Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time she wakes up, she is alone. Her head throbs like she spent the entire evening listening to atonal violin music at top volume, and her mouth is a desert. Her hands are cuffed behind her back—one of the hinged sets, much to her chagrin—and her first thought is that she is going to kill Sherlock, because she really has to pee and she is not in the mood for this right now.

Phantom pins and needles sting her triceps as she scoots forward. The floor is concrete—so not at the Brownstone, then—and the walls appear to be white. They reflect the overhead light with an intensity that hurts her eyes. She rolls onto her back, and her delicate surgeon’s fingers bore holes into the top of her tailbone.

There is no seam between the ceiling and the floor. As her eyes adjust to the light, she sees that the walls are curved like the ceiling of a basilica. She is the unfortunate inhabitant of what appears to be a sizeable dome.

Her annoyance skyrockets.

“Sherlock!” she bellows as soon as she finds her voice.

His reply is immediate. “Watson! WATSON!”

The urgency in his voice steals her breath.

His first thought upon waking is that he doesn’t remember falling asleep.

Not that this is unusual, per se—Sherlock Holmes rarely slips voluntarily into unconsciousness. REM cycles tend to sneak up on him, launching covert attacks when he sets up shop at the kitchen table or when he dares to settle into the chair at Watson’s bedside.

The thought of Watson fills him with a warmth that almost offsets his discomfort. His shoulders ache as though he has spent the night applying pressure at odd angles, and the paste in his mouth is unpalatable at best.

Were it not for the handcuffs securing his wrists—a steel set, hinged, most likely the Peerless 801P model—the scene would remind him uncomfortably of the crash that follows a particularly delicious heroin high.

He presses the tip of his tongue curiously to the holes at the roof of his mouth, searching his sinuses for the familiar taste of oblivion. He tastes only a hint of rose hips and pomegranate—the remnants of last night’s tea—and his chest heaves in relief. He does not want to begin exploring how he would explain a second relapse to Watson.

Did Mistress Felicia leave me cuffed last night? No. The tension in his hips wouldn’t be so prevalent if they had agreed to meet.

His eyes scan the room rapidly, searching for clues in the lack of crown molding and the kiss of the concrete floor. Its surface is deceptively smooth, almost gleaming. He can barely make out the reflection of one hazel, bloodshot eye.

Immediately irritated, he nudges himself into a sitting position and begins to work at the handcuffs as he surveys unfamiliar terrain.

His fingers manipulate the laces of his right dress shoe as he studies the slope of the white walls and the strange dome of the ceiling. There are no doors or windows, nor can he find a trapdoor in the floor, but he knows there is an exit somehow. Any space that can be entered can also be left.

Using the plastic end of his shoelace, he seeks the pin in the cuffs and applies consistent pressure, listening for the catch. This particular model, while difficult to navigate, is one of his favorites. With exceptional diligence, he will be home with Watson within a few hours, barring any sort of interference by his captors.

He begins to hum as he works, pausing only when the click of steel against steel releases his left wrist. He rotates the joint with no small amount of pride. Less than ten minutes. Personal record.

Releasing the right wrist takes less than half the time. The exercise almost brings a smile to his face. He pockets the discarded Peerless cuffs as a souvenir. Hinged cuffs are quite useful; one can never have too many pairs.

Now, to search for the exit.

His search for the seam of a door is tactile, with the worn pads of his fingers pressed firmly to the wall. Occasionally, he knocks, listening for the shift in frequencies and the thickness of sound that would indicate a hollow patch of drywall. The knocks form a rhythm eventually, and he begins to manipulate that rhythm in the timeless language of Morse code.

W-H-E-R-E-I-S-T-H-E-D-O-O-R-W-A-T-S-O-N

T-H-E-R-E-A-R-E-L-I-G-H-T-S-I-N-T-H-E-C-E-I-L-I-N-G-W-A-T-S-O-N

I-R-E-Q-U-I-R-E-A-C-U-P-O-F-T-E-A-W-A-T-S-O-N

The design of the room is quite ingenious, really, and he feels a reluctant admiration for whoever conceived his capture.

“Sherlock!”

Equilibrium slips from the head of its pin and shatters in the silence that follows her voice. His world tilts. His chest seizes. His blood begins to boil with a combination of rage and fear he’s not felt since Mycroft stood on his stoop without his partner and delivered a third party’s ultimatum.

“Watson?”

His voice, intended as a shout, is a breathless, tentative gasp, and he hates himself for it.

“Sherlock!”

He liberates the handcuffs from his pocket and digs the serrated edge of the smooth steel into the drywall with a growl.

“WATSON!”

She retrieves the iPod from its hole in the wall with a crippling mix of fear and relief as her legs fold beneath her.

If he is not here, she cannot save him. Then again, if he is not here, perhaps he does not need to be saved.

She almost scoffs aloud. Come on, Joan. This is Sherlock. Sherlock ALWAYS needs to be saved.

She hears his voice, raspy and contemplative in the corner of her mind. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” *

(She knew it was a recording. She has heard him scream her name for five years, has learned to familiarize herself with the slightest variations in pitch. The shouts coming through the wall were tinged with excitement, not terror. The increase in volume mirrored that which he uses to summon her downstairs after a particularly thrilling break in the case. Someone has recorded them, which means someone has been plotting to take her.)

She presses play again, just to hear his voice. She closes her eyes as his shouts echo along the smooth, curved walls, and for a moment, she is back in the brownstone beneath the sheets she loves almost as much as the man behind the voice.

It’s clever, this blatant manipulation of her emotions. It’s also a clear indication that she has been taken. Sherlock is not this cruel.

She presses pause again and pockets the iPod, just to keep him close.

She studies the hole she has carved with the handcuffs. By her estimation, the wall is roughly eight inches thick. She hasn’t found a door yet, but she has spotted the seam of a panel in the ceiling that appears to be the source of light. If she uses the hole as a foothold, she can almost reach the roof.

Stairs, she thinks. I can use the handcuffs to carve stairs in the wall.

It may take days.

Or I can wiggle through the hole and see if there’s anything on the other side.

The alcove in which she found the iPod nestled seems like a promising place to start. Then again, if her captor wants to draw this out, the iPod could very well have been positioned opposite her exit.

Her gaze drifts to the other side of the room, where the wall is unmarred.

What would Sherlock do?

Flecks of drywall litter the ground like snow, dusting the concrete and obscuring the reflection that so mocked him before. The larger chunks of wall have been flung across the room.

His pulse throbs in his ears. Rage makes his hands shake. Blood seeps through the cuts in his palms.

(When the handcuffs failed to achieve maximum efficiency, he began tearing the wall apart with his bare hands.)

He has deduced that they are being recorded. The black foam behind the drywall suggests that his captors have attempted to soundproof the room, presumably because there are things they do not want him to hear. The wall is not so thick as to be indestructible, meaning that he is expected to tunnel his way out.

Normally, Sherlock would enjoy defying expectations and determining an alternative means of escape, but destruction feels good, like the tip of a needle in his veins. Ripping the wall out is safer than ripping his skin off, and he STILL CANNOT FIND WATSON.

He uses his fist to pound her name into the wall in Morse code. His knuckles leave a pink streak across the surface.

His throat is raw—either from the sobs or from shouting her name into a soundproof abyss. His face is streaked with tears, and he hates himself for this, hates himself for putting her in danger again, because he fucking enjoys these situations, but she must be terrified.

(He knows she is not terrified, nowhere near. Watson is much stronger than that. He is not.)

With a growl of frustration, he kicks at the hole in the wall, enlarging the edges until his whole person fits through.

“Sherlock!”

He snatches the tape recorder from its perch on a small end table and hurls it against the wall. Its plastic parts splinter and scatter, and Watson’s voice grows distorted, then silent.

With a heavy sigh of defeat, Sherlock allows himself a moment—just a moment—to sit on the table and press his fists into his eye sockets.

Deduce, damn it. Deduce.

He searches this new room with tired eyes, cataloging the table on which he is perched, the wooden chair in the center of the room, the four blessed walls with a roof and corners, and the naked pillow-top mattress on the floor.

He cannot help but think that Watson would appreciate the bed’s extra padding. He walks gingerly across the room, listening to the way his footsteps echo against the stone floor, and lies down on the bed for a change in perspective.

