Chapter 2: Moving in to Baker Street with a mad man and a skull for company

It's hard to really describe how our first case came into being. I could start of course the morning the Inspector decided to give Baker Street a visit at 4 am. This would have been a somewhat rude wake up call, but Arthur had decided it would be a fine time to play the violin a few hours earlier than normal to ease his thoughts, so both of us were up anyway. Or I could tell you that the case started when a body was found murdered and tied to a pole at 2 am the same morning. Or even I could tell you that the case truly began with a letter that had been sent to Scotland Yard two weeks prior but had been ignored and forgotten. Because of these strange happenings I find trouble with where to truly begin with this peculiar case. But if I had to pick a point on where to start, it would be the morning just before we were handed the case files, when I had just fully moved into Baker Street and effectively set up my study.

I was settling in just fine, or at least I thought I was. Sure the dismembered head in the freezer managed to spook me out one morning when I had been innocently looking for breakfast, or another time when I had to run butt naked out of the shower when the water started smelling of some sort of chemical, or yet another time when I caught Arthur standing in the middle of the room pacing and talking to the skull on the mantel that I had found when I had first arrived. This all was, as I was told by the landlady, totally normal. Within the first few weeks I became acquainted with the inter-workings of Arthur's mind. It was amazing to simply sit and watch sometimes, spending loads of time in silence just listening to this guy ramble off about facts and figures, cases and mysteries, causes and consequences. He could pull his small height up and make it seem like he was a politician giving a lecture, an air of importance swirling around him. But he could just as equally slouch his shoulders, sigh, crane his neck down and look like the most dismal man in the world.

I spent a majority of the time in Baker Street writing on odd scraps of paper here and there. Somehow I spent an ungodly amount of time in silence, simply letting memory after memory scrawl down on the page. For the talkative person that I was, I was sure that if any of my friends back at home could see me, they would think me a man possessed by the very devil himself. It was one of these occasions where I was hunkered down in the living room, paper balanced on my legs, and a pen clutched in my hand that Arthur decided to burst into the room.

"ALFRED!" he yelled, throwing off his coat and hat.

He always seemed to wear them when he went out. However the reason to why was still a mystery to me. I looked up quickly, startled out of the world I had created around my writing.

"What?"

He stomped quickly into the room, his cheeks were flushed from the slowly cooling air outside, and his bright blond hair was frayed and standing up on end, more so than usual.

"Stillness, silence, and god it's so BORING! I know its winter but MUST it be so DULL? I NEED something!"

I had found, even from my short time at Baker Street that Arthur could be a quiet person if he wished to be. He could lie down for hours and say nothing, he could huddle over a table staring into a test tube and not make a sound, hell he could run around London chased by a serial killer I was sure and stay deathly silent. The only time Arthur seemed to want to talk, was to elaborate on deductions, show some one up, get the last word, insult policeman, or to complain about his boredom.

I cocked an eyebrow at this sudden outburst and put the pages and pen down next to me. However, I was very reluctant to leave my chair; over the weeks it had become an unspoken rule that this particular chair next to the mantel would be mine.

"Come on Arthur. It's a good thing no one has been murdered, or mugged, or disappeared. Just means that there's less criminals out on the streets."

Arthur simply scoffed, throwing up his hands with exasperation and unceremoniously plopped down in his own chair across from mine.

"It's too loud." He grumbled, and shot me a quick glare, then turned to the window in a huff as I picked up my papers again; refusing to let this new idea I had to slip away from me.

"You haven't called your brother." Arthur said, turning to look at me again.

"No." I agreed. "Mattie—"

"Mathew" Arthur corrected. "You still haven't lost that habit."

Again I made a sound of agreement, letting Arthur's distaste with me accent and shorting of words slide.

"How do you expect to play a proper Englishmen with an accent like that? Any man with half a brain can tell you're from America!"

I was scribbling down notes and ideas again, pen dancing across the page and producing long 'L's and scrunched up 'E's and the occasional huge round 'O'.

"I'll be fine!" I reassured him happily.

Obviously too happily for his liking as he sighed dramatically again and got up to go into the kitchen, most likely to finish an experiment.

"What kind of criminal takes off for the winter? What? God it's boring I might just…."

And then there was blissful silence for the span of two minutes. Then a sudden sharp banging seemed to rouse the house out of its sleep as the doorbell went off continuously, the door banged, someone yelled from the street, I still am not sure how one moment silence reigned and the next chaos took hold.

"For the love of God! MRS. HUDSON! OPEN THE DOOR!"

"I'm not your house keeper!" sounded from down stairs, though the racket must have gotten to her as well as after a minute the knocking stopped and in its place came a quick repetition of hurried steps up the stairs.

Arthur groaned, he wanted nothing to do with the visitor. He had something against seemingly everyone who walked into the flat. Even Mrs. Hudson at times if he was in a very horrible mood.

