"Obviously." Sherlock is standing at the window, looking out into the street, but he tips his head slightly towards Lestrade's voice.
"This package was delivered to my office, but it's addressed to you, Sherlock." Lestrade holds out a small box, wrapped in brown paper. John can almost see the moment when Sherlock's brain moves into action. He takes the parcel in long, slender fingers and turns it over gingerly, examining it from all angles.
"You haven't opened it."
"No, but we got it x-rayed and we're pretty sure it's nothing dangerous."
"Splendid. I feel much safer." Sherlock quips off-handedly. He slits the tape on one end and slides what looks like a large jewelry box out of the paper. With infinite care, Sherlock pries open the box. Inside is a mobile phone. John lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding and hears Lestrade do the same. Sherlock drops the box on the coffee table and begins to speak.
"New model Apple mobile phone - iPhone 4S. Never been used. Well, just the once to leave whatever message is on here."
"Message?" Lestrade asks. Sherlock doesn't roll his eyes, but his tone of voice when he speaks again is the equivalent.
"Yes, message. Ah, here." Having found the videos app and voicemail empty, Sherlock opens the voice memos app. A cheery and somehow simultaneously cold voice fills the small flat.
"Sherlock Holmes. Just the man I've been waiting for. I've been so looking forward to this, and even Dr Watson's little escape trick can't dull my excitement." Sherlock's pale eyes flick to John, whose insides froze at the first syllable. Dark. Deep. Dublin-bred. John nods once to the unspoken question in Sherlock's eyes. It's him. "You'll know it when you see it, dear." Five beeps sound, then the message cuts off. John grips the handle of his cane tightly.
"What have you found?" Sherlock breaks the eerie silence with a question to Lestrade, but he's looking at John.
"A body on the shore of the Thames, no ID. No sign of struggle. Will you come?" Lestrade is already halfway out the door. Sherlock waves him away while pulling his scarf and coat on.
"Not in a police car, I'll take a taxi. Mrs Hudson, I'll be out late, so don't wait up. Something cold for dinner will do."
"I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper."
"John, sit down, make yourself at home, have a cup of tea." And with a swish of coattails and a too-eager smile, he's gone.
"All that rushing about... my husband was the same way. You're more of the sitting-down type, I can tell. I'll get you a cuppa, you rest your leg."
"DAMN MY LEG." John explodes suddenly, without reason or real provocation. He instantly regrets his outburst; Mrs Hudson has been nothing but kind and welcoming and here he is complaining about his lot. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry - "
"Never mind dear, I understand. I have a hip." She bustles off in the direction of the kitchen. John collapses in an armchair and buries his face in his hands.
"You're a doctor." The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere. John starts, but not as much as the last time Sherlock snuck up on him. "In fact you're an army doctor."
"Yes."
"Any good?"
"Very good."
"Seen a lot of injuries, then? Violent deaths?"
"Yes." Watson you are a genius at conversation. John winces at his own inner monologue.
"Bit of trouble too, I bet." Quicksilver eyes sweep from the top of John's graying head to the toes of his sensible shoes. Attempting to suppress an incredibly aroused shiver, John licks his lips and makes an effort to string two words together.
"Of course, yes. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much." And too far in the other direction. John is just about to give himself up for a lost cause when he sees a strange, dangerous glint in Sherlock's eyes.
"Want to see some more?"
Without hesitation, without a moment's pause or consideration, John looks right back into those searching eyes and says three words:
"Oh, God yes."
With these three words, the two men spill out of the flat and onto the sidewalk in front of the flat. Holmes raises a long arm and a cab appears almost immediately. The detective slides in first, leaving John to make his slightly slower way into the car. As soon as the door slams shut, the cab eases into traffic. Holmes doesn't give an address but gives directions in his low, rumbling voice. His eyes are glued to his phone and his long, lithe fingers fly over the keys as he memorizes as much information as possible - weather conditions, tide times of the Thames, missing persons over the past 48 hours, police reports.
He pretends not to notice how close John is, how intimate the back of the cab is.
John watches London flash by, listens to Holmes giving directions. He's not using a map or anything - he just knows this city like the back of his hand.
"Amazing." he mutters under his breath, trying to hide a grin under his hand. Holmes' pale eyes slice to the doctor, who carefully schools his face to reveal nothing. The ghost of a grin quirks the corner of Holmes' mouth before he returns to the screen of his phone.