(The bed makes him feel closer to her. If she were here, he thinks, this is where she would be.)

He rolls over onto his side, curls into Watson’s favorite sleeping position, and forces himself to think of anything but the needles that usually accompany a mattress on the floor.

Cameras in the ceiling, obscured by the brightness of the light. Soundproof walls and yet, a tape recorder bleating my name.

He cannot remember hearing that same note of urgency in her voice ever before.

Someone recorded Watson’s voice, which means that someone was in the brownstone with us, or she has also been taken. Someone knows the nature of our…connection and is using it to motivate me to…

His eyes widen, and his hands fall away.

The walls are not soundproof because they don’t want me to hear; the walls are soundproof because they don’t want someone else to hear me.

Watson is here.

She slams the steel core of a stiletto firmly into the drywall and thinks that Sherlock can never call her heels “impractical” again. When she is sure that the disassembled heel will bear her weight, she rises again.

She sees the camera first, but the well-concealed air vent is the thing that holds her attention. She pries the cover from the wall using the serrated edge of the handcuffs and the leg that hangs free. With more dexterity than anyone’s toes should have, she offsets the cover until it clatters to the floor.

Wrenching herself into the air vent is more difficult, but she manages. In order to climb the wall, she has strapped one of the stillettos to her knee. She tucks the other into her waistband and says a silent prayer of thanks that she hasn’t been captured in one of her cute little sundresses. Now THAT would’ve been insensible.

She crawls through the vents like a child playing hide-and-seek, slowly and stealthily and with no small amount of pride. This is why I jog, she thinks. So I can fit into small spaces.

(People think Sherlock’s heart is a small space, but she seems to fit there just fine.)

She passes an empty canister and wonders if it held the gas that first knocked her out. She pockets it, just to be safe. She imagines throwing it at Sherlock when she finds him, gleefully announcing her entrance with, “Could’ve been a knife!”

She will find him.

He cannot find a suitable means of exiting captivity in the larger room, so he returns to the domed room. He fashions an extended arm by turning two of the end table’s four legs upside down and fastening them to its surface. Using the extended arm, he reaches us and prods at the lit panel in the ceiling. His intention is to remove the lighting panel and escape through the hole that remains. Unfortunately, his prodding liberates his only light source—a shoddy stage spotlight that inconveniently rains glass all over the floor.

For a moment, the room is cloaked in darkness, and Sherlock’s frustration nearly chokes him.

He waits impatiently for his eyes to adjust, listening to the voice of his inner addict. Should’ve known it was a spotlight. Should’ve looked at the pattern of light distribution. Useless, useless, useless.

As soon as he can make out the blinking red lights, he destroys every camera he can find.

Without eyes or ears in the space of captivity, his captors will surely pay him a personal visit. Such an opportunity will allow him to examine more of this curious prison and search for clues as to Watson’s whereabouts.

(He will punch them in the face, string them up by the spotlight’s power cord, and slice at their skin with shards of glass until they BLOODY TELL HIM WHERE WATSON IS.)

He uses the serrated teeth of the handcuffs to carve footholds in the wall that will aid him in ascending towards the hole through which the spotlight once shone. Throughout the process, he acquires more wounds, which bleed in an aggravating manner that requires him to remove and systematically repurpose his shirt as a series of bandages.

Every so often, he shoots a forlorn glance toward the remnants of the tape recorder. He finds that he misses her voice.

Satisfied that he has removed or disabled all of the recording devices, he begins to deduce aloud. His voice creaks to life, hoarse and haunted in the wake of Watson’s absence.

“Two rooms—not connected in construction, per se, but clearly designed for the same purpose of captivity—and only one with amenities. It is as though I am being rewarded for leveling up, so to speak; navigate out of one room, find oneself in another, better room. By this token, there should be a third room and, ultimately, an exit…unless, of course, our captor follows the traditional rule of three, in which case the third room would be the last and the one from which we are ultimately expected to escape or capitulate…”

The rhythm of the words soothes him ever so slightly, but his voice sounds hollow without hers to echo it.

When she first hears the drone of Sherlock’s familiar chatter through the vent, her entire body sags with relief. Tears of gratitude spring forth, momentarily blurring her view of the tunnel ahead.

He sounds wrecked, but conscious, and she says a silent prayer of thanks that he is still alive and well enough to ramble.

She can’t see him—the holes are too narrow—but the cadence of his voice is too familiar, too stilted and arrhythmic to be another recording.

With a smile as broad as this new horizon of possibilities, she assembles her tools like found art and begins making quick work of the bolts holding the vent in place.

He hears the distinct clatter of metal against metal and the roar of aluminum bearing significant weight. His orations cease, but his mind is alight, lithe and nimble and racing with the potential consequences of this new aural stimulus.

The captors are coming. The captors are coming!

He descends gently, abandoning his perch and avoiding the scattered, glittering debris as he searches for a more appropriate place to conceal himself. Armed with a large shard of glass and the broken spotlight, he crouches beneath the hole he created and watches the ceiling warily. He is weighing his options—attack first, or demand to see Watson first?—when a mess of black hair and linen comes crashing down onto the unsoiled mattress.

(Moving it was a good call, he thinks.)

The painted sheet of metal skitters across the stone floor, the shrieking soprano accompaniment to a familiar female groan.

Surgeon’s hands attempt to comb through a familiar mass of black hair, and his throat feels impossibly heavy.

“Seriously?!” Watson mumbles incredulously. “I can’t believe they gave you a bed!”

He swallows an inappropriate amount of tears. “Technically, they didn’t. I had to crash through a wall to find it.”

She stands, dusting the remnants of her solo adventures from her slacks and looking…not unlike every other time he has roused her from the comfort of a bed. It is so terrifically normal that it seizes his chest and sparks his fingers, which drop their potentially dangerous bounty with a loud crash.

(He has probably shattered his single most useful piece of glass, but he doesn’t care, because Watson is here and alive and breathing, and they will figure this out together.)

She snorts, and her prominent cheekbones house the smallest ghost of a smile. “At least there was a room on the other side of your wall…”

(He hears her voice, small and slightly guilty, in the back of his attic. “I kinda feel like hugging you.” Now, two years later, he understands the feeling implicitly. His deltoids still tingle with the phantom press of her biceps, warm and sure after a relief-filled conversation with his unlucky barrister. He thinks a hug might be okay.)

She barely has time to take him in—the linen strips tied around his hands and dangling from his head; his bare, bleeding chest; his lace-less dress shoes, scuffed beyond repair—before she is awkwardly sandwiched between two skinny arms and pressed to a chest more solid than she remembers. He smells like sweat and drywall and something indescribably Sherlock, and she is touched (literally, my God) and confused all at once.

She wraps her arms hesitantly around his waist and presses her palms to his shoulder blades. “Are you okay?” she murmurs worriedly. “Did you hit your head or something?”

“No.” She feels his muscles bunch beneath her hands, but he does not let go. If anything, he squeezes her a bit too tightly. “Why?”

“You’re…hugging me. By your own definition, this is rash behavior.”

He swallows, and his throat bobs against her forehead.

“The last time you were…stolen and returned, I did…nothing.” His hoarse voice is full of remorse. “I didn’t touch you or hug you or…anything. Then you left, and I left, and I felt absolutely, horribly, irritatingly wrong for eight months.” He clears his throat, but the rasp remains. “It’s not an experience I want to repeat. Thus, the urge to hug was not one I wanted to suppress.”

She feels her biceps bulge against his ribcage as she squeezes him back.

“Are you getting sick?” she asks the crook of his neck. “You sound…”

He clears his throat again, to no avail.

“I was shouting your name.”

Her heart breaks open, and tears sting her eyes. “Sherlock...”

He steps back, and his fingers dance manically against his dust-covered slacks. Everything is dirty. Glass and drywall have left their Pollock-esque mark on the concrete floor, and flecks of ceiling indicate the path of the destroyed vent cover.

He cannot—will not—look at her. She has surely seen the broken tape recorder by now; he taught her to catalog such things. Shame colors his cheeks crimson.

“I know it was a recording,” he continues, his voice breaking over the syllables, “but it seems that my deductive skills and the logic from which they stem are…incapacitated in your absence.”

