AN: Good news, everyone! Updates will be back to every day/every other day, because I've worked out all my plot kinks and because exams are over (and I passed everything!) Now excuse me while I go write some more humorous drabbles for Anything You can Do, because the thickening of this plot is making my palms sweat, and I'm the one writing it.

Enjoy!

The night had been long, very long.

Neither had slept. Both had tried, but it had been quite a pointless notion. There was too much eagerness, too much anxiety, too much excitement charging the air between them to let them sleep. John had retreated to his room for an hour, but had realized that if he was just going to roll around fitfully on his bed, he might as well expend his excess energy doing something useful. He had trudged back downstairs to find Sherlock – uncharacteristically and rather amusingly adorned with safety goggles and a respirator – occupying himself with a truly noxious-smelling series of experiments.

Sherlock had asked the bleary and pyjamaed John to hand him a notepad, and he had done so. Then Sherlock had handed him a test tube and asked him to neutralize an acid, and he had done so, and before he knew it, he was equipped with his own goggles and respirator – which did not help in the least with the smell – and was properly assisting the eccentric genius with measurements and pipettes and tweezers as he chemically stripped the flesh from a mouse carcass. Sherlock had never really requested his help in kitchen lab before, and John had never really offered it, but in the silent fluorescent light of that very early morning at Baker Street, and in anticipation of the ever-nearing mission ahead, the two men had entered into a wordless symbiotic state, each feeding on the other's anticipation.

The dark hours ticked past them, marked by one small chemical fire, one broken beaker, and no fewer than fifty-eight watch-checks; thirty-five from John and twenty-three from Sherlock.

It had been fifteen hours, and it was time for action.

Sherlock checked his watch one last time, then met John's eyes and nodded. They snatched up shoes, coats, and – under the guise of looking for a torch – Sherlock pulled open the desk drawer and slipped John's pistol into his coat pocket.

"Coming?" John asked, turning to glance back from the door.

"Yep." Sherlock replied nonchalantly, "finding" the torch suddenly and brushing past him down the stairs, hands still buried in his pockets.

They took a cab to a street corner nearly half a mile from the house to avoid prying eyes, and though John watched carefully, Sherlock's gait was swift, steady, and confident.

"We'll have to be quick," the detective warned, "we won't have more than half an hour, and we'll have to be very careful about what we disturb and what we leave for Lestrade to find."

"What do you need me to do?"

"You'll go to the basement, where you'll find a smallish trunk freezer."

"How do you know?"

"Because people don't keep frozen semen in their kitchens."

John pursed his lips. "Right."

"There will be more than one vial, take one, leave the rest."

"What are you going to do?"

Sherlock seemed to be measuring his answer carefully. "I'm going to figure out what was so important to Adrienne Van Orden that he killed three little girls to secure it."

Sherlock was often evasive – very often, but John knew him well enough by now that something in the detective's tone set him on edge. He opened his mouth to press the matter further, but Sherlock cut him off.

"I'll pick the lock on the back door" he decided, taking a bafflingly roundabout route to reach the house in question, "front door is too conspicuous, there may already be neighbors awake. It'll lead into the kitchen. I'll stay there and you'll head for the basement. If you see anything down there that looks suspicious, especially small, blunt implements or anything that could be used as a garrotte, check it for blood and photograph it, but be quick, this is not a crime scene investigation. I'll have a poke around some things, then find the linen closet to compare the blue sheet, that's likely upstairs, and I'll meet you back in the kitchen. With any luck we'll be in and out in five minutes."

"I wouldn't say we're terribly lucky, you and I."

Sherlock glanced at him dubiously. "With intelligence and diligence, we'll be in and out in five minutes."

John realized a bit belatedly that Sherlock had led then down an alley to a parallel street, one that approached the back of the house, flanked by tiny city gardens and cellar doors. He dropped his voice to a whisper, knowing that there were likely at least a few very early risers on this street.

"Sherlock?"

"Not now."

"Sherlock, there's something you're not telling me. You know what it is that the kid was after, you realised something the second you looked in through the front door, you're just trying to confirm it. What are you looking for? Tell me."

"Shh!" He slipped into a slow, crouching creep as they approached the grayish, windowed aluminum door set into the back of the Van Ordens' house. He threw a scathing look back toward his companion to keep him silent and dug in his jacket pocket for the little leather envelope that housed his lock picking set.

John's jaw clenched in irritation as Sherlock knelt beside him and began clicking and scraping softly at the doorknob with his squiggly little bits of metal.

So. This was him being treated like a dog again? The moment he wasn't saving Sherlock's life his only function was to follow blindly, to follow someone who wouldn't even tell him where he was being led. Theirs was truly a bipolar relationship, one moment absolute trust, the next a gaping rift. When exactly was he to be privy to the mind of the great Sherlock Holmes? His throat burned with the rawness of his indignation, but now was not the time (now was never the time, was it?) and he kept his mouth shut.

Sherlock's head snapped up at the next click and with practiced care he eased the door open quietly and nodded John inside ahead of him. John, stiffly, obliged. The door opened into a narrow, tiled hallway, which in turn led into the small but well-furnished kitchen. Sherlock didn't even raise his head to look around, the only move he made was a beeline to the very next door on the left, which he pulled open to reveal an unlit staircase leading to the basement. How he had known which door was which, John had no idea, but the doctor glanced down into the inky abyss with more fear than he would have admitted. Fear of the dark is primal. It's something you're born with.

Sherlock leaned so close that his lips nearly brushed John's ear and whispered, quietly but clearly: "don't turn on any overhead lights," he extracted the torch from his pocket and John took it, "there are three high windows at the front of the house, so keep the beam low. I'll be either here or upstairs when you return, if I'm not in the kitchen, wait for me there, I won't be a minute." John nodded and with a final weighted look at the detective, plunged into the darkness.

Sherlock did not shut the door behind him, but waited until the sound of John's hesitant footsteps reached the bottom of the staircase before turning hurriedly back to the kitchen. The calendar was still clipped on the fridge, and still damningly turned to November rather than the current month of October, but by itself it was inconsequential.

"Where have you hidden it, you little bastard?" He mouthed to himself, running his hand over the circled date, the fourteenth. "You didn't destroy it, it's important to you. It's not hidden well, you were panicking. Where did you throw it?" He glanced around, his eyes jumping across each of the eight drawers arrayed beneath the countertop. Junk drawer. Wear pattern around the edges, obvious. He crossed the room and pulled it open, only to be met with a litany of papers and scraps and brochures. Forest for the trees? Not all that terribly clever, but then, you are only eleven. He plunged his hand into the mess and sifted through, knowing exactly what he was looking for, but taking care to be systematic. His fingers began to fumble impatiently as he reached the bottom of the pile, wondering if he had underestimated the child's ingenuity, but with a small, irrepressible cry of triumph, his fingers closed around it.

Nothing more than a small pamphlet, the glossy, thin, black pamphlet that he had glimpsed the day before when it had been clipped to the refrigerator, a pamphlet that no-one else would have looked twice at, but which had made Sherlock's hair stand on end as he had seen it from all the way at the other end of the house, through the crack of the open front door.

He hadn't been sure then; the paper had been far away, the writing small, and he had seen it for only an instant, but he was sure now as he read the bold, white, serif title on the cover.

His pulse thumped loudly in his ears once – only once, then was still.

The Powers Institute

The coat of arms beneath contained a shield, a bottom quarter of which contained a tiny, stylized, cameo-style profile. For Sherlock Holmes, a profile he would have recognized anywhere.

It was bait.

It was a game.

He straightened up, pamphlet in hand, his breath coming slightly faster, the corner of his mouth twitching, somewhere on the border between a grimace and a smile.

He heard footsteps, the softest, most measured of footsteps behind him, and quiet, hesitant breathing. He started to turn, an excited whisper of "John!" already condensing on his parted lips, but it never got an instant further. The name never escaped his mouth.

The pain shot through him like so many volts, blossoming hot and cold at once as it radiated from the freshly-torn skin and nerves, thin muscle and punctured membrane just beneath the bottom of his ribcage. Even before the first thick rush of blood bathed his side his head began to spin. The glossy black pamphlet fluttered to the floor.

He'd been stabbed before, he knew.