They eventually make it to a lonely, deserted stretch of bank - well, what usually would have been lonely and deserted. At the moment, it's crawling with police. The cab hasn't even stopped before Holmes is out the door and striding toward Lestrade. John pays the cabbie with the wallet that Holmes threw him before disappearing. Easing out of the car, John takes a moment to get his feet accustomed to the ground beneath his feet and cane before picking his way carefully to the knot of uniformed men.
"What do you think, John?" Holmes asks without preamble; John almost asks how the lanky man knew it was him, but then remembers his unique walking pattern and saves himself the embarrassment.
"Give us a mo', Holmes." John grunts softly as he stretches out his left leg enough that he can go down on his right knee beside the body.
"Sherlock, please." John's head whips up when he hears the murmured request - if he hadn't seen the detective's lips move, he almost wouldn't have believed the words really came from him. Their eyes lock for a long moment, and John thinks he sees a softening somewhere in the depths before Lestrade clears his throat.
"Got anything for us, Sherlock?" the older man asks.
"Give John a moment to give us his professional opinion, detective inspector." Sherlock's voice is soft, but there is an undercurrent of command. Lestrade looks as though he wants to argue, but John is checking the body with a briskness and confidence that keeps Lestrade quiet. After a few moments, John nods, then looks to Sherlock, who's been watching him, unblinking, the entire time.
"Smoke inhalation, from what I can tell." Sherlock quirks an eyebrow, which John takes as a sign to continue. "There's soot around his nostrils, for one thing. You can see that a good deal more mucus was secreted recently -" he points to a bit oozing that's pooled on the inside of the victim's nose, "and it looks like it might be... Lestrade, do you have a cotton ball - " John doesn't finish the sentence before Sherlock has passed him one. "Yep, dark grey. This man was in a fire, and recently."
"Sally, check the surrounding area for any fires in the past 24 hours." Lestrade barks, and the woman John saw at the Yard scurries away from weasely looking man with a sour look on his face. He then turns to Sherlock, who begins explaining everything he's found. John, however, isn't listening. Adrenaline is rushing though his veins, a thrill he hasn't experienced in much too long but his body remembers fondly. His head reels as he pushes himself to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane after staying on one knee for so long. This is why he became a doctor - to help solve mysteries. They may not always have been murders, but diagnosing is his own form of what Sherlock does - taking all the little symptoms and putting them together in a logical way to get to a solution.
"Fantastic." he hears himself say aloud, and then sees Sherlock preen a bit. He does not tell Sherlock that the fantastic was not for him - but for John himself.
It's not long before Sally Donovan returns bearing the news that there were no fires within the radius Lestrade specified. Sherlock's eyebrows snap together before looking at John. Knowing his medical knowledge is being called into question, he shakes his head - he knows what he saw and he told Sherlock exactly what that was. Satisfied, Sherlock turns to Sally.
"Look farther out. Lestrade, text me if you find anything." Turning his back on the lot of them, Sherlock whips out his phone as he begins to walk back toward the road. John looks around for a moment, wondering where he ought to go, but when he sees Sherlock with his arm raised for a taxi, the wind tossing his curls lightly, he knows exactly where he wants to be. Nodding to Lestrade and the rest of the team, he limps to Sherlock's side. He could be wrong, but Sherlock might have smiled when John arrives at his side.
"If that man was in a fire, why was his body taken to the riverbank?" John muses aloud as he and Sherlock ride along in the cab. They're on their way to St Bart's, where Sherlock wants to perform some experiments on the mucus John found. "Why not just let him burn?"
A phone rings somewhere in the cab. Though he's certain his mobile doesn't make that noise, John checks and finds it silent. Sherlock was using his when the noise started. Raising a quizzical eyebrow, the consulting detective fishes a second phone from an inside pocket of his coat. He answers it and puts the call on speaker. The feminine voice speaks haltingly, as if reading from a source that's writing while it's being read...
"I'm so glad you've found my puzzle, Sherlock. I should take points for using the doctor, but he most likely won't be much use." John raises panicked eyes to Sherlock's pale ones. He knows what's about to be said. "I'll give you 12 hours to figure this one out. If you don't, the doctor's replacement won't be as lucky as he was." The call is disconnected and the cab is deathly silent for a few moments. John's left hand trembles, and he grips his cane as tightly as he can. He tries not to think of the innocent woman wearing a new Semtex vest somewhere in London, praying for deliverance. Certainly the Irish madman won't make the same mistake he did with John - he'll have done some research this time and chosen a victim without the ability to escape. He wipes his right hand over his face, terrified of doing nothing, equally afraid to face this unknown killer. When Sherlock reaches over to place a long-fingered hand over his, he looks up, startled. There's a fierceness in Sherlock's eyes that warms John down to the soles of his feet. Together they can stop him.