She initiates the hug this time, and his entire body feels like a live wire. His nerve endings are raw at each point of contact. She squeezes him tightly, and his chest is on fire.

Her hair still inexplicably smells like lilacs and honey. He inhales a garden and exhales a storm.

He sees a single teardrop disappear into her crown.

“They had a recording in my room, too,” she all but whispers. “An iPod, actually.”

He snorts. “I hope it fared better than my tape recorder.”

“It’s fine. Still intact.” The force of her inhale tickles the hair follicles on his pectorals. "I kept it in my pocket, just to hear your voice.”

I’m so glad you’re alive, he wants to tell her.

What he says instead is, “Watson? Did you scale the wall using your stilettos?”

I’m so glad you’re okay, she wants to tell him. I was so worried about you.

What she says instead is, “God, I could use a nap right now.”

Chapter Text

They catch up in the usual fashion—her in matter-of-fact details, him in a winding narrative that she frequently interrupts.

“You used the table to destroy the cameras? It didn’t occur to you that we might be able to stack it on top of the chair and maybe get the hell out of here?”

“I couldn’t have held the structure together on my own.”

Joan folds her arms expectantly. “You could’ve used some strips from your shirt to tie the legs to the chair back.”

Sherlock stares forlornly at the deconstructed table and the discarded chair. “That…would’ve made sense.”

“More sense than cutting yourself on purpose,” she remarks with a pointed glance at the shards of glass on the floor.

He scoffs indignantly. “I wasn’t…”

She dips her chin meaningfully, bright brown eyes boring mercilessly into him, and he swallows shamefully.

She turns around and begins to prowl the space, familiarizing herself with these new surroundings. “You also could’ve tipped the mattress on its side and used it to get to the vent.”

“Nonsense,” he grumbles. “I knew you’d want the mattress for sleeping.”

“You know where I like to sleep?” she retorts. “My own bed.”

“Yes, well,” he sniffs, “I’m afraid beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Screw that! We’re getting out of here tonight.”

“With all due respect,” Sherlock points out, “we don’t know if it’s night or morning.”

She realizes with a start that Sherlock is right; both of their watches are missing.

“We can guess,” she volleys. “How sleep-deprived do you feel?”

Before he can defend his ability to function without the recommended amount of REM cycles—or issue his estimation that he has been awake for no less than twenty-seven hours, give or take—a distant something whirs to life, and a chill descends.

Watson takes pause with all four limbs. “Is it getting colder in here? I feel like it’s getting colder.”

Sherlock listens for a moment with his eyes closed. His shoulders fall in recognition. “They’ve turned on the air conditioning,” he laments. “A Whynter ARC-12S, by the sound of it. I believe they may be altering our conditions in light of our quick reunion.”

“It didn’t feel very quick.”

For just a moment, he sees in her the same terror that left a lead ball in his stomach, curled up his esophagus, and erupted in sobs bearing her name.

“No,” he agrees quietly. “No, it didn’t.”

Three walls of what they dub the “living room” are cinderblock. They systematically destroy what they can reach of the fourth—partially to discover what lies in the gap between it and the dome and partially because the physical activity helps them keep warm. She discovers that it is colder on the other side of the wall, and he is sure the roaring of the Whynter is louder in the space between, but neither of them can definitively locate and disable the air.

He hoists her onto his shoulders so she can examine the hole in the dome through which the light fell, but all she can see is the wooden frame around which the wall was built, and her hands can’t find purchase enough to hoist her up.

The prolonged lack of food and water is making her dizzy, but she tries to push through.

(He’d do it—is doing it—for her.)

At long last, he halts her fruitless search by tugging gently on the hem of her slacks.

“Watson.”

The cold air has ravaged his throat, and she feels the deterioration of his raspy tenor in her bones.

“You should get down,” he laments. “I’m afraid I’m no longer a suitable base.”

Her hands begin to tremble as she attempts a controlled descent. She hates that she cannot find an exit for him, cannot even lift herself over the edge and manage to shut off the air. All of that training, completely wasted.

The skin beneath his stubble is marred with tiny lacerations, and they blur and pearl and slide down her prominent cheekbones as she dips her chin to study the dust-covered floor beneath his feet.

She hates crying, but helplessness bubbles up against her eyelids and spills over anyway. When she finally speaks, her voice is naught but a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Sherlock.”

He looks genuinely confused. His hands twitch by his sides, and he bounces unsteadily on his toes. “For what?”

“Are you kidding?” she hisses. “We’re still here because of me! If you were alone, you would’ve escaped already. Instead, you’re losing your voice, and you’re bleeding, and you’re being forced to bear my weight—literally AND metaphorically—while I try to solve a problem that you could probably solve in your sleep!”

Fatigue and hunger have made his vision atypically fuzzy, but his focus on Watson is sharp as ever.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he argues sternly. “No one solves problems in their sleep. If sleep were that productive, I might enjoy it more.”

“Stop,” she growls. “Don’t try to make me feel better about this.”

“You know me, Watson,” he snaps. “It’s not in my nature to console out of kindness or some bloody sense of social obligation.”

“No,” she agrees tartly, “but I’m the exception there too, aren’t I? You’re constantly breaking your rules for me. You trained me, and you’re nice for me, and you’ve made space in your home for me permanently, and what do I do? I sleep with your brother and try to move out and get people killed and…” She shakes her head so fast that her hair flutters around her head like wings.

“I’ve failed you, Sherlock,” she says finally, angrily. “I fail you all the time.”

“Bollocks,” he interjects. Like a reflex, he reaches out to grab her hand, but she shrugs him off and continues to pace, reciting her shortcomings in a staccato clip that sounds like the firing of a gun.

“I couldn’t stay in the brownstone when you needed me. I couldn’t save that kid from Le Milieu. I couldn’t listen to your advice about Andrew quickly enough to save his life. I couldn’t rescue Alfredo in time. I couldn’t re…”

Rescue you in time.

She doesn’t finish the thought out loud, but he hears the words as boldly and clearly as if she’d shouted them.

“I fail you every time,” she says instead. Her arms fall forlornly to her sides.

He coughs to clear his throat, and the burst of air feels serrated. “I was always going to relapse.”

She spins around to face him, incredulity scrawled across her face, but he holds up a hand to still her.

“I was,” he insists. “You were right; arrogance is my downfall. I thought I could outsmart the disease. But, as you know from your time as a sober companion, addiction doesn’t work that way. I was always going to relapse, Watson. It took me three years because of you. And the fact that I didn’t take enough to kill myself? That’s on you as well.” His voice is failing spectacularly, so he pauses to let that sink in. “I might’ve been able to make my escape initially, but only if I knew I’d be coming home to you. If you’re in here, I have no reason to leave—chills or no chills, cuts or no cuts, voice or none. Captivity and our partnership versus freedom and solitude—it’s not even a choice, Watson.”

“But…what about the work?”

Her modest confusion is equal parts endearing and infuriating.

“Must I repeat myself?” he grumbles. “It’s not about the work anymore, Watson. It’s that I do it with you.”

She searches his damaged figure with more gratitude than she can verbalize. He is a mess—hair askew, pants riddled with dust, one shoe laced and one with the tongue flopping defiantly about (not unlike its owner), soiled jacket barely covering his bandaged arms and bare torso—but he is her mess.

(She must never use that possessive pronoun out loud.)

Her eyes widen appreciatively as her gaze traces his pinstripes. I know that jacket.

She steps forward and presses both hands to his bare chest, smoothing her palms along the planes of his torso until her fingers find the inside pocket hidden close to the hem.

“Watson,” he murmurs just as her fingers slip inside. His voice is but a breath. “What are you doing?”

With a triumphant smile, she retrieves four Burt’s Bees cough drops and holds them up for him to see.

“You were sneezing last week, remember? You insisted that you’d had an allergic reaction to that—what’d you call it? An overzealous hoarder’s paradise?—but I thought you might be getting sick, so I slid these into your pocket before handing you your jacket.”

Sherlock arches an unimpressed eyebrow. “This from the woman who lives to lecture me about boundaries?”

Her eyes are still wet, but she no longer looks the least bit sorry.

