-ooo-

The clanks and puffs of the heavy steel machinery still seemed to dominate the small space even as they had been halted for decades. The history and nature of the mechanical structured place was painfully beautiful and strained in every joint, rod, wheel and pillar at the machine room. The steel itself had lost its shine, somewhat rusted now, and in its prime time had probably saturated the room with a stench of lubricant oil and hot water steam. It was a small room under the first arch of the cast iron bridge over the Thames, a cubical room with only one window, high up on the far wall, overlooking the river waters. At a corner of the room stood a heavy oak desk and a chair, with a petrol lamp on it and a vintage typewriter, left forgotten by the last caretaker of the bridges' hydraulics, before it had been completely transformed by electrical devices, rendering that room and the machinery within useless.

'You really seem to know the best places in town', John said, as he paced the room, peeking at the old curiosities, his hands behind his back again and he didn't even know it.

'It will get cold at night. There are blankets in a small cabinet on that corner. And some canned food too... Can you sleep on the floor, John?'

He looked up, confused. 'Of course I can.'

'What would your doctor say to it?' Sherlock circled his previous question.

'I would hardly listen', John answered with a fake smile designed to appease his friend. 'Do you have a bed in here somewhere to yourself?'

'No, it's the same situation for the two of us.'

John pressed his lips tight to a very thin line, uncomfortable with his own perceived selfishness. After all, he was the one that got Sherlock there, with a very recent firearm wound.

'The police didn't find a body, John.'

He turned back around slowly.

'You mean I missed?' his voice was strained.

'I wish I could tell you that, it would sort it all out... There was too much blood on the scene.'

'Maybe he got out on his own, despite being hurt.'

Sherlock shook his head. 'Unlikely, John. It just means that there were two people there.'

'Which did I hit?' he worried. Sherlock gave him a heavy stare.

'The one that was shooting back.'

'How would you know?'

'You are that good as a shooter. You had very little to go on. The street outside was dark except for a lamplight that blinded your view of the empty house across. There was no way you should have been able to calculate that shot based only on the outside.'

'Then how did I?' he doubted himself. His adrenaline high that night had blurred his memories of the events.

'Experience and training kicked in. You saw the bullet hole on the closet door and the one on the window pane. A straight line gave you trajectory. The knowledge on the bullet type confirmed the distance it had travelled from. If it had been further it would have lost speed and gathered more distortion around its axis. You knew all this, and you knew it instantly.' In front of him, John's expression was heavy. Sherlock still insisted. 'As you entered the room and saw the bullet's trajectory, you also saw that Mary was within range of a new shot. You ran to the window and placed yourself in front of the glass hole. If another shot had been fired right then, it had no angle to shot anyone else in the room but you, John. You did that to cover Mary, even me. Do you remember that? Adrenaline can be a powerful amnesiac.' John looked up to Sherlock but he didn't answer. 'You aligned your handgun with the bullet's trajectory and pulled the trigger. I can assure you John, you were very precise. I saw it all happen.'

'Are you sure? It was very fast', there was a sense of urgency in his words, now. How much it mattered to John that if he was a criminal, that he'd be for the right reasons, the right target.

'It was very fast, you are right. In a second you had shot the bullet. Then you stood there, immobile, frozen, and honestly it took you a few seconds before you were breathing again and had lowered your gun. I could see your angles perfectly, John. But I don't know where your mind goes when you fire a crack shot like that. I've seen it before. Your mind goes somewhere else.'

'It's probably the adrenaline kick.'

'Actually, I think it happens every time, and that you remember every time you had such a shot perfectly. I think you remember them all when you fire like that. I think you could count and name every single one of those deadly shots ever since the you went to war, the ones you made it and the ones you failed.'

'Get out of my head', John snapped back, bitterly, stopping Sherlock's words flow. 'You wouldn't want to be in there', he added with a self-loathing smile.

Sherlock broke eye contact, there was a tinge of sadness in his eyes but mostly he remained apparently emotionless. He could see John struggling for privacy. Every single shot came with a price. He blamed himself for each one and carried them darkly inside himself. It was his dual nature. The soldier and the doctor. The harmer and the healer. The struggle inside him made him hate himself, and that was painfully evident in every line of his face and his body as he stood in front of Sherlock.