Sherlock is uncertain as to why he knew he needed to touch John at that moment. Interpersonal skills are not his strong suit by any stretch of the imagination. Something about this man, though, makes him want to protect, not just solve. He keeps his hand on John's until they reach Bart's. It is comforting to have contact with another person, or perhaps it's just this particular person. When the cab pulls up in front of the hospital, John is again left to pay the fare, again with Sherlock's money - he'd forgotten to return the wallet. It can wait. In the lab, Sherlock is approached by a pretty young girl in a lab coat. John hangs back, waiting to be noticed or sent to do some errand.
"John, this is Molly Hooper. She works here. Molly, John." Sherlock waves his hand between them, then scurries away to set up his equipment. John shakes Molly's proffered hand.
"Dr John Watson. He's here a lot, is he?"
"Oh yes, always doing experiments." Molly smiles slightly, though her eyes are asking a million questions. "Are you working with him?"
"Got roped into it. He needed a doctor at a crime scene and I was an army medic - "
"Molly, stop chattering at John. I need him." Sherlock's voice cracks like a whip in the small space. John smiles apologetically when Molly waves him away, flustered. She leaves them alone as soon as possible.
"You can be nicer to her." John doesn't mean to say it, but the words are out before he can stop them. Sherlock doesn't look up from the microscope; for all he knows, Sherlock didn't even hear him. Sighing, John checks to see what's on the table of the microscope - it's a bit of the gray mucus he'd collected from the body.
"An interesting question you posed earlier. If smoke inhalation is the cause of death, why would the body be deposited near the river? Answer: it was meant to be found, not burned up."
"You don't think that was the cause of death."
Sherlock looks up at this. No one, except perhaps his brother, has been able to keep up with him, and yet here is a man who is a step ahead. "Obvious." John purses his lips.
"Then what is?"
"I may be able to find something in the sample you provided, but there is no guarantee it will produce results. Most likely we will need to examine the body more closely. Perhaps Molly will have some insight. She is quite competent at her job." Sherlock studiously avoids John's eyes as he says this last bit, assuming John will look smug or say "I told you so." He does neither, just sits a little down the table and waits.
Extraordinary.
Approximately half an hour later, Sherlock has no new information and sends John to find Molly. He finds her in the mortuary and watches her for a moment. She performs her work with a brisk efficiency that John appreciates as a medical professional.
"Miss Hooper?" he calls quietly but she still jumps at the sound of his voice. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you... Sherlock was asking for you."
"Really?" Her eyes brighten and her smile widens. John wonders if there's some history there or if Molly's simply harboring a crush. He really couldn't blame her for it if she is. She finishes her task quickly but correctly, then hurries off, apparently forgetting about John. Shaking his head, he sets off for the lab. It's not the first time he's been forgotten.
On his way back to the lab, John encounters Mike Stamford, an old friend and former classmate. They chat amiably for a moment, making indefinite plans to get coffee and catch up soon.
"Where have you been?" Sherlock demands as soon as John enters the lab. "Molly got here before you. Did she leave you to fend for yourself?" Molly blushes, realizing she did just that.
"Saw a mate from when I trained here. Stopped for a chat." John groans as he sits; his leg is starting to ache.
"Don't sit, we're leaving. The body won't be ready for some time." Sherlock pulls on his coat and wraps his scarf around his neck. It's sexier than it should be. John mentally shakes himself. Married to his work, remember? Sherlock swoops out of the room, John following, leaning more heavily on his cane than earlier in the day. He wonders if Sherlock realizes he's slowed down his stride to keep pace with John. Probably not. Reading too much into things again, Watson.
The cab ride back to Baker Street, however, is charged with something that wasn't there earlier. Sherlock feels it and squirms a little, unfamiliar with the feeling. John pointedly ignores it, the same way he ignores the looks Sherlock is giving him every few moments. He refuses to let himself hope, to even consider the possibility of him and Sherlock as a couple. They'd barely met when Sherlock made his stance on relationships and his disdain for them very clear. Who is he to attempt to change someone's mind?