Two Days Earlier - Battersea
"Where the hell have you been?" Sherlock asked with a scowl, tossing his Belstaff across the back of the pub seat with practiced coolness.
Lestrade grimaced guiltily into his pint. He took a long draught, casting a furtive look around the establishment. It was midafternoon, and the pub was near empty.
"Your number disappeared from my phone," he mumbled.
Sherlock raised one elegant eyebrow. "My number disappeared from your phone."
"Yeah! Y'know, your contact information."
"Did any other numbers," he made air quotes with his fingers, "disappear?"
"No," Lestrade sighed.
"And you don't even have my number memorized. You wound me, Gary." My companion feigned hurt. I hid a smirk behind my hand.
"It's Greg, you git."
"Must've been Mycroft," I observed when I regained my composure. "Trying to keep you off the case."
"Mm," Sherlock acknowledged.
"Where have you been?" Lestrade queried. "You vanished at the beach. I was surprised. We chased down that barrel all morning, then when I turned to ask if you could make sense of it, both of you were just... gone."
"We were, er, sternly advised to leave the premises," I explained with a meaningful glance at our friend.
"Eh?" Lestrade set his mug down heavily on the table.
"The guys from MI5. They kicked us off the beach."
"Your brother?" Lestrade asked Sherlock wearily.
"Obviously."
"Need a drink?"
The edge of Sherlock's mouth quirked up almost imperceptibly.
"John, why don't you get us three pints?" my friend asked.
I nodded. I went to the bar and ordered three ales. When I brought them back to the table, Sherlock and Greg were locked in ardent discourse. I sat, placed the beers on the table, and tried to catch up with their heated argument.
"You need me at that factory, Lestrade. I'd wager my left hand that not a single man on your team could understand, let alone articulate, what the machinery in that lab even does."
"I know that!" He didn't seem fazed that he had just admitted Scotland Yard's ignorance. "But I just can't have you involved! You're a liability, Sherlock."
"Oh, come off it, Gavin."
"Greg."
"And since when has legalese dictated the outlines of our friendship, Garrett? A liability?" he quoted with a shake of his head. "Honestly."
Lestrade gripped the handle of his mug, face red despite not yet having drunk anything. He held his ground.
"Those are my terms, Sherlock," he said, ignoring my companion's bait. "Take them or leave them."
Sherlock scowled.
"I make my own terms."
He stood, whipped his coat off the back of the seat, and stormed out of the pub without another word. I sighed, watching him go. Throwing a temper tantrum at the universe.
"You do know," I murmured to Lestrade as the bell on the door jingled angrily, "that he's on this case now, whether you like it or not."
"He's going to get hurt," Lestrade intoned ominously, deadly sober. He raised his glass to his lips. "And I'm not going to be held responsible."
One Day Earlier - Marylebone
The atmosphere at 221B the next day was dense, liable to combust at any second. My friend the detective lay, like the patient of a theatrical psychoanalyst, on the sofa with both hands clasped behind his head. His eyes were closed, but his foot twitched every couple of seconds. Eager to run.
He was being suspiciously good.
No matter how hard he would try to deny it, Sherlock saw Lestrade as a father figure. And in his own way, he tried to make him proud. Some part of his brain - the part that wasn't autistically preoccupied with projecting the appearance of an eccentric - truly wanted to make Lestrade happy. He would stay home, and he would wait. At least, that was my take on it.
The text alert startled us. Or it startled me, anyway. I wasn't sure if anything could startle Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock looked at his phone. The light from the screen illuminated the topography of his face, accentuating curves and highlighting subtle imperfections he rarely let anyone see. He smirked.
"Lestrade's had a change of heart," he announced.
"Has he?" I hazarded.
"Come along, John," he said, as if this had been his plan all along. "We're going to Avalon."
One Day Earlier - Avalon Enterprises
"Sherlock, I'd like you to meet Major Tim Seary," Lestrade said formally, as if he hadn't just effectively banned us from his case. "Major Seary is the co-owner of Avalon Enterprises. He's agreed to give us a tour of the facility."
"Anything to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice," the Major's silky voice agreed in a placating tone.
Sherlock gave the man his patent once-over. Major Tim Seary used to be a thin man. He wasn't fat, not exactly - but some beer to the gut and a few folds to the face, and he had become the very image of a person who had accumulated too much wealth too quickly.
Sherlock sniffed.
"Who's the other co-owner?" Sherlock asked, without preamble or introduction.
