someone." There was a stagnant pause, and John's other hand moved to pinch the bridge of his nose. "No. No, not him. His grave is fine. It's someone else—um—two someone else's. They've both been…shot." Another pause. "The abandoned paper mill on Anlaby. Right. Yes. Alright, see you." John hung up the phone and placed it back in his pocket. Then not a moment later, he collapsed forward, his forehead pressing against the cement and his fingers threading through his hair.
Sobs began to wrack him, deep and pained, and they seemed to cause the very walls to shudder. Sherlock couldn't say that he'd heard John ever cry before, and he certainly wished he couldn't hear it now. The sound of it made his chest tighten, as if he couldn't pull air into his lungs quite as easily as before. And in that moment he wanted nothing more to barge out of that closet and pull John to his feet and drag him back to their flat. Their warm, safe flat that smelled of burnt chemicals and tea and John. Sherlock inhaled deeply, but all he could smell was the sulfur dioxide used to bleach the paper. He felt suddenly and immediately sick.
Sherlock slid away from the door, farther back into the darkness of the closet, but he couldn't escape the sound of John's choked cries. It wasn't supposed to be like this. John was supposed to be spared this kind of agony—be free of the death and destruction that followed in Sherlock's wake. Yet here he was, kneeling at the feet of the man who had saved his life. Another friend lost.
To make matters worse, the detective had rendered himself utterly useless. All he could do was sit here and watch as John's pain consumed him. He wondered if this was what Irene had felt after she'd faked her death. He wondered if she had had to sit and watch people she loved writhe in agony, knowing there was nothing she could do.
Why don't we ever talk about her?
No. No no no no. This was not happening. He wasn't going to do this now.
It's alright, you know…to talk about the people you cared about after they're gone. I know…I know that you felt something for her, even if you don't know what that something was.
Sherlock pressed his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes, willing the thoughts away. They were whirring through his mind like a raging storm, threatening to upset the precarious balance of his calm. He couldn't do this—not here. Not with the sound of John's broken voice sliding through his ears and causing his bones to rattle. Not here. Not now.
"Sherlock," John sounded tired, "are you listening to me?"
Sherlock glanced up at him from his chair. Glowering, he drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his nightgown around him like a cocoon. "Of course I am, John. If I could turn off my hearing at will, I would've done it some time ago."
John gave one of his deep sighs—the kind that usually gave Sherlock a strange sort of pang in his stomach, but somehow the effect escaped him this time. "You realize that eventually we're going to have to discuss it."
"I realize nothing of the sort."
"Sherlock…it's been months since you last saw her, and you still mope around here like—"
"I do not mope." Sherlock snapped.
"Yes, you do, Sherlock. You mope." John shifted in his seat, gingerly rotating his cup of tea back and forth in its saucer. "And usually I don't mind it. I let you do your own thing, and sort out your issues in your own way, but this—this isn't healthy. You've lost weight, and you were already teetering on the edge of skeletal before. You barely sleep. Hell, it's like I've been living with a bloody ghost. You can't keep everything all bottled up inside like this."
Sherlock tore his gaze away from the other man, preferring instead to glare at the wall. "And what about Miss Adler do you suppose I'm keeping bottled up, John?" he asked petulantly. He didn't want to talk about this, and hated that John was insisting otherwise. He'd been avoiding this conversation for a list of very specific—and pointedly private—reasons, and the other man knew as much.
He was angry. It was one of the longest black moods he'd suffered in the past decade, and nothing he did seemed to satiate it. Music didn't help, his experiments were unfulfilling, and there hadn't been a decent case to speak of in weeks. Sherlock could feel his mind rotting away—a train charging full speed towards a solid brick wall. Something was wrong. He felt off balance, like either side of some inner equation was refusing to equiponderate. Irene was a part of it, he knew, but there was something more to it as well.
John's blog is HILARIOUS. I think he likes you more than I do. Let's have dinner.
If it had just been Irene, Sherlock was sure he would've been able to pull himself out of this lapse weeks ago. No, there was something more to it. That text about John—
"For Christ's sake, Sherlock, I sat in the same room as you two. You think I didn't see?"
Sherlock's head snapped back, the full fury of his gaze boring into John. "See what?"
John shrank back slightly under the weight of his gaze, and Sherlock heard his teacup rattle against the saucer. "See the way you looked at her."
"What way did I look at her?"
"I don't know." John shook his head, his eyes dropping. "You looked at her…with that look you have."
Sherlock's head quirked, black anger sparking in his chest at John's newfound fondness of vague wording. He'd had quite enough of this. John needed to understand that when he said he didn't want to talk about something, the subject was not to be addressed again.