'I'm sure you didn't hit the wrong person. Please stop imagining that you hit some random innocent person in the other side. If that had happened, the shooter would hardly had the trouble of taking the body with him. No, you hit the shooter, fatally or not, and someone else, maybe the mastermind, got him out of there. So the odds are that whoever you shot actually got out of there alive, though seriously injured. In such an event he must have been taken to a hospital, and that's where our investigation will start, John.'

He shook his head, immobile still. 'You can't deceive me, Sherlock. I know you too well now, and I've learnt your methods... There was too much blood, Greg said so. It's not hospitals we want, it's morgues.'

'Maybe someone else got hurt in that apartment, in a fight. That would account for the extra blood. We can't eliminate any possibility yet', Sherlock offered a weak theory and he knew it was so.

'Now you're not even making an effort', John snapped. 'Hurt enough to bleed a lot and strong enough to carry the body out...' John depreciated, again with that same self-hurting smile.

Sherlock sighed. John was no ordinary man, and his use of logic was getting fine tuned to the point after all those years in crime scenes.

Then Sherlock took a deep breath.

'Wait! What did you just say? Getting out. The police doesn't know it, they hadn't arrived yet, but we do, we were there, John. No one left that place. You are a genius, John! You pointed that out specifically right then and I didn't realize it meant something, it means a lot... How did they get out before the police got there, John?'

John was still immobile and his eyes were dark, but Sherlock wasn't paying attention to that anymore. A new question, a new doubt, and he was rolling in deep again, full of bursting energy and adrenaline. A locked room mystery. Undoubtedly, Sherlock's favourite type of mystery. He had to bite down his tongue not to say "thank you" to John for that mystery. Good thing he didn't like saying "thank you"s too, John wouldn't have appreciated his gratitude at that point. Of course, if someone ever understood Sherlock's faux pass was John, somehow he always seemed to. But not at that moment in time. At that time, the twitch on the corner of John's mouth was of disgust and if Sherlock had been more attentive he'd have realized that John was directing it to himself. And he'd try to reach out to John. Probably by logic. But then John was already sure Sherlock could never tell him something that could make it all right. For John there was a serious doubt. Had he hit the right person? And the acknowledgement that he could have failed to do so was taxing him very hard. Because that was the sort of person that John was. A Right and Wrong person, and there was rarely an in-between.

-ooo-

As much as Sherlock felt uncomfortable leaving John behind, failing to take actions would not have brought them closer to an ending on that situation. That was how he had come to find himself separated from John and facing his brother, Mycroft, in the hope of gathering an ally in him. Their conversation was however punctuated with the usual distance and manoeuvring that was characteristic to their understandings. They sat facing one another in Mycroft's concrete bunker of an office, in a secret location.

'It's unfortunate, but this is not your battle, Sherlock', Mycroft reminded him in a warning tone of voice.

'John's my client', Sherlock pointed out. Not that he saw him like that, but hopefully Mycroft could understand the detective-client relationship more easily than a friendship one. Still, Mycroft tilted his head and raised a brow, seeing right through the nomenclature.

'There is nothing I can do. I must obey the law at all times and, for all accounts, Dr. Watson is indeed a murderer. If you are so invested in the Good, and Justice and all those nice things, then you shouldn't be siding with him in the first place.'

'He was protecting his wife's life.' Sherlock leaned forward, his voice was tense.

'Turns out your friend has quite a shot. All would have been simpler if he had missed. And if he hadn't brought illegally a military gun back to London. What did he need it for, by the way? You can see all of this hardly paints the picture of an innocent man?'

'Mycroft...'

'Sherlock, even though I enjoy myself hearing you come to me for aid, I cannot give you any. There is nothing I can do for John Watson. I vehemently suggest he turns himself in and gets a plea bargain for cooperation.'

'No!' Sherlock actually raised his voice, his impatience rapidly turning to despair. Mycroft was not completely impassive to his brother pain, but he remained adamant that there was nothing he could do.

'Why not?' Mycroft shrugged his shoulders. 'It's his best option. Even a man like him can surely see it.'

'He saw it', Sherlock recognised. Mycroft pondered it.

'Ah, yes, the soldier, of course, what was I thinking.'