(He’s glad. He cannot stand the thought that she blames herself for any of his misfortunes when she clearly works so hard to take care of him.)

“They’re made of honey,” she explains delightedly, “so they’re not sugar-free. Two of these should be enough to at least temporarily combat a hypoglycemic spell. Plus, they’ll help your throat.”

His brow furrows in confusion. “I thought surely you’d take this opportunity to enjoy the silence.”

“Hardly,” she laughs. “Sherlock, I don’t think I’d know what to do if you weren’t prattling on about something.”

He sniffs pretentiously. “I think I’m insulted.”

He takes the cough drop anyway, unwrapping it with shaky fingers. The honey is a welcome salve for his battered voice, and his eyes almost roll back in relief as the familiar sweetness fills his mouth and stirs his stomach.

“Good, right?”

He pauses to study the smile on her face, and the corners of his lips curl curiously in return. “I intend to remind you of this very moment the next time I wake you with my prattling, as you say."

She grins. “I look forward to it.”

This time, he stands on the chair while hoisting her onto his shoulders. The added height gives her just enough room to climb through the hole in the ceiling. She finds the Whynter ARC-12S wedged between the dome and the cinderblock on the side opposite the living room and makes quick work of shutting it down. She drags it along the dome’s perimeter, ceasing only to hide it amidst the parts of the wall they have destroyed. It will take time for the space to warm up, she knows, but at least they won’t have cold air blowing through the cracks anymore.

She can’t see an exit, but she does notice the identical wall on the other side and wonders if, perhaps, there are two square rooms.

“Watson?”

She climbs back to the top of the dome, struggling not to cut her feet on wood frame or its uneven drywall, and pokes her head over the edge until his face comes into view.

“I’m okay,” she assures him. “I shut off the A/C and hid the unit.”

He coughs from his perch atop the mattress, which he has dragged in to break her fall.

“Exit?” he prods hopefully.

She shakes her head and tells him about the other wall instead. “I think we should tear it down. There may be a door on the other side. I think whoever’s holding us is getting in and out of here through a trapdoor in the ceiling near the first wall we took out, but it’s closed and locked from the outside.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Perhaps you should come down now.”

She descends with a grace that steals his breath, collapsing easily into the mattress and rolling off. He taught her how to fall, but she still feels his bandaged hands immediately on her face, arms, and legs.

“I’m fine,” she mutters.

“Adrenaline is roaring through your bloodstream,” he counters. “If you weren’t fine, you might not know it yet. I’m merely checking for injuries.”

She shoos him off with a flick of the wrist, focusing intently on mound of white that broke her fall. “There’s something in that mattress.”

He follows her intense gaze with a frown. “Where?”

“The upper right corner. It didn’t give in the same way that the rest of the fabric did.”

He notes the uneven stitching on the indicated corner, and his frown deepens. “We’re going to have to cut it open.”

“Why do you look so dismayed?” she prods incredulously. “It’s not like you ever sleep on a bed.”

“No,” he agrees sheepishly, “but you do.”

“I think it’s sweet that you’re suddenly so concerned about my sleeping habits,” she murmurs in a tone that is both skeptical and sarcastic. “Maybe you could employ this same concern next time it’s four o’clock in the morning?”

(For every hour he spends waking her, he has spent two in the chair at her bedside, exercising what limited self-control he possesses. He tries not to wake her. He does. He just can’t help it, sometimes. Okay, most times.)

“For all we know,” he retorts, “it IS four o’clock in the morning.”

“Fair enough,” she sighs. “Come help me with this.”

Using their matching handcuffs, they hack away at the thick fabric until they hear the familiar crinkle of plastic against plastic.

Watson shoves her hand into the space and curls her fingers breathlessly around a ridged plastic cylinder. She tugs it out until the navy and red of an Ozarka label are blurring in front of her.

“Oh, thank God,” Sherlock gasps. “You found water.”

In total, there are four liters of water and two store-brand chocolate chip granola bars stashed inside the mattress. After a few ounces of water, Sherlock feels refreshed enough to launch into a brief lecture on the dangers of ingesting too much high fructose corn syrup, but he eats one of the bars anyway.

The granola reminds her of long days in scrubs and long nights in on-call rooms, clutching her pager out of fear for a patient whose treatment didn’t quite go according to plan. It tastes as bittersweet as the memories it evokes.

After they have eaten, they sit side by side on the edge of the mattress, each nursing a liter of water with eager hands and parched lips.

He takes another long pull of water and aims the mouthpiece of the bottle at the intact opposing wall.

“I think we ought to start carving another hole right there.”

His voice has recovered some of its authoritative resonance, and it makes her smile as the wall ebbs and flows before her. She feels at least minutely sated, knowing that he’s alive and no longer starving or dehydrated. “I think I’m gonna need to sleep first.”

He stands and dusts himself off with a perfunctory nod. “I believe I may benefit from a REM cycle or two as well. I’ll take the chair.”

Joan snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s plenty of room here for both of us.”

He stares apprehensively at the double bed, his fingers dancing sluggishly along his dusty thigh. “Perhaps we should sleep in shifts,” he murmurs, “in case our captors dare to show their faces.”

“Or perhaps we should sleep together,” she volleys, “in case they try to take one of us while the other’s asleep.”

(The thought that someone could take Sherlock without her knowing—that she could wake up to find him gone—makes her feel far colder than the Whynter ARC-12S ever could.)

“If our captors try to snatch you from me again,” Sherlock snaps, “they might find themselves relieved of a few vital limbs.”

“You’re exhausted and suffering from a severe lack of nutrition,” Watson points out. “You’re not in any shape to take them on.”

With a wicked gleam in his eye, Sherlock turns to face her fully. His jaw is dangerously set, and his whole person is still for the first time in her memory.

“I was with the figment Irene Adler for seven months, and I nearly decimated the man I thought to be her killer.” He inhales sharply, and something in the air shifts intensely as his chin adopts a defiant tilt. “We’ve been partners for five years, Watson. Believe me when I say that we have caught psychopaths and serial killers who could not imagine the horrors that would ensue if our captives—or anyone, for that matter—tried to take you from me again.”

The air between them is charged, heavy.

“I love you too,” she says, and means it.

(She has meant it for a long, long time. Certainly longer than seven months.)

His lips tremble only for a moment before he clamps them shut.

“Now,” she murmurs when he has achieved some sort of composure, “are you going to continue waxing poetic about the terrible things you’re going to do to my would-be killer, or are you going to shut up and join me in bed?”

Watson gathers her deconstructed stilettos and the two empty gas cans (halothane—she recognizes it from her days as a surgeon) and lays them as close to the bed as humanly possible. She pockets the handcuffs, making sure the serrated edge is easily within reach.

Sherlock gathers the deconstructed table and the spotlight on the other side of the mattress. His handcuffs are tucked safely into the front pocket of his trousers. Once Watson is settled on the bed, nursing her liter of water and rubbing warmth back into her bare feet, he makes quick work of scooting the shards of broken glass into a lethal perimeter.

Joan removes her jacket and tucks her toes into the sleeves. She keeps the vest on, but pockets the tie in case she needs a noose for their would-be attacker.

Soon, they are lying side by side on the pillow top, sipping greedily and trying to keep warm.

Sherlock laces his fingers around his water bottle and presses it securely to his bare belly. As silence descends, he hears the echo of her tearstained voice in the darkest corner of his brain attic.

“I fail you all the time.”

The ache in his chest is unbearable.

“Watson?”

“Holmes?”

“No way I would’ve found that water without you,” he murmurs meaningfully towards the ceiling.

“Sure you would’ve. You’re you.”

“Yes,” he agrees, “but we both know how often and how perspicaciously I encounter a mattress. Today, the survival skills that counted were yours.”

She doesn’t have an immediate reply to that.

“You don’t fail me,” he concludes, his voice soft but sure. “Sometimes, you save me.”

She thinks about the mental acuity she has honed since her arrival at the brownstone and considers the joy she finds in solving a case with such a brilliant mind by her side. She thinks about endless pairs of handcuffs that need to be picked, aural stimuli that must be identified (blindfolded, of course), and basketballs that could’ve been knives.

“Sometimes you save me, too.”