Sherlock leapt up from his chair and closed the space between he and the doctor with one sweeping step. He pushed John's knees apart and knelt on the floor between them, silently enjoying the way the other man's tea spilled over the rim of his cup. John stared at him, eyes wide and dark and lips pressed firmly together. With a sardonic sort of smirk, Sherlock leaned forward, his hand moving to brush against the base of John's jaw. The detective could feel his pulse like the beat of a hummingbird's wings.
"Was this the look, John?" Sherlock asked, dropping his voice to a low, rumbling baritone.
"Sh—Sherlock…what're you—"
Sherlock's hand tightened against John's neck as he leaned in farther. "I want you to tell me. Was this the look?"
John swallowed, and Sherlock was close enough that he could hear the wet sound as it travelled down his throat. "Yes," he said in a breath.
"Then you now know that I am capable producing it without it meaning anything."
The flinch was scarcely noticeable—the barest spasm of muscle and skin—but to Sherlock's fingertips it might as well have been an earthquake. The detective dropped his hand and rose back to his feet, stretching the ligaments of his fingers. He plopped back down in his seat and wrapped his gown back around him.
Silence hung between them for a few long minutes before Sherlock heard John stand and retreat upstairs to the solitude of his room. Sherlock didn't want him to leave, but he didn't dare open his mouth to say so.
I think he likes you more than I do.
Of all the reasons he didn't want to talk about Irene, that one was at the top. John's attachment to him was becoming dangerous. Sherlock's attachment was one matter—his emotional scale, though admittedly stunted, was under careful observation and control. He knew how to detach himself from his fears now. Moriarty had taught him the necessity of that the hard way. But John…John was a man of volatile emotion and poor judgement when it came to matters of the heart. He would throw his life down for Sherlock in an instant—he'd said as much—and Sherlock had thought that he could live with that knowledge…even use it to his advantage if a situation ever deemed it necessary. But over the past few months, Sherlock had started to realize that this…this bond that had formed between them…it wasn't simple, and it certainly wasn't disposable.
Which was exactly why he needed to start cutting John out.
Before John all there had been for him was the work. Work, work, always the work. Work. He needed another case.
He needed a distraction.
Sherlock broke free from the memory with a barely muffled gasp only to have another hit him—with the full force and clarity of a great church bell.
For the record, if anyone out there still cares, I'm not actually gay.
Well I am. Look at us both.
Look. At. Us. Both. That had been an incredibly strange sentence to say in that moment. The implication that they were innately the same—that their very nature was defied by their relationship with Sherlock. Irene, a self-proclaimed lesbian, and Three Continents Watson—that was who they were to themselves—but somehow with Sherlock, their poles were reversed.
Sherlock realized then, why he'd been so upset all those months ago. Not because of John's words, or because of Irene's text, but because he had subconsciously processed Irene's conversation with John in a way that his conscious mind hadn't been able to comprehend at the time.
He hadn't minded Irene's fascination with him—he'd considered it predictably base, but endured it nevertheless if only because he'd found the blankness of her slate annoyingly captivating. He had minded, though, the way she'd made John's fascination sound. How she'd devolved it—how she'd tainted it. She'd implanted in Sherlock's head, the idea that his presence was not only something John longed for, but also something he was held captive by. In one fell swoop, four small monosyllabic words had destroyed something Sherlock hadn't even realized was dear to him—the notion that, for once, someone actually liked him. That someone liked him for more than his mind and the exciting pace of his life. Sure, those things were a part of it, but he'd wanted more. The whole package—the good and the bad and the twisted ugliness that came with being human—and he'd wanted somebody to be able to see all of it and think it was beautiful. After all…wasn't that what John was for him? John, who should have been so ordinary and so tediously dull, but somehow wasn't.
Before you say anything, you don't have to worry, Sherlock…I won't ask you about her again.
That conversation had taken place only a few days before Henry had come to them with the Baskerville case. Baskerville…that first night when—
"John?" Lestrade's voice demanded Sherlock's attention like the crack of a whip. "God…John." Rushed footsteps scratched across pavement, followed by the sound of soft, soothing whispers. Sherlock strained to hear what Lestrade said, but he couldn't make it out. At least Lestrade sounded like he'd come alone.
"Christ." John was obviously trying to keep his voice steady, but Sherlock could hear the subtle waver. "Greg, I don't…I was brought here in a car and I just—I found them like this."
"Who brought you here, John? And the car, do you know the make? Model?"
"It—it was a black Jaguar XF I think. No plates. I didn't see the driver."
"Right," Lestrade hoisted John up off the ground, keeping his arm around John's waist and pulling John's arm up over his neck. "Let's get you home, alright? I'll get a team up here and we'll be right on the case."
John shook his head. "I knew him, Greg. I knew him. And I couldn't…" John stumbled, his leg nearly collapsing beneath him, "…I couldn't save him."
"I know, John. I know. None of us could."
