No warnings to speak of this time, you may (or may not) be pleased to hear.
Reviews always very welcome.
Also, because I haven't said yet, I don't own Sherlock. I do on the other hand own my plot, except the links to the actual series :P
On the cab ride back from the interview with the Mitchells, Sherlock is uncharacteristically quiet. It's too much for John to hope that the murder and its implications have actually affected him, but he does feel there's ground to hope that it means he's thinking – and likely productively.
John sneaks a sideways glance at his flatmate. Sherlock's eyes are staring, unfocussed through the dark window. He appears entirely immersed in the inner workings of his mind.
"Yes, John?"
His expression stays precisely the same, and were it not for the slight movement in his lips, John would have wondered if he imagined the sound. As it is, the response is still a surprise.
"How..?" he asks incredulously, unable to stop himself. He shakes his head, sighs, and turns his attention to the window opposite Sherlock's.
"Reflection," comes the immediate answer; Sherlock's usual bored drawl. "I assume you wanted something."
John's head snaps back round. He looks at Sherlock, eyebrows raised involuntarily in surprise at the detective's seeming cooperation. When he was quiet, he rarely answered questions, let alone listened to somebody else. A smile curves John's lips at this thought; although the expression itself is encouraging as well as pleased.
"Got anything?"
He hears Sherlock make an indistinct noise in the back of his throat, halfway between a scoff and an exasperated sigh. The detective still seems willing to answer, however, because he drags his attention from the orange and pale gold streaks flying past the dark glass, fixing his gaze instead on his flatmate.
"Not much."
John is surprised by the seeming lack of irony in such a response. Sherlock's lips are set in a frown that John now recognises he's been wearing all afternoon, his brows are furrowed, and the statement seemed more genuine than the usual more arrogant response that the particular phrase generally entails. John raises his eyebrows at the unusual tone. It's only now, with his flatmate's face illuminated only by shop windows and streetlights, that John realises. Sherlock looks worried: the expression thrown into sharp relief by the black shadows that flicker across his face. The realisation unnerves the doctor, who tries not to let it show on his face.
"Really?" he asks him, smiling. "That's not like you."
It's a hint for Sherlock to elaborate, one which the detective deliberately ignores.
"Care to tell me what you have got?" he prompts, going for a more direct assault. Sherlock sits in silence, leaving John to grind his teeth, and wait for the man to decide the time was appropriate to speak. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking Sherlock was being cooperative.
He does speak eventually – genius needing an audience and all that – first pressing his fingertips into a pyramid beneath his chin. John will never understand his fascination with that pose, but he doesn't comment; just watches the man eagerly. His face is still twisted in what appears to be worry, and such an obvious display of emotion from Sherlock Holmes of all people puts John on edge.
He wants to rip the expression off the man's features, smack him round the head and tell him to stop being stupid. He can't quite explain why, so just sits and waits, watching Sherlock intently.
"This was meant to hurt these people, John," the man beside him says slowly, his eyes sliding sideways to meet his flatmate's. His voice is quiet, perhaps not to pique the interest of the cabbie, but the doctor is positive he hears a worried rasp that he's never heard before. He says nothing, just continues to listen. "The killer left her face intact. The part you recognise a person by. He wanted her recognised. He wanted to hurt them."
"He?" John asked, interested.
"Habit," Sherlock tells him, waving one hand dismissively. "I don't like this, John."
"You're kidding."
The comment comes out unbidden, almost,designed to be offhand - but he's met with a glare of such intensity and ferocity that he recoils into the leather of the seat. The light from the streetlights outside flickers in the detective's eyes as he glares: it's like the irises are literally burning with anger.
Reclining into the seat of that cab, watching his city blur past as he and Sherlock sit in stony silence; John Watson begins to get a very bad feeling about this particular case, and shivers. A shard of dread burrows into his heart, making him far colder than the wind outside could. That anger was the second explicit emotion in so many minutes from his self-proclaimed sociopath of a flatmate. Something had changed, and John didn't need to be the world's only consulting detective to realise that things boded ill.
"Are you enjoying this?" The detective asks into the silence. His voice is low and as aggressive as his glare.
"No," John replies quite honestly, trying to avoid eye contact.
"Then don't assume I am," the detective snaps. He pulls his phone from his coat pocket and begins texting, stabbing the keys unecessarily hard.
John just sighs in defeat, and returns his attention to the window, feeling guilty. He hadn't meant to suggest Sherlock in any way wanted children dead.
But then again, he reflects angrily, Sherlock usually didn't care.
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It's been two months since Lestrade called the first murder to their attention, and Sherlock and John are inside 221B Baker Street. Sherlock's sitting upright on the sofa, his eyes fixed on the wall, unblinking. John stands next to him. He's less eager to look at the wall but does so anyway, surveying it with a clenched jaw as a show of solidarity.