Chapter Text

Despite their exhaustion, sleep does not come easily. Sherlock is a lackluster sleeper in the best of environments, and here, he feels the wreck of the day like a brick on his sternum and Watson’s proximity like the buzz of an electric fence.

(She would be so very easy to touch, but he anticipates the burn and lets it still his limbs, because if he makes Watson uncomfortable after this massive cock-up of an experience, he will never forgive himself.)

Joan can usually will herself to sleep, but her mind refuses to cease its cyclical investigation of the evidence. Even though the roar of the Whynter has dissipated and the temperature is slowly climbing, the memory of the cold licks her skin through the cotton of her dress shirt and causes her to shiver periodically.

(She can still feel the jagged edges of her heart, shattered by the telling redness and the glassy sheen of tears in Sherlock’s eyes. She can still hear his voice, splintered by cold and strain as he fought to establish her worth. She knows they are better now—warmer, calmer, hydrated, together—but the ghosts of their brokenness haunt her in the silence.)

His name escapes her of its own volition.

“Sherlock?”

He hums in acknowledgment.

(He is always awake for her. Only withdrawal has ever stolen his attention on sleep’s behalf.)

“Do you think Moriarty’s behind this?”

He emits the usual sigh of resignation and disgust that accompanies a mention of his former lover.

“No.”

“Really?” She rolls over to face him and studies the smooth curve of his brow. “But…what about the elaborate set-up? Keeping us at the same compound, but separating us? And forcing us to listen to those manipulative recordings?” She shudders and wraps her arms protectively around her torso. “You have to admit,” she mutters, “this kind of mind-fuck is right up her alley.”

He snorts. “In my experience, any sort of fuck is far preferable to whatever this was at the beginning.”

“It’s her style,” Joan argues.

“No it isn’t,” Sherlock counters. “Not anymore.” His fingers begin to play a syncopated ostinato against the wall of the water bottle. “Moriarty’s sin, like mine, is pride. Her letters reek of it. If she were behind all of this, she’d want us to know it. She would want us to know the exact degree to which she’d bested us, especially by this point in the game.”

She chews on that for a moment, enjoying the way his train of thought disrupts the silence. “What about your father’s cabal?”

His eyebrows rise appreciatively, creating ridges along his forehead. “The thought had crossed my mind,” he admits, “but I concluded that the cabal would not have risked using our partnership in this way.”

“Tormenting us with separation, you mean?”

“No, taking the gamble that we would reunite.” He turns his head to face her and watches the shadows dance along her cheekbones. “We are quite a liability as individual captives, Watson—both extensively resourceful, thoroughly trained in self-defense and investigative techniques—but together, we pose a uniquely formidable threat. I am completely comfortable lying here now because I know that, as long as we’re together, escape is inevitable. And, should we choose to seek revenge following our escape, I believe that our captor’s demise is equally inevitable.” Confidence twists chapped lips into the smallest scowl. “Were the cabal reckless enough to capture us, they certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to hold us in the same facility.”

“Certainly not in the same room,” Watson agrees, “but the same building?”

Sherlock snorts derisively. “I abandoned London and a rather delightful heroin binge for the sake of our partnership, Watson. No matter the distance, no matter the obstacle, I will always find you.”

He sees her cheekbones shift beneath the slight curve of a smile. “Technically, I found you this time.”

“Immaterial,” he insists. “My point remains.”

He watches in fascination as her smile broadens to a grin. “I also found you first when you got back from London. Remember? You were sneaking around the brownstone in a sensory deprivation helmet like a crazy person.”

“Nonsense,” he argues indignantly. “Kitty had been tailing you for quite some time before that.”

“So you’re admitting to completely creepy stalker behavior and a gross violation of boundaries?”

He narrows his eyes dangerously in her direction. “Don’t talk to me about boundaries, Watson,” he retorts. “You hid soothers in my coat pocket.”

She laughs. Her giggles are loud and long and genuine; they comprise the most beautiful sound he has ever heard. For a moment, everything is right in the world again, and Sherlock can finally drift off to sleep.

_____

She dreams impossible dreams, of squeezing through an air duct that never ends, of knocking down wall after wall while an invisible Sherlock screams her name, of a French boy riddled with bullet wounds, of racing across a train track of broken glass toward an unconscious, unresponsive detective whose veins are fraught with needle marks.

“Watson!”

She wakes with a start, chest heaving and limbs taut. It takes her a moment to notice the palm on her shoulder, its fingers rigidly stretched toward the ceiling.

Any other time, the awkwardness of his uncertain touch would be hilarious, but his eyes are wild and fearful, and his lips are a white line.

“What?” she gasps, her own eyes widening to mirror his. “What happened? Did someone…”

“You were crying out in your sleep,” Sherlock interrupts. “A nightmare, I presume.”

She feels the warmth of embarrassment flush her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

He is on his side, facing her with an imploring gaze so childlike and un-Sherlock that it almost breaks her heart.

“Tell me,” he says softly, “about the boy from Le Milieu.”

“What?”

He dips his chin expectantly. “You heard me.”

She scrubs her face with grimy fingers and swallows the bile that rises as gunshots echo against the walls of her skull.

(She can still hear his fevered mutterings. Her lessons with Sherlock have taught her to recognize some of the words she still hears in her nightmares—église, femme. She knows he was praying to the Virgin Mary, envisioning a woman in a church.)

“You don’t want to hear about that.”

“Why not?” he prods. “Because I’ve never asked before?”

She lifts her eyes to meet his gaze. Her voice is a sharp warning, like the glint of light off a blade. “Sherlock…”

“If you want your cousin to live, take him to a hospital. Otherwise, keep him here and watch him die.” *

The memory of three loud cracks wracks her shivering frame.

“Drop it, okay?” she snaps shakily. “That was a long time ago.”

“And yet,” Sherlock volleys pointedly, “you thought the boy a necessary addition to your list of the ways in which you believe you have failed.”

She uses bloodshot eyes to drill imaginary holes in the curved ceiling. “I was exhausted and hungry and clearly overwrought.”

“And, as a result, you were also at your most honest,” Sherlock argues gently—which makes her immediately suspicious, because the Sherlock she knows never does anything gently. Nervously, yes. Reluctantly, yes. Gently? No.

“I left for London,” he admits haltingly, “not because MI6 gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse, but because I couldn’t protect you. Because I was afraid that, in failing to protect you, I’d broken something vital about your spirit, and your moving out meant that you knew I was to blame.”

The tentative confession pinches her eyebrows together above the bridge of her nose, casting shadows across her face.

“That’s why you left?” she scoffs. “That’s a shitty reason.”

He lifts his palm from her shoulder and wields it in protest. “Don’t.”

She rolls her eyes and smacks his hand away. “Don’t play ‘talk to the hand’ with me. It makes you look like a fourteen-year-old girl.”

He glares. She glares back.

“I never expected you to protect me, Sherlock!” Her voice has an authoritative edge that he recognizes from her days as his sober companion. “I certainly never blamed you for the kidnapping.”

“Perhaps not,” Sherlock concedes morosely, “but I blamed myself, and that led me to cause irreparable damage to our relationship by leaving.” He glances awkwardly at her, tilting his head to the side. “You were never what I would call forthcoming with personal information, but after your kidnapping…”

His words are salt in a wound she thought she’d forgotten, and the words erupt in a violent hiss before she can swallow them. “You wouldn’t know anything about what happened after my kidnapping. You were halfway across the world less than a week later.”

“Because I was scared!” Sherlock thunders. “Because I was losing you! Because I was silently blaming myself for something that perhaps wasn’t entirely my fault!”

“Not entirely your fault?” Joan scoffs. “It wasn’t your fault at all!”

Sherlock’s eyebrows shove wrinkles into his receding hairline. “You were kidnapped by my brother’s associates because you were looking into a case for me!”

Her eyes are mere slits. “I’m sorry; did you knock me out with chloroform and put a black bag over my head?”

“Watson.”

“Did you tie my hands to the back of a chair with cloth, zip-ties, and Velcro?”

“Watson!” he snaps, but his still-raspy tenor is no match for her clipped soprano when she’s on a roll like this.

“Did you fire three rounds into that poor boy’s chest?”

Sherlock’s eyes narrow dangerously in the dim light, and he arches an expectant eyebrow. “Did you?”