'I won't let him.'

'Can you really stop him, Sherlock? And why would you do that?'

'He's a war hero, I won't see him being degraded like that.'

'You don't believe in wars and politics, Sherlock', his brother reminded him.

'No, but I now believe in heroes.'

'Don't be stupid, heroes don't exist and if they did John Watson would hardly qualify for one.'

Sherlock smiled coldly as the best offense he could master to his cold-hearted brother. (John already is a hero.)

-ooo-

'Thank you, Molly', John's smile was genuine and warm, as he took from her a paper bag full of stuff she had got for them. He was grateful she was up for it, he was now officially evaded from the police and would be arrested on the spot if found. The situation was getting worse by the hour and Molly's kind gesture was no small token of bravery.

'You've got a nice place here', she complemented, looking around. 'It was Sherlock's idea, I suppose.'

'Definitely his doing', John agreed, feeling lucky. As he was reaching into the bag he stopped short and winced. He had used the wrong arm, he had forgotten, stupidly forgotten the obvious. He took a seat by the old desk, resting the bag in front of him.

'I'll call Sherlock', Molly offered at once, reaching for her phone and he hardly had the time to stop her.

'No need, it's all gone, now, just a silly movement, that's all.'

'John, I'd find it easier to believe that if you weren't looking so run down.'

'Didn't sleep well, that's all, and I'm not doing much today anyway. It's safer if I just stay here, hiding... Hiding...' his gaze was lost and his mouth twisted in disgust. He was a fugitive, a criminal, like the ones they used to chase.

Molly lowered herself to the table separating them, so she'd be forced into his eye sight. John seemed surprised by her intensity. 'John, Sherlock is worried about you.'

'Maybe I should just give up. I'm dragging his name down.'

John knew Molly cared so much for Sherlock, she could put some sense in John's head, talk him into doing the right thing, and John tried to plead it out of her so he could finally give up.

'If you do that he'll be all alone, John. He can't be all alone. It's not good for him, John.'

'He's not alone anymore. He's got a lot of people who care for him and put up with his crap.'

She copied his smile to be polite.

'You know it's not the same. You are the only person he opens up to', Molly confided.

'I fear not. He doesn't', John corrected her.

'He told me that himself.'

'He must have been working some angle.'

'He wasn't. It was just after St. Barts.' John had to look away. 'He told me you were the only one who understood him.'

'I seriously don't. He keeps surprising me.'

She smiled. 'No one else can say that. Do you see what I mean?'

He looked up to her. 'This is not the right thing, I'm not doing the right thing.'

'I'm giving you a reason not to do the right thing.'

This time John paused.

'You are amazing, Molly.'

She smiled awkwardly.

-ooo-

Sherlock Holmes hated to take the bus, honestly. And he could hardly explain why. Either the proximity of all those people crammed into a small space shaking over wheels or the excess stimulus they brought him, it overwhelmed him every time.

A doctor (the slight smell of chlorine and anaesthetics that was similar to John's) with a gambling problem (all the ink marks on his fingers from the small complementary pens at the betting's office) and deep in debt (the shoes were expensive but over-worn and the right shoe let rain water in through the front now, but hadn't been repaired or replaced) came to sit by his side on the bench. A short uncomfortable glance at Sherlock's open and running computer and he'd pretend to ignore his curiosity. All the better, since the computer had been passed on by Mycroft and Sherlock was frantically searching the cctv footage from the night before, trying to identify the escape of the shooter from the apartment across the Watson's house. Unfortunately, John had picked the suburbs, overcompensating his need to feel adequate and average. The suburbs had less cctv and less lighting in the streets, making Sherlock's job harder.

Nothing there. Sherlock closed the lid shut harshly over the keyboard and the gambling doctor glanced sideways. Sherlock hated busses so much. But he was doing it for John. So no one could trace a cab with Sherlock Holmes in it to John's location. And for the same reason he couldn't tell the woman behind him that her husband was cheating on her, to the young couple in the front to stop doing drugs, to the man across them that there was no point on going drunk that night (he still would) and to the other guy to restart taking his heart medication, it was stupid to stop it due to an infatuation with a way younger woman.

Sherlock shut his eyes tight, trying hard not to analyse the whole of the top deck of the bus.