Chapter Text
John was coming up the stairs more quickly than he usually did after working a shift at the clinic. Usually, he’d be dragging himself up the stairs, ready to relax in his chair with a cup of tea and the newspaper. He burst through the door with an energy that was normally reserved for following Sherlock around the city, game on.
“Sherlock!” When he didn’t get an immediate reply, he yelled again, “Sherlock!”
John raced through the door into the kitchen, expecting to find Sherlock sitting behind his microscope, examining the tissue slides from the bucket experiment. But he wasn’t there.
“There’s no need to yell, John. I’m right here.”
Sherlock had slipped up behind John, who, already bursting with excitement, all but screamed when he heard Sherlock’s voice in his ear. He’d normally be irritated with Sherlock for sneaking up behind him, but this time he just grinned and grabbed Sherlock’s shoulders, making sure he couldn’t continue on to the table or anywhere else for that matter.
“Fantastic news. Fantastic.”
“That I’m right here? Well, you should feel honored, really.”
“No, Sherlock. I have fantastic news. Brilliant.”
“You have my undivided attention” says Sherlock as he raises his phone and starts texting someone. His lips are twitching into a grin, but he manages to keep it at bay.
“Put the bloody phone down! Pay attention!” John sounds frustrated, but the smile hasn’t left his face. When Sherlock mumbles something along the lines of “Won’t be but a moment, John,” he grabs the phone from Sherlock’s hands and throws it down the hall.
Sherlock glares down at John, hands still poised in front of him as if the phone were still there. “Spit it out.”
John claps him on the shoulders, still smiling. “It seems the blog has attracted something of a following in the states, and there’s a publisher that wants to make a book out of it. Start with some of the stuff that’s already there, polish it up a bit, but write new stuff about the other cases. Anything new would be mostly for the book, so the blog itself would have to change a bit, but that won’t be a problem. And you’d write the introduction and could add commentary and the like. Maybe a chapter on what happened during those two years away. They’re offering a huge advance, that means I could stop working at the clinic -”
“That would be convenient.”
“-and I could just work with you on cases and on the book. It’s bloody brilliant.”
Sherlock looks down at John, smile spread across his face. He’s already thought of a thousand ways he could tease his blogger, like asking if the book will be shelved in the fiction section, but he just smiles, gives John’s good shoulder a squeeze, a steps around him, going to retrieve his phone from where it landed on the floor.
“Mycroft had said something about your blog showing an increase in traffic from New York recently. I wondered if that might be a possibility.”
“Mycroft monitors my blog traffic?”
“I’m sure he has an underling do it, but he gets a report if anything is unusual.”
“Is he always watching us?”
“In some way or another, I’m sure he is. He knows the boundaries, though. And I’ve learned to deal with it as long as he respects those boundaries. It comes in handy now and then.” Sherlock went back to his texting.
John thought back on times when he’d gotten texts from Mycroft telling him information that he needed to know at just the moment he needed to know it, or when help had arrived at just the right time. He supposed he’d gotten use to Mycroft’s presence, though he was still annoyed by the way he’d just show up unexpectedly or send a car to summon him.
“Right. Well, mystery solved. He doesn’t have to wonder anymore. It seems an editor from here in London transferred to the New York office. Followed the blog religiously until you fell and I stopped writing. When he heard you were back from the dead, he started keeping an eye out for new updates. He loved the post about the bomb on the tube, and he took the idea to his boss. They called me today, while I was on my lunch break.”
“Have you agreed to anything yet?”
“No. Not yet. I told them I had to talk it over with you first, since it’s about you and I’m hoping you’ll help with the project. It should give you something to do during your downtime. They said they’d send over a preliminary contract for us to take a look at.”
“I’ve never given any thought to working on a book, but I do like the idea of you not working at the clinic anymore. I suppose I could help out a when I don’t have a case going. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? I thought you actually enjoyed being a doctor.”
“I did. I do, but working with you is...well, it’s lot more exciting than doing a prostate exam or having some kid throw up on me, which happened this morning-”
“Ah, yes. The scrubs. And I thought I got a faint whiff of vomit as I walked past you. It was your second - no third patient this morning. He told his mother he was feeling better when he woke up and wanted to go to school, so she gave him cereal for breakfast. Unfortunately, the milk had just turned. She had a cold, so she didn’t notice the slightly sour smell. All of the sugar in the cereal kept him from noticing the taste until he’d had several bites. He started to feel nauseated again, so his mother decided a visit to the clinic was in order. He managed to keep down his cereal, though, until he got on your exam table. Lucky you.”
John stared at him, narrowing his eyes in the way that Sherlock had come to know meant he was pretty sure he’d followed most of Sherlock’s reasoning, but that there were still a few gaps. He was waiting for Sherlock to fill them in.
“How’d you know it was cereal? And that it was a boy?”
Sherlock looked back down at his phone as he received a response to the message he’d just sent. “In addition to the faint smell of vomit, there’s a hint of sour milk. There’s also a bit of marshmallow stuck behind your ear from one of those monster cereals that is marketed to boys between the ages of 6 and 9 years old.”
John reaches up to pull the bit of marshmallow from behind his ear. “You’re right. As usual.”
Sherlock goes to sit in his chair, and John, his exhaustion finally catching up with him, falls down in his own, leaning back and resting his eyes.
“I like what we do, and I like writing about it. It would be damn near perfect if I could get paid a proper wage for it, so, yeah. I’d like to give it a go. See what they have to offer. You probably know a lawyer that can look over the contracts for us, right? Probably one that owes you a favor?”
“One or two.” Sherlock assumes the conversation is over, stares down at his phone, his fingers moving swiftly over the keys and his attention elsewhere. John realizes that there will not be any further conversation on the subject at the moment, so he gets up and heads off to take a shower.
Sherlock reads back over the exchange he’s just had with his brother via text.
S - Publishing company source of NYC traffic?
M - Yes. Call was legitimate. Official offer is in John’s inbox now. He should take it.
S - Identity of Anonymous?
M - Still looking.
S - Threat?
M - Not likely. But we’ll keep watch.
Sherlock could hear the shower going down the hall. He fetched his laptop and logged in to John’s blog. There’d been a new message from Anonymous every few days for the last two weeks, since John had been ill. They were all similar in tone, but not overtly threatening. Insulting, but not threatening. Sherlock was still bothered by them, but he hadn’t yet figured out why. For now, he was making sure to copy each one. He had a file going. And he’d asked Mycroft to monitor the traffic to the blog. Just in case.
He decided now was the time to delete them all, since John was likely to start looking back over his old posts soon, in preparation for the book. Sherlock heard John heading back down stairs after changing, and he closed the laptop, just as John made it to the kitchen and started going through the take away menus.
“Lestrade texted, inviting us round to the pub. I’d normally decline, but I thought a celebration might be in order. What do you say?” Sherlock stood and smiled, reaching for his scarf on the desk.
John tried not to look too surprised, but he was quite pleased by Sherlock’s offer.
“I’ll just grab my coat.”