The wall itself is plastered with pictures and notes. There are photos of all the victims from the morgue, notes, locations, grainy CCTV footage, newspaper cuttings, and hastily scrawled extracts from news reports. There are photos of the families, family history, diary extracts even. Everything is connected with arrows and notes scrawled along them; string if it was to hand when Sherlock had a thought.
There's also an angry black biro scribble to the left of the main collage, something Mrs Hudson had already picked up on, and had not been pleased with.
Sherlock had blamed it on John.
The detective lets out his breath slowly, the air hissing between his teeth. His eyes shut momentarily, away from the wall, his fingers lift from his lap to press together. John watches him.
"Tell me what we've got again," the detective murmurs, barely audible, but John picks up on the request.
"All five from the same school. Seemingly no links, other than they'd all been taking drugs. Oh wait – all only children. All burnt." John stops, long enough for his flatmate to open his eyes and look up at him in curiosity and faint annoyance. "I'm sorry, Sherlock, but this looks like Moriarty."
"Why?"
His voice is sharp and accusatory.
"Who else would do this?"
"Oh, now I see it," Sherlock says, his voice icy and sarcastic. "How did I miss something so obvious?"
"Well you think it's him too!" John protests, sighing. His voice is tired, and he shuts his own eyes for a second, and finds the pictures of the dead children are ingrained on the insides of his eyelids. When he opens them, Sherlock's expression is curious, and tinged with concern. John takes a breath."We've got to stop this; please don't try and protect him."
He's a little afraid to meet the other man's gaze after that sentence, but he does so anyway, with defiance. The detective's expression is unreadable, but it's not hostile. He brings his legs up onto the couch and stares into space, apparently thoughtful. Sighing, John sits down next to him, resting one arm along the back of the seat.
"Sorry," he says.
"No," Sherlock replies, waving away the apology, and shaking his head. "But Moriarty's…he's so clever. I don't know if he'd make it this obvious."
"Remind what about this case is in any way 'obvious'"
"The dead children, the link to drug addiction, the killer who's in jail. It's so meticulous, seems engineered specifically for me – would he be that obvious?"
John stares at Sherlock, wondering briefly if the man had lost his mind.
"You're saying that it looks so much like something Moriarty would do…that it's not."
"To put it crudely."
Sherlock crosses his legs, glancing sideways at John and rolling his eyes.
"What?"
"You're insane!" John bursts out, utterly unable to stop himself, and disinclined to do so anyway. "This is you! You told me that my sister was an alcoholic by my phone, and you won't trust your instincts and just accept that this is Moriarty?"
He shakes his head in disbelief. An incredulous laugh escapes his lips, despite the lack of humour of the situation. At his words, the detective's eyebrows dart upwards briefly, his expression becomes sceptical. He doesn't answer this time, merely shoots a glare in his flatmate's direction, and turns away. John, however, is unprepared to let the matter drop.
"This has got to be him."
There's no reply, and John takes the opportunity to continue without the usual condescending interjection.
"It's obvious. The drugs, the kids, the burning…he said he was going to burn your heart out." The revelation draws no reaction from the younger man, who seems oblivious to John's outburst. He stays sitting perfectly still: almost statuesque – porcelain skin, and dark hair dipping into his eyes. John grinds his teeth. "Sherlock! Listen to me."
The statue moves, his head jerking in John's direction almost as if he were trying to flick off a particularly irritating fly, then he freezes again. Losing patience, John elbows him in the ribs.
"Shut up. I'm thinking."
The shorter man takes absolutely no notice, getting up and beginning to pace in agitation, back and forth, past the sofa.
"Do you remember what happened last time you didn't think things through with Moriarty?" John asks, his voice rising. "We got blown up in a bloody swimming pool, and we're lucky to be alive. So, if you think I'm going to sit here and let you pretend that it isn't him – "
John's not really sure what he intends to add onto the end of that sentence, but it turns out not to matter: because Sherlock gets up and strides away from him, stopping in the doorframe to his bedroom, where he turns to John, eyes blazing.
"I told you that your brother was an alcoholic from your mobile phone," he corrects. "My logic is not infallible, John, it's flawed. And an instinct isn't even logic, it's just a feeling: it's very imprecise. I will not be blinded by a belief that Moriarty is behind every murder, hiding around every corner, because he's not. If I decide it's him with no evidence, then I blind myself to other options, we might overlook the real culprit. I won't do it."
"Will you just bloody trust yourself?" John asks, his voice rising further to match Sherlock's. "Hell, I do; but I'm beginning to question why right now! You're blinding yourself to anything ever being Moriarty, just in case it's not."