If Major Seary was offended, he did a very good job of not showing it.
"My partner's name is Nolan Colmore," Seary said.
"Nolan Colmore," Sherlock repeated, rolling the name around on his tongue. "I'll speak to him today as well."
"Of course," Major Tim agreed in his soothing voice. I frowned. Something about him was off. He elongated each syllable of every word, holding out phrases for far too long. My instincts told me not to trust this man.
But he was helpful. He escorted us downstairs, into the basement manufacturing lab of Avalon Enterprises, where dozens of machines lathed away at flesh-tone blocks of plastic. Sherlock was right, as usual - I couldn't even begin to fathom what purpose these machines served. Lestrade looked equally perplexed.
"This is our lab," he said, gesturing grandly at the sterile space before him. "We specialize in silicone implants, as you can clearly see from the assembly line before you."
"Clearly," Lestrade agreed, trying for sage and falling short of the mark.
"What's your market?" Sherlock barked. "Who buys your products?"
"Oh, women in their early twenties for the most part. Poor things. Breasts and buttocks. And the occasional amputee..."
"You manufacture prosthetics?" That got Lestrade's attention.
"Oh yes. But nothing like those poor murder victims you described. Animal feathers?" Major Seary clicked his tongue in a mother-hen way. "And between you and me, there's simply no market for corpse prosthetics."
"Mhm." Lestrade jotted something into a notepad. "How much does one of these implants cost?"
"The simplest procedures start in the low thousands. A complicated restructuring could be tens of thousands of pounds. Or more." He smiled ghoulishly.
Sherlock had wandered off, obviously not interested in Major Tim's marketing strategies.
"Sherlock!" I hissed. "Excuse my friend, Major, he's... er..."
"Oh, not to worry. He'll be perfectly safe here. The lab is monitored twenty-four hours a day by video surveillance."
Lestrade made another note in his pad.
"Would you mind if we borrowed those surveillance tapes from the past two weeks?"
"Of course," Seary said, inclining his head politely. "You'll have the full cooperation of our staff and security team."
"Thank you," I said gratefully. "I'm just going to, er, find Sherlock. If you don't mind."
"Not at all, Doctor Watson."
It wasn't until much, much later that I realized Lestrade had never given Major Tim Seary my name.
Present
Sherlock's hand is still tangled up in mine. That's the first thing I notice when I wake up, my back stiff and my neck twisted at an odd angle.
The second thing I notice is Greg Lestrade.
"Greg!" I yelp, hastily detaching my fingers from Holmes' hand and my face from the hospital bed, where I had evidently fallen asleep the day before. Or was it night? I stand with a wince. Everything pops.
My face is red. Caught holding hands with Sherlock Holmes? I'm never going to live this one down. Lestrade gives me the ghost of a shit-eating grin. He claps a friendly hand on my shoulder. He winks, letting me know that he knows, and that he knows that I know that he knows. I groan.
But there are more important matters at hand.
"How is he?" he asks, grin softening back into worry.
The heart monitor on the wall beeps slowly, but steadily.
"Why don't you ask him yourself?" Sherlock's low baritone reverberates in the small space.
"Sherlock!" Greg kneels beside the detective's bed. "You're awake."
"Wonderful observation. Do you have any more?"
Lestrade laughs brokenly. I wonder if he's going to cry.
"Good to see you too, ass."
Sherlock smiles at him, his first genuine smile since this whole ordeal started. It's hard not to break into a smile myself. Good old Sherlock.
"Ah, Sherlock," Lestrade sighs. "I'm sorry I got you mixed up in this, old friend."
"I got myself into it," Sherlock admits with a shake of his head. "If anything, I brought you into it."
"They told me to expect the worst, downstairs. That you might not..."
"I'll die precisely when I mean to."
Even I huff a laugh at that one.
"Ah yes, the Great Wizard Sherlock. Master Of His Own Fate And The Fates Of Those Around Him," Lestrade intones gravely, mimicking turning the pages of a book.
Sherlock's brows furrow. He doesn't get the joke, or chooses to appear not to. But when I look at his face - really look at it - I see that beneath all the pain lines, and the tired, bruised undereyes, that he is joyful. A regular old fountain of mirth, that Sherlock.
And as he and Lestrade bait each other, throwing around witticisms and insults, I begin to feel something that had been missing the previous few days. Something I thought had died the moment Sherlock lost his legs.
I began to feel hope for my friend.