"Oh how nice to see you, how's the hip? Fine? Good. Now if you have nothing interesting to show me then do kindly leave the flat for the rest of the afternoon."

Mrs. Hudson stood in the doorway frowning in Arthur's direction. Today she was in a pink dress, slightly faded, with a pair of heels on. The busy flower patterns of the dress however were almost blinding, all she had to do was wear some yellow or something and I was sure I would go blind from the sight.

"He means good morning." I said trying to cover for my roommate.

At times Arthur would use pleasantries but not often enough. While originally it hadn't bothered me too much, however my obliviousness caught up with me and even I could pick up on the sarcasm that seemed to drip from the man's voice as he spoke. Arthur stuck his head out from the kitchen to look over Mrs. Hudson for a moment.

"What have you managed to find…?" he was quickly moving out of the kitchen and over to the land lady as if she had suddenly appeared with a bomb in her hand.

"It's not a note from down stairs. It is most certainly not any sort of note from around Backer Street for that matter if I'm right."

He plucked the faded paper from her hand and quickly started to examine it.

"What do you plan to find from that thing?" As of this point I hadn't yet been fully introduced to Arthur's 'work' per say.

Not quite yet, while I knew the very basics, there was still a lot to be desired from Arthur's description of his job.

"How many stairs are there leading up to Baker street?" Arthur suddenly asked, looking over to me.

"How many stairs…? What does that have anything to do with the piece of paper?"

Arthur tsked and went into the kitchen for a few moments, emerging with what almost looked like a butter knife.

"Because it's not so much a matter of looking it's a matter of noticing! Don't you see? You walk up those stairs every day; you walk up them mindlessly, as does everyone who comes to Baker Street. But I can tell you right now that there are exactly 14 steps that lead up to this flat. You see Watson? Of course you 'See' but you don't 'observe', store the data, make use of it!"

He looked around for some sort of understanding, Mrs. Hudson used to this sort of talk simply sighed and waved it off. Walking back down stairs before the inevitable speech started, yelling back, "I'll bring up some food for you boys then."

"Take this piece of paper for example. It's specific, used for business. No one would notice it at first, that tells us the person we're looking for was in a hurry, on the run, anyway but if you hold it up to the light like so…." Arthur picked up a flash light, torch…it was a torch…I had to remind myself, and shone it through the paper revealing a business's water mark.

The grin Arthur had been sporting since he got the paper seemed to be ready to split his face in to.

"We're looking for…I'm not following. Seriously, we're not looking for anything or anyone. I'm perfectly happy to just sit on the couch and…play some video games or something."

That had been the trade off, if I was going to move in, we were going to get a damned T.V. so I could set up one of my game consoles.

"You still haven't explained 'Watson' to me either you know. I get not calling me Mr. Jones. Sounds too much like my old man, but you could just call my 'Alfred' or 'Al' or I dunno some variation of my name."

"To many things that could go wrong, to many people that could find out. That won't do in my line of work."

That line again, I groaned. Arthur wouldn't tell him a thing about his job other than what he told him from the first day. 'My line of work my ass' I thought to myself, huddling deeper into my chair. How was he supposed to know if it even paid anything? How was Arthur going to make it for their first payment on the rent this month. Where was his money coming from? Even as a doctor, even on this army pension, there was no way I was going to be able to pay for both of us. Not this month, or anywhere in the near future.

"It's nothing to concern yourself with."

Arthur simply brushed it off again and ran back into the kitchen to pull some sort of funky experiment that would most likely turn the water yellow in the flat for the next few months. That or it would somehow bring back that green growth that we had had to battle when I had first moved in (yes. First moved in. Like first day.). It had been some sort of green, brown mush with hair, which clung to the refrigerator. I was pretty damn sure that it had growled at me at some point. Now the choice was up to me, should I grab that damn cane of mine and head to see what Arthur was doing, or should I stay here, comfortable and relaxed, in my chair?

"OH! And work on that accent of yours."

Arthur called back. Yeah okay I was getting up, even if it was just to whack the guy upside the head.

"Say it again and you'll be the one making dinner." I threatened and grabbed my cane from the floor.

It felt heavy and unpleasant in my hands. It seemed to much like my grandfathers after gram died. He had seemed so broken, the cane only made the image worse. Was that what I looked like now? Broken? Again I had to remind myself this was something I would be living with for the rest of my life, and I had only a sniper to thank for it.

