Chapter Text
Sherlock spent one day in the hospital, annoying the staff enough that they let him sign out earlier than John thought was medically advisable.
He followed Sherlock back to the other man’s flat, unsure what he was doing there.
“I play the violin and sometimes don’t talk for days on end, will that bother you?” Sherlock asked as he was hanging up his coat. As his scarf was removed, the vivid bruising from the attack leapt out against his pale skin. John had to mentally shake himself to answer.
“Sorry, what?”
“You have nothing to do and are very bored,” Sherlock said, mild impatience in his tone as he stalked through the room and threw himself onto the sofa that was against the wall. “As you do not know how to crossover…”
“Do you know how?” John asked curiously. Sherlock was strange enough that anything was possible.
“Of course not,” Sherlock said disdainfully, “Do I look like a ghost to you? Crossing over has never interested me. If I ever knew anything about it I must have deleted it.”
“Deleted it?”
“Irrelevant,” Sherlock said, waving one hand idly. “My point is that you have nothing to do. So, you can continue to aimlessly wander until you go insane from boredom or…”
“You want me to stay with you? To talk to you about your mad cases?” John asked, incredulous. He remembered what Sherlock had said earlier. Genius needs an audience. Perhaps that was true, but it was also possible that the other man was lonely.
“You are more interesting than the skull,” Sherlock said, and for some reason John decided to take that as a compliment.
“Skull?” he asked, confused. Sherlock simply waved a hand in the vague direction of the mantle, and sure enough there was a human skull sitting there. “Why the hell…? No, you know what, I don’t want to know.”
Sherlock gave a small smile at that, steepling his fingers under his chin. “There’s been two suicides that the police believe are linked.”
“And you don’t think they are?” John asked. He recalled the Detective Inspector who had shown up to arrest the murderer (Lestrade, according to Sherlock), talking to his Sargent about a second serial suicide.
“They are linked, but they aren’t suicides,” Sherlock said. “There will be more. It’s murder, it has to be. A serial killer, most likely. Serial killers are always hard, you have to wait for them to make a mistake. Lestrade will call me in when something changes.”
“How do you know that they will make a mistake?” John asked, frowning as he looked at the chairs. It took a few minutes and concentration, but he managed to sit in one of the chairs.
“They always do,” Sherlock replied, not opening his eyes. “It is simply a matter of time until they make a mistake. We will be called in then, I have no doubt. Lestrade has held off this long, but as soon as something changes, he will call.”
“And none of them will be surprised to see you talking to thin air?” John asked dubiously. He doubted anyone at the crime scene would be able to see him, so for all intents and purposes, they would think that Sherlock had lost his mind and started talking to thin air.
“I’ll tell them that I have an imaginary friend,” Sherlock said dryly, opening his eyes to look over at John, who huffed a laugh. “Regardless, they are used to my oddities, I doubt that talking to myself will cause them alarm.” It wouldn’t be the first time he had appeared to talk to himself, when he was working through a deduction. He usually convinced Lestrade to give him privacy while examining the body, so it would be simple enough for John to accompany him.
John thought about the things Sherlock had been able to tell about him just by looking at him, and the fact that the man had been in the morgue beating corpses with wrenches, and he decided that the man was right. Sherlock was brilliant, and there was a method to his madness, but he didn’t think that most people took the time to discover the method. They only ever saw the madness.
“Also, Lestrade knows that I can speak to ghosts,” Sherlock added, drawing John out of his thoughts. “The man is more observant than the idiots who work with him, and is actually moderately intelligent.” It had been an accident, a moment of sloppiness on Sherlock’s part and observation on Lestrade’s, and he had been forced to explain to Lestrade, ensuring that the man would keep his silence on the matter afterwards. “He thinks that I should use it to assist with cases more often, while I dislike taking the easy route.”
He would need to have evidence to back whatever he was told, after all, so there was no point in asking for the identity of the murderer from the ghosts that occasionally hung around until after their cases were solved. It was better, more challenging, if he ignored the ghosts and simply solved the cases his way. He needed the challenge, the puzzles, after all, so ‘cheating’, as he called it, would mean that there was nothing for him to do.
“So…this is what you do?” John asked. “It wasn’t a one-time thing, the police honestly consult you to help them solve their cases. Do you…always end up in as much trouble as you did last time?” He could still remember how helpless he had felt, unable to do anything to help Sherlock as the murderer tried to strangle him. If it hadn’t been for Lestrade showing up when he did, John didn’t doubt that Sherlock would have joined him. It had been horrible being that helpless, knowing that if he had been alive, he would have been more help. He didn’t know if he would be able to handle being an observer every time Sherlock was in danger without going mad.
“I do, as the nature of my work demands,” Sherlock replied, before going still and silent. John didn’t fully understand the whole mind palace thing, but he knew that he wouldn’t be getting anything further out of Sherlock for awhile, so John decided to spend the time wandering around the flat, looking at all of the odd things that Sherlock had apparently collected.