Sherlock seems to contemplate him for a few seconds. Perhaps he's taken the point on board, because there's no angry retaliation. He's wearing an odd expression, and for a moment John thinks he's going to say something: but then he turns on his heel, slamming his bedroom door so hard behind him that a couple of drawing pins tumble from the wall.
Sighing, John goes to re-secure them, muttering curses under his breath, and continually glancing at the door behind which Sherlock had just vanished. He watches the blank wood for several minutes, but it becomes apparent that Sherlock is not going to reappear through it. Sighing, John draws a hand across his forehead, and picks his way towards the kitchen.
Steaming mug of tea in hand, he feels far less agitated, and even prepared to take yet another look at Sherlock's haphazard wall-chart. He negotiates the mess on the floor easily, coming to rest in front of the chart. He disregards the various map references and CCTV photos (Scotland Yard were handling that, although still to no avail: nobody seeming to have any link to the crime. Even with Sherlock's theory of the use of decoys, the lack of information is unnerving) of the actual murder locations, focussing instead on the photos of the deceased children.
The pictures are genuinely horrific – he's warned Mrs Hudson not to take too close a look at the new décor, though he suspects she's caught a glance – and John can see at a glance why Lestrade called Sherlock in immediately. What he hates most, he supposes, is not the charred remains, but the faces left intact. It reminds him that the burned flesh, the blackened remains – they were once people. Children, to make it worse. He hates the innocent blue eyes gazing up at him, the pain twisted into the marble foreheads, the frowns so out of place on such young faces. There's one particular little girl that John finds very hard to look at; the very first victim. He feels guilty about it – the death of any child a tragedy, he shouldn't single out one more sad than the other – but it's a gut reaction, he doesn't seem able to help himself. The girl is about nine, though slightly thinner than usual for that age group, with curly black hair and eyes the exact shade of Sherlock's. She's even got the same high cheekbones as the detective. John wonders if Moriarty scoured London for that child that looked so much like the consulting detective. Was it a warning? He feels slightly sick at the thought, and sips his tea hastily, trying to push it away.
The tear streaked faces of Laura's parents flash into his mind, and he squeezes his eyes shut, as if he could tear the image from his brain just by pressing his eyelids together. A fierce bubble of hate towards Moriarty courses through him like poison. If the man were to walk into 221B right now, John would have shot him stone dead without a second thought. It was more than he deserved, anyway.
He realises, suddenly, that he's shaking with anger and tries to draw his train of thought away from Moriarty.
It might have taken the death of (was it six children, now?) to achieve it, but he, Sherlock and the metropolitan police had managed to discover a few more details. Every single one of the children was an only child. It adds weight to Sherlock's argument that this venture is designed to hurt people, but frustratingly that's all it's added. They are at least all in agreement that after six virtually identical deaths, this similarity is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Secondly, there is a definite link with the drugs problem. All of the children had been being supplied heroin, it was found in their bloodstream in the post-mortem. Therefore, they were presumably persuaded to their place of decease to collect the substances, although Sherlock has not been able to confirm this for definite. All had said they were going to meet friends.
Finally, all were killed in seemingly open spaces, like the first park, yet there is no footage of the murders. They've found the kids walking alone to their place of decease, but nothing more.
Both Sherlock and Lestrade have agreed that the dealers have some connection to the killer, and as such Lestrade has become hell bent on tracking them down. As usual, Sherlock had scoffed, claiming himself to be the only one capable of doing such a job. As yet, all he has done is make a wall chart and argue about Moriarty, while Lestrade has actually caught some people linked (albeit tenuously) with the dealers, and begun questioning them mercilessly.
It's Sherlock's apparent lack of motivation that scares John most. He can tell that the man is affected by the death of children more than adults, but he hasn't done very much, for him. He's had a great deal of talks with all the victims families, collected vast amounts of data and thought for days on end without moving or eating: but he hasn't done anything practical, and John's sure they've got enough to go on to do something.
That wasn't true, actually. He went to the supermarket about a week ago and returned with what had to be the store's entire supply of nicotine patches, and no milk.
In all honesty, John thinks, as he turns away from the wall chart and settles in the armchair, he's scared that Sherlock is trying to protect Moriarty. Even if it's not conscious, John still sees it as a real possibility: he does after all find the man fascinating. His work would definitely be less challenging were Moriarty not around, and John worries that the detective's stalling to try and hang on to the more interesting cases, the game.
He shrugs to himself, feeling guilty for his rather damning evaluation of the man. Maybe Sherlock was trying: maybe it was just his own desperation to do something about this.
He sighs, takes a gulp of tea, and leans into the cushioning of the armchair. He'll readily admit he's not enjoying this case as much as he usually does; often glad for Monday to come back around and to be called into work. There's less running and deducting and kidnapping; and more frustration and dead ends and a growing list of dead kids. He exhales out his nose, and prays that Sherlock comes to his senses.