The kitchen was literally a horrible place to try and cook. Seriously, most kitchens you were supposed to make food in. But somehow in this kitchen the builders were either very high when they built it, they brought in an artist to design it, or Arthur built it himself. Not only did it seem almost impossible to maneuver around the table without knocking something over, but due to Arthur's experiments it had literally become life threatening to eat in its general vicinity. I was sure at one point Arthur had spilled something radioactive and never cleaned it up. The contents in the drawers and cupboards weren't much better. I wasn't sure how Arthur hadn't ended up killing himself yet, by accident of course, seeing as half the cups on the first shelf contained poisons, the second shelf antidotes that were poisonous if you weren't infected by the poisons, the third shelf was filled up to the brim with chemicals that would either explode on contact with a spark, or couldn't be handled even with gloves on. It was only on the highest shelf that the cups were clean and safe, and that was on a 50-50 chance, seeing as some times Arthur puts cups back in the wrong shelf, just to make it 'interesting'.

The table was another problem entirely. In fact you couldn't see the table it was that bad. Maybe at one point the table had been brown, or maybe it had been pale, or maybe it had been black. You couldn't tell any more. Test tubes and burners, beakers and tongs, everything and anything you associated with science was on this table. Arthur always put his most recent experiments on the table as they had 'top priority' over everything else in the flat. Then finally there was the fridge. It was like the seventh circle of hell. He was sure that if there were fridges in hell, this was what it would look like. Unidentified meat was most likely of human origin, if not it had been tampered with. Inside the butter cabinet were human eyes and the middle shelf held a human head which had spooked him on his first day here. I was positive that said head would become a very nice partner for the skull on the mantel place later.

To Arthur, eating and sleeping were funny jokes. Very funny jokes, as he seemed unconcerned with everything that his body desperately needed….

BANG

I looked quickly over from the fridge, which I had migrated to during my thought process.

"What is it?"

This couldn't be good, Arthur currently looked like he was hopped up on some sort of sugar, or had been breathing in fumes for too long. The man had slammed his hands down on the table and stood up so quickly his chair fell back.

"What's wrong?" I repeated again.

"I have it!" he announced gleefully.

"Want to tell me what 'it' is?"
"The note! The bloody note. It's from the tower, written at traitor's gate, early afternoon, judging from the pencil strokes it's a man's not a woman's. Man who feels quiet full of himself, reminds me of someone, wonder if he's still on that diet. Probably. It's almost Christmas after all."

Arthur was pacing while talking, "Data, I'm going to have to collect more data on this matter."

"You're talking as if you're a computer." I said absently shuffling over and looking over the piece of paper Arthur was making such a fuss over.

"Dear Boss. Let's see each other in hell. Best of luck or else it'll be a one way trip. 12.4./12.24/1.23/2.25" I said reading aloud, nothing about the Tower, or any kind of tower in the letter, so where was Arthur getting all this stuff from?

"Know the guy?" I asked after rereading it a second time to try to find what I missed. But then again Arthur was always finding hidden meanings in things. If I didn't know he was brilliant, I was sure I would have just put him off as paranoid.

"Hardly I don't associate with these kinds of people unless it's absolutely necessary."

"Right…right…so we just opened up some one's mail then?" Well it wasn't as if they stumbled across much anyway.

"Oh it's nothing to worry about Watson he's dead anyway."

"Dead okay that-…dead…What?"

"Don't worry it's more than likely we'll get a case soon. Just go back to your novel about…what was it…cowboys? Something horribly patriotic."

"Try not to blow us up then."

It was slightly faint, nothing more than a trace, but I was sure that I could smell something at the very least akin to gun powder, and some other chemical…. A compound or element that had been used in fireworks. I frowned lightly, and quickly left the room, not glancing back at the mad genius at the table.

Blog of John Watson

Literally nothing ever happens to me. (November 25)

There. Wrote something.

This place is boring

No. I am not doing this.

Oh God. Okay I'm doing this.

My new roommate is a genius.

I take it back now…I'm sure my roommate is trying to kill us all-

Continued from roommate is trying to kill us all: So that's how the first part of the day went guys. I mean nothing really happened after that. Sure Sherlock managed to actually blow up part of the kitchen (don't worry we're fine), but Ms. Hudson was really angry with us. Mathew decided to call again; it is a Tuesday after all. If you're reading this Mathew I'm not going home just yet. Stop spamming the voice mail box. Anyway that's how it ended up starting. The real fun didn't begin until well….until the next morning. Needless to say Arthur was excited about it; the most excited I've ever seen the guy. I'll send you all a line when I can but right now I'm to bloody exhausted to do ANYTHING. I haven't slept in a few days but it's been…it's been worth it. 10x over. I think I finally came up with a name for this to. The case of the Indian rope. And Sherlock? Stop reading this. How many times to I have to change my password?

-JW MD

CHAPTER 2~! Hey guys! Sorry for how late this is, it's finals week for all of us back here. I won't be able to get chapter 3 out until the beginning of summer, but thankfully that's not too far away. The real case begins next chapter, but there's hints here. Try to find them. Reviews are always helpful!