Her chest heaves in the sudden silence. Her eyes widen like those of an animal trapped.

“I should’ve stayed,” Sherlock pants, matching her breaths out of habit. “I should’ve talked to you about the things I was feeling. But Watson, if your kidnapping was not, in fact, my fault, then you certainly cannot blame yourself for what happened to the boy.”

“Jem.”

There are needles in her voice. They prick at his skin, sending every hair to attention within the follicle. “Beg pardon?”

“Jem.” He doesn’t have to see the silver tracks on her cheeks to know she is crying. “His name was Jem.”

He rolls over onto his back and begins tugging at his knuckles, which are white around the water bottle.

(She can cry. He will always allow her a space in which to give proper vent to her feelings. He just cannot bring himself to watch.)

He unwraps a tentative hand, and his fingers dance along the mattress until they find her palm. His limbs feel odd and aflame, but he squeezes her metacarpals anyway.

She squeezes back, and the brick on his chest is gone.

“At first, I only heard him screaming from the other room. He’d been shot somehow, and I offered to help him. I thought I could prove my worth as an asset, forge an emotional attachment that would force them to keep me alive, but…when I saw him bleeding out on the table, I just wanted to help him. He looked like a kid—early twenties, long brown hair, big eyes…”

He listens patiently, trying not to jostle the bed with his fidgeting as she tells him about stitching up a wound with a literal needle and thread and scrubbing her hands with a toothbrush over a decaying sink. Though the tears make her voice thick, she delivers the details of her kidnapping with clinical precision.

“You know,” he says when she is finished, “he may not have been this man’s cousin. He may merely have been a peon who overstepped and was used as an example—both for you and the other men present.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she relays in the same clinical tone, releasing his knuckles from her grasp. “I took an oath. Standing up to them, delivering an ultimatum like that…”

Sherlock rolls to face her. “You were advocating for your patient.”

She snorts. “I took a risk, and someone died.”

“He would’ve died anyway,” he persists, “in arguably more agony. If—and this is a very large, very hypothetical if—the conclusion of events were in any way attributable to you, you were responsible for expediting what would’ve been a very painful process for the boy.” His eyes widen meaningfully, and he snatches her hand back. “I believe you did everything within your power to save him, but any way you slice it, you’re not the villain in this story.”

She meets his eyes for one slow, painful second. “Why are you fighting me so hard on this?”

“Because we are partners, Watson,” he growls, “and to let you believe that any of this somehow makes you a failure would constitute a failure on my part.”

She threads her fingers more tightly through his, and his hand feels warm and foreign with her weight inside of it.

“I really do love you,” she murmurs. “You know that, right?”

He does not dare to speak around the lump that forms in his throat.

_____

When he wakes again—alarmed and afraid, with Watson’s screams still ricocheting against the walls of his skull—his teeth are chattering, and he feels impossibly cold. The violent shivers that wrack his frame are paralyzing, and all he can see is the hole in the domed ceiling.

No. No no no no no. I tore down a wall and I destroyed a tape recorder and I found Watson and we are going to get out of here. We HAVE to get out of here.

Panic grips his ribcage in a crushing embrace.

“Watson!”

His voice, a tortured rasp, shreds his lungs. Terrified tears well in his eyes until a familiar black mane enters his field of vision.

Suddenly, two wide, almond-shaped brown orbs are blinking at him.

“Sherlock? What’s wrong?”

Warm, salty rivers leak from the corners of his eyes. “Watson?”

She presses icy fingers to his forehead, and he flinches at the contact.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs softly, awake and infuriatingly calm. “I’m just checking for fever. Are you okay?”

“C-cold,” he stutters around the infernal clacking of teeth. “Are you o-k-k-kay?”

“I’m fine,” she assures him.

His lips tremble as he struggles to swallow. “In the d-dream, you were g-gone. You w-were gone, and I…”

“I’m here,” she interrupts firmly, weaving her fingers through his. “I’m alive, and I’m okay. So are you.”

His breathing slows, but the chills are ghosts he cannot shake. His limbs are rigid, vibrating branches that throb and ache.

“Scale of one to ten,” Watson prompts. “How cold are you?”

She has seen him through bad head colds, the flu, and even the worst of withdrawal, so he feels (almost) no shame in answering honestly.

“T-ten.”

His eyes dart across her figure as she rises to her knees and unbuttons her vest.

“I’m going to hug you,” she warns him sharply. “It’ll only be as awkward as you make it.”

She presses her shirt-clad chest to his bare, dust-covered, sweat-chilled torso, and every inch of her is fire on ice. With more strength than he knew her to possess, she wraps his arms around her waist beneath the open vest. His hands are so numb that he can barely feel the kiss of the fabric, but she tucks her nose into the crook of his neck and begins rubbing his shoulders with firm, capable palms.

The scent of lilacs and honey reaches his nose amidst the chalky taste of drywall, and he wants to wrap it like a blanket around him.

“Still with me?” she asks, and her breath is warm against his neck as she kneads the sides of his ribcage through the flimsy fabric of his jacket.

“I had a pea coat,” he croaks mournfully.

“So did I,” she grumbles. “Maybe we’ll find them when we find our watches.”

“I don’t care about the watch,” Sherlock gasps, “or the coat. I just want to get out of here.”

She stills for a moment, and he remembers their previous conversation.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps. “I wasn’t…”

She tosses her head to the side, taking the perfume of lilacs and honey with her. “Open your mouth.”

His teeth are still chattering, but he does his best to comply (without protest, she notes, which is new). His eyes widen in surprise when another honeyed soother nearly chokes him.

“We div-vided these,” he mumbles around the candy. “You took two, and I t-took two.”

“Spoiler alert,” Watson grunts as she massages his scapulae with nimble fingers. “I didn’t actually take two.”

“Watson,” he sputters indignantly, “I w-will not consume your f-food.”

“It’s not food!” she explodes. “It’s a fucking cough drop with a shit-ton of sugar, and you need it more than I do.”

He takes a preparatory breath, and she shoots daggers with bright brown eyes. “Don’t argue with me!”

He closes his mouth and frowns deeply to express his discontent.

“Look,” she entreats in a softer voice he recognizes as Dr. Watson’s, “chills and tremors like these are a common side effect of hypoglycemia, and I’m sure there’s a greater chance of the onset of these symptoms in a room where the temp is below sixty degrees Fahrenheit. You were sweating earlier, which means that your clothes and bandages are damp. When we first settled down, you still had adrenaline running through your system. Now, you’ve…”

He interrupts with no small amount of irritation. “I understand how our c-circumstances affect body temperature, W-Watson.”

He can feel her smile against his jaw. “Good. Then you know it’s better for you to elevate your blood sugar and let me work. If you want to help, focus on contracting and releasing your muscles at regular intervals.”

He begins to point and flex his feet, feeling rather sufficiently chastised.

Slowly but surely, the warmth returns to his limbs and the shivering ceases. He does not relinquish his hold on Watson.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs sheepishly into her hair. “I am more than well versed in survival tactics. I should’ve made adequate preparations for the drop in temperature and the effect it would have on my body in the absence of adequate sustenance. I shouldn’t have put you in a position where you would have to…”

She snorts. “Shut up, okay? I took an oath.”

(Lying here, on his chest, feeling the warmth of his skin against her cheek and the thump-thump of his heart against her breast, she almost feels absolved of Jem’s death.)

_____

She doesn’t realize she’s slept again until he clears his throat awkwardly and begins the telltale twitch of fingers against her spine.

“Watson?”

“Sorry,” she murmurs sleepily. “Are you warm now? I can get off.”

To her surprise, his grip on her ribcage tightens.

“If it’s all the same to you,” he returns tentatively, his voice a deep, healthy hum against her temple, “you’re welcome to stay. I find that your weight gives me…great comfort.”

She hears the uncertain shiver of his breath as the vulnerable admission hangs in the air.

(She is so grateful that he still makes the effort to be vulnerable with her. She is also grateful for the weight of him, breathing and wriggling beneath her, reminding her that he is still very much alive, and still very much Sherlock.)

“Does this violate your boundaries?” he asks fearfully, velvet-tinged terror in his tone.

Pressed firmly against his pectorals, with her crown tucked under his chin and his downy chest hair tickling her nose, she stares at the broken table peeking over the edge of the torn mattress and thinks, this entire adventure has been a gross violation of boundaries and what a strange question.

“Does it violate your rules about partnership?” she retorts, nuzzling closer.

She can hear the discerning shift of his eyebrows, and she feels his confusion in his lack of movement.

“Don’t accept any accolades,” she recites with the ghost of a smile, “don’t ignore any text messages, regardless of how cryptic the acronyms may be…”

“Urban Dictionary does not deem my texting ‘cryptic,’” Sherlock retorts, “nor does the hacker collective Everyone.”

Joan continues, undeterred by his protests. “Don’t disturb anything in the fridge that looks remotely suspicious, don’t ever stock the honey your father likes, don’t hug…”

His Adam’s apple bobs against her forehead, and his arms clench protectively around her.

(He thinks perhaps that particular rule requires significant revision. He finds he does not mind—could actually get used to, my God—the feel of Watson’s petite frame in his arms.)

“You’ve made quite a thorough catalog of my proclivities,” he remarks dryly.

She snorts. “For a self-professed ‘unconventional free spirit,’ you’ve got a lot of proclivities.”

(She never misses a beat in conversation. It is one of the many things he appreciates about her.)

He barks out something that could be a laugh, and his lips find the crown of her head as though kissing her is the most natural thing in the world.

“The first rule of partnership in captivity,” he murmurs thoughtfully, “is that there are no rules in captivity.”

“How very Fight Club of you,” she retorts, but he feels the amused stretch of her lips against his collarbone.

(He knows better than to pretend that he does not get the reference. They watched the movie together once, on all seven screens, passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth between them.)

This time, they fall asleep together.

Chapter Text

She wakes to the growl of metal teeth against drywall. If she keeps her eyes closed, she can almost pretend that she’s back in the brownstone, playing the unfortunate victim to Sherlock’s latest experiment.

(She hopes he never dabbles in construction after this. If she wakes in her own glorious bed, beneath her own glorious sheets, to the sounds of her wall coming down, she will lose her shit.)

She automatically reaches across the mattress for the ghost of his form. The fabric is warm and worn to the touch, which means that he didn’t leave the bed that long ago. The rustling of limbs against cotton invites the clap of soiled dress shoes against stone.

“Watson! Excellent! I’m sure the process will go much more quickly with your assistance.”

She grimaces at the eager percussion of consonants and paws at her eyes with grimy fingers.

(She wishes she’d woken up to him—not because of a nightmare or medical distress, but because consciousness caressed them both at roughly the same time. She imagines it would’ve been nice.)

“What process?”

Sherlock’s confused visage comes into some semblance of focus. “We spoke of this last night, Watson. Do you not remember?” He studies her face scrupulously for a moment, wide green eyes darting back and forth, before his eyebrows climb terrifyingly high on his tall forehead. “Are you concussed?!”

He steps forward and reaches for her temple—most likely to conduct some poor excuse for a medical exam. She rolls her eyes and flops back against the mattress.

“I don’t have a concussion,” she grumbles.

“You do not think you have a concussion,” he corrects.

“I have a medical degree,” she snaps. “If I had a concussion, I would know.”

“Yet you willingly admit that your memory of our previous conversation is tenuous at best.”

(She remembers the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the warm weight of his arms against the small of her back, and the soft whisper of his breath in her ear.)

“Perhaps I should refresh your memory,” Sherlock barks, wriggling back into her field of vision. “I pointed the water bottle at that wall and said we should create another hole. You agreed on the condition that such destruction was preceded by sleep. I complied. I even let you come to consciousness on your own.” He spreads his arms wide as if to indicate his uncharacteristic generosity.

She snorts incredulously. “Sherlock, you started hacking away at a wall with a pair of handcuffs. The freaking roosters were quieter.”

He holds up her stiletto sheepishly. “Actually, I commenced hacking, as you so kindly put it, with this.” He gives her a twitchy look that might be a smile. “I retract my former judgments about your preferred footwear; as it turns out, these shoes are quite useful.”

Reluctantly, Joan pushes herself to a sitting position and squints at him. “You’re abnormally bouncy,” she notes with no small amount of disdain. “Did you sleep at all?”

The bouncing ceases immediately. Sherlock’s eyes study everything but her, and the skin above the beard he has begun growing flushes a curious crimson.

“I did,” he admits to the corner of the mattress, his tone striking a chord somewhere between contrite and reverent. “Quite well, actually.”

She heaves a sigh and strives to shake off the last of her exhaustion. “Good.” She watches as he rolls the soles of his shoes along the cracked glass and examines the floor with pursed lips. “Me too,” she adds before she can stop herself.

Their gazes meet for just a moment, and he gives her a shy, genuine, normal smile. It looks almost foreign on his face.

He wants to thank her for pushing the life back into him with her bare hands, for disregarding her clearly defined boundaries to keep him comfortable, for being so gracious as to allow him to hold her.

Instead, he locks his elbows and swings his arms and turns around to face the wall in question. “So you believe there is another square room on the other side.”

She hides a small, genuine smile of her own. “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

He retrieves the Peerless model from his pocket and wields the teeth. He understands destruction far better than he can ever hope to understand Watson.

“Then let’s take down the wall.”

He scoots the mattress to the point of construction so she won’t cut her feet on the scattered shards of spotlight. Armed each with one pair of handcuffs and one stiletto, they chip away at the plaster with as much strength as hunger allows.

“Did it take you this long to tear down the other wall?” Watson mutters after what feels like an hour has passed. Despite their diligence, they’ve barely made dents in their respective areas.

“No,” Sherlock admits reluctantly, “but I was significantly more motivated before.”

(He is certain that the note of urgency in the recording of her voice will haunt his nightmares for years to come.)

“Me too.” She reaches into her pocket, and her fingers brush the smooth screen of the iPod—which, at a moment’s notice, could bleat her name in a painfully familiar British accent.

She inhales sharply and studies the cracks in his face where experience has pinched the skin together.

“I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”

He spins around, and she feels the full weight of his wide-eyed gaze upon her. “How do you suggest we proceed?”

Watson sits down on the mattress and straps the stiletto onto the arch of her foot. When she stands, bending her knee to compensate for the sudden difference in leg length, she glares at the wall and allows herself to think about Sherlock—about the ferocious chattering of teeth, the violent tremors that shook his tall frame and stole all muscular control.

(Sherlock is always in motion—sometimes even violent motion—but she has never seen him shiver so helplessly. Not even during the worst bouts of withdrawal after his unfortunate search for Olivia.)

She allows herself to hate for him. Want for him. Need for him. Then, she hoists her fists in the air like one of the many self-defense coaches taught her and delivers a swift kick that echoes in the hollow space like a gunshot and leaves a baseball-sized hole.

Her chest expands and contracts irately with the force of exertion. She anchors her bare foot in the fury that simmers just below the surface and kicks again. The wall spits flecks of paint onto the mattress in protest as its smooth planes give way.

Fire licks its way up her esophagus and erupts in a scream of frustration as she delivers another blow.

Sherlock clears his throat and passes her the second stiletto. “I believe you need this more than I do.”

She threads the core of the heel between her third and fourth fingers and directs a jab at the broken drywall.

As he watches her work, pride starts a fire in his core that warms the tips of his jumping fingers. He hates that this life—the uncompromising, unapologetic life of a detective—has repeatedly placed her in peril, but he loves the ferocity with which she fights (not just for herself, but for them).

Irene was like steel—glossy and sharp, with a defiant, blinding strength that knocked him down more often than not. Watson’s strength runs deeper. She is overtly feminine and sometimes almost delicate in appearance, but her fierceness far exceeds that of Moriarty. She is quietly sure, solid in a way that often leaves him awestruck. Moriarty is cold and clinical, methodical and exacting, but when Watson fights, she fights with complete abandon.

(She has taught him to fight—not just for himself, but for them.)

“Perhaps I should procure a pair of those for self-defense purposes,” he muses aloud.

She spins around in surprise—hair askew, skin flushed, eyes wild—as though she is seeing him for the first time.

“You don’t need a pair of stilettos,” she pants finally, glancing over their improvised arsenal. “Don’t you have a broken spotlight somewhere?”

He locates the aforementioned device in seconds. It is grossly misshapen after its twelve-foot fall, but its heft still feels significant in his palms. He imagines hurling it at the face of their captor—this is for Watson!—and the green flecks in his irises glitter excitedly as he manipulates momentum and releases his grip. The heavy stage light makes a crater in the wall and lands with a resounding clatter against the stone floor.

Only slightly to the left of the impressive indentation, Watson gasps in alarm.

“You couldn’t have given me a warning or something?!”

She glares over her shoulder just in time to see childish glee written all over his dirty, distinguished features.

(When they get out of here—because they will get out of here—the first thing she wants is a shower.)

“That could’ve been a knife,” he smirks.

“Seriously?!” she explodes. “We’ve already been kidnapped!”

“Continuous training is essential for survival, Watson,” Sherlock returns solemnly as he retrieves the stage light, “and I intend our partnership to endure for a long, long time.”

(Sometimes, he says the sweetest things.)

He heaves the broken mass of metal at the wall twice more before the weight becomes too much for him to bear.

“Maybe we should begin tearing at the bits we’ve dislodged,” he sighs mournfully.

Joan rolls her eyes, releases the stiletto from her grip, and steps gingerly off of the mattress. “Fuck that,” she mutters. “We can each take a side.”

On the fourth lob, the light crashes through to the other side, and Watson gifts him with the brightest of her smiles.

“Teamwork,” she affirms with a perfunctory nod he recognizes as his own.

“Partnership,” he counters meaningfully, his voice thick with admiration.

With tired hands and determined fingers, they begin to pry at the pieces of drywall surrounding the hole their work has created. Almost immediately, sweat dots their brows and pearls above their upper lips. The air that spills from the hole is hot and thick, and entering the new chamber feels like stepping into a sauna.

Joan inhales, and the steam is heavy in her lungs.

Sherlock discards his jacket, and the heat presses firmly against his bare chest, laying the hair flat and drawing perspiration to the surface.

They trace the room’s perimeter with sluggish steps, taking inventory of their new surroundings and the possibilities afforded therein.

The sparse furnishings echo the first square room—only a navy nylon sleeping bag, an ugly lamp with an abnormally large ceramic base, a small stepladder, and a metal folding chair. The lamp has neither cord nor bulb, and the metal folding chair is without cushion and hot to the touch.

The room, she notes with defeat, has no obvious exit. No visible door presents itself, and the lone vent in the ceiling is bolted into place.

The stifling temperature makes her eyelids heavy, but she begins to drag her palms along the wall for Sherlock, knocking at odd intervals to see if the variations in pitch will reveal a vulnerable spot.

“Curious,” he murmurs as he follows the seam of the walls with steady feet. “This room seems more suited to me—minimal sleeping quarters and creature comforts, maximum tools—though the stifling heat would be much more frustrating for my constitution than yours.” The bulbs in his attic flicker to life, whirring and buzzing. “Perhaps the rooms’ contents are complements. The sleep sack would’ve provided a useful buffer against the Whynter ARC-12S, and the ladder would’ve greatly expedited its cessation. Do you suppose there’s sustenance hidden in here as well?” He pauses to finger the fabric of the sleeping bag. Anticipating (hoping), he presses firmly into the surface of the bag, listening for the familiar crinkle of a plastic bottle or wrapper. All he hears is the swish of skin against nylon.

“Not in the sleep sack, apparently,” he concludes aloud. He begins unbuttoning his trousers to accommodate the warmer climate. “Pity. I’m sure you’re hungry, having relinquished your second soother for my sake.”

(He is still mad at her for that, still mad at himself for letting her do it.)

She isn’t sure she has the strength for another go at the wall. Hunger churns her stomach like a virus, and every step adds lead to her limbs. She thinks she hears Sherlock’s voice in the background, a steady drone that sounds peculiarly like the humming of a hive when the queen is in danger.

“Where else do you think rations could be hidden?”

When she doesn’t immediately respond, he spins to face her, concerned that he may have offended her Puritan sensibilities by stripping down to his pants. He finds her pressed against the wall, completely oblivious to his state of undress.

“Watson?” he prods. “Have you found an exit?”

Her head tilts at an unnatural angle. Her knees buckle beneath her. Her arm falls limply to her side.

Like holding the rusted tobacco tin in his hands, he knows exactly what is going to happen before it occurs. Fear and shame grip his ribcage on either side as terror screams her name.

“WATSON!”

That, she thinks lazily as the floor rushes to meet her, is definitely not an iPod.

“WATSON!”

The word grates across his vocal cords, and it feels good. Right. Like even the most basic parts of his anatomy are protesting this grotesque turn of events.

He is at her side in an instant, tracing the delicate contours of her face with frantic, shaking hands. He grips her jawbone in search of a pulse, but his tremors make deduction impossible and he is hyperventilating, of all stupid, irritating things, and WHY THE HELL CAN’T HE FIND A PULSE.

(He cradled this very jawbone in the crook of his shoulder last night, warm and soft and alive. His skin still remembers hers in the worst way.)

He forces himself to take a breath, broken pieces made staccato by the quaking of his chest. The contractions of her fierce heart push feebly against the pads of his fingers.

He exhales relief and inhales rage.

“Watson,” he growls, gripping her shoulders with every inch of his hands. “Watson, wake up.”

Her head rolls back, and the weakened weight of her sags beneath it. Sweat streams from her temples, and the fabric of her shirt is damp against his palms.

Think, Holmes, you useless, pathetic excuse for a detective. Think.

The heat from the floor seeps into his skin as he kneels, and he is sure it is warming her through the black fabric of her suit. He gathers her limbs in his arms and stands, cradling her against his trembling pectorals.

(She doesn’t wake, even in the midst of this gross violation of boundaries, this unnecessary touching, and the lack of reaction from Watson, who is always so very reactionary, shakes him to his core.)

Dehydration heat exhaustion hypoglycemia how am I supposed to wake her anyway what good am I what good can I be she is always the backbone she found the water and the corn syrup death bars and she knew about the new room and all I know is how to scream her name and fall prey to hypothermia and she fucking NEEDS YOU HOLMES WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.

He glances helplessly at his surroundings, trying to ground his thoughts.

without her you are wasted unfocused manic insane you need someone to live with it’s all a façade the suits the jackets the dress shoes you have no idea how to keep your shit together she calls you on it all the time and

He squeezes his eyes shut and wishes for the tape recorder, for the singularity of purpose it brought.

“SHERLOCK!”

He feels for her ribs beneath his fingers and touches his nose to her crown. The scent of lilacs and honey is still there, buried beneath the chalk of drywall, the musk of sweat, and something else indescribably Watson.

“I think what you do is amazing.” *

“Sleep sac, folding chair, lamp,” he recites aloud, shakily, for her. “Mattress, table, wooden chair. Spotlight, handcuffs, water…”

His eyes widen appreciatively, and the litany of self-loathing comes to a blessed halt.

Water.

He knows he cannot drag her back across the broken threshold. Not only is the space too small, but the other rooms are cold, and the shock to her system from the difference in temperature could have damning medical consequences.

He arranges her delicately on the sleeping bag and disappears into the arctic quarters, retrieving what is left of their water supply and enjoying the brief kiss of air conditioning against his skin.

Armed with two half-liters of water, a growl in his stomach, and fear in his veins, he wiggles back through, kneels before her, and contemplates the possibility of heat exhaustion.

I need to take off her clothes.

With terrified fingers, he begins to undo the clasp of her trousers. He tugs them off gently, raining tears onto her bare legs. He drapes the slacks over the folding chair and uses his jacket to fan her lithe frame.

“Watson,” he bleats. His voice echoes amidst the sparse furnishings, healthy and full and trembling because of her. “Watson, please.”

His companion remains horribly, dreadfully silent.

Forgive me, he thinks desperately, reaching for the buttons of her shirt. He releases every button, including the cuffs, unwrapping her torso and liberating her arms with painstaking tenderness.

(He knows there are cameras in the ceiling because there have been cameras in every ceiling, but he has not been able to dismantle these yet and he hates. He hates this gross invasion of privacy, this disgusting glimpse into their private, desