John

As adrenaline pumped through my veins, blood pumped out of them through the bullet wound in my arm. I reassured myself with the fact that I would have stopped feeling the pain or lost consciousness a long time ago if the situation was that serious, life threatening, like I had last time. I let my injured arm drop to my side and forced myself to forget about it, raising the pistol that had been with me and protected me for nearly a year on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and cocking it. I aimed it at Sherlock's forehead which would of course be whoever came though the door's forehead. I didn't want to use the gun but I would do so willingly to protect my friends.

"Ready?" Sherlock asked, grimacing as door once again shuddered against his back.

I nodded and tried to wipe my forehead so the sweat didn't run into my eyes but I automatically used the arm which wasn't occupied with the pistol and so only succeeded in sending a searing pain up my arm and smearing my forehead liberally with blood.

"Good." Said Sherlock, "Lestrade?"

I glanced over my left shoulder at Lestrade who nodded, jaw set, and wielded his truncheon, clutching his side with his other arm. I couldn't help wondering if we were all about to be horribly murdered; I just reminded myself to keep breathing steadily. I caught Sherlock's eye before he opened the door and he winked at me, as he had the first time we met and I felt like everything might just have been going to be okay.

Sherlock stayed boring into my head with his so-blue- they-were-almost see-through eyes, never breaking the lifeline of reassurance he managed to turn on for me in the dilation of his normally nothing voids of pupils as he reached behind him to pull the heavy door open. The corridor outside was a mass of people, I couldn't discern any faces, only muscular arms, fists ready to crush the life out of lions and battered, bloodied cudgels made of wood. They were still at the moment, breathing heavily nearly in sync like bulls; I almost expected steam to be rising from their sides. They wanted us to make the first move.

I felt mildly dizzy which helped really, it gave me a sense of detachment. Blood and sweat were running from my forehead into my eyes, blurring my vision with drops of pain.

"Hello!" Sherlock began brightly, smiling an unnervingly large grin at the group of people in front of us.

He was met with a wall of stony silence.

"Oh, come now," Sherlock continued, "I know your wife has recently left you for another man; I don't blame her really, we all know your spending more time with your laptop stash than with her." By the looks of how beetroot he was turning, Sherlock was addressing a steroid-stuffed balding man who was bursting out of his black skinny jeans.

"But," Sherlock said, walking to the man until they were practically nose to nose (I was horrified to find that I had to supress a pang of jealousy) "Your business is booming, is it not? I mean your sign making business, by the way; not this one. Anyway I would like to know why, when you have a higher salary than a premier league footballer, you resort also to selling alcohol illegally. Actually I do know why, it's because you like to water down the stock you sell and drink the rest of it neat. I would like to speak to your superior and ask them why they deemed it necessary to ask you to break my friend's ribs and face and lock him in a room, shoot my other friend and now turn up here with us all severely weakened to finish us off with bludgeons of the sort that before the murders of Harry Watson and the gentleman a few rooms away hadn't been seen since dinosaurs roamed the earth."

"Um…" I ventured, "Maybe you should stop talking now. Also, dinosaurs and humans never existed simultaneously."

"I know!" Sherlock snapped, "I was talking about the dinosaurs using the bludgeons!"

I was sceptical but had no time to revel in the fact that Sherlock made a mistake almost as monumental as not knowing the basic model of the solar system because Sherlock had obviously offended the mob by connecting them to at least two murders and reading one of them like a very open, very despicable book. The people were advancing towards us. I could see they were trying to herd us through the door and keep us cornered. This was a technique I had seen in action in Afghanistan when a few members of the Taliban had pushed a few pathetically armed civilians into an alley and shot them one by one. I raised my gun arm and fired into the midst of them; aiming to miss.

Sherlock

The raging mob of idiots scattered as the bullet from John's gun ricocheted from the floor to the ceiling to the wall and back again off the concrete. They were bad fighters; they took too long to reconfigure themselves into their previous impenetrable block of people. I took this opportunity to throw myself into the midst of them and start throwing punches- I could tell from the Moonblood Cult's representatives' body language that they were not going to talk now- they were going to bargain the only way they knew how. With their weapons.

I felt rather than heard John and Lestrade limp up behind me as I broke a woman's nose with my fist. John was holding off a small group of people by waving the gun at them, Lestrade was whacking anyone who tried to reach John's back across the shoulders with his truncheon so there was by now a small collection of thugs crippled with pain around John's feet. Something inside me hurt; I felt the poignancy of the injured looking out for each other so stepped up to behind Lestrade and did to anyone who approached him what they'd done to him- made their faces look like third-rate dog food. I did, of course, know far more advanced martial arts but I thought I'd speak to the brawl a language they could understand.

All was going very well, as I had expected, because even Lestrade on his own was three times more experienced at organised fighting than the whole of the Moonblood Cult people put together. I was just raking my nails into the corners of someone's eyeballs when a stern voice that took me back to standing in the headmistress's office and having to explain that I'd hit the Chemistry teacher because he hadn't accepted that he was wrong and I was right rang out over a tanoy system and everyone stopped.

"As amusing as this has been to witness," The disembodied voice began, "Your fisticuffs are becoming rather tiring. Minions, please tidy yourselves up and bring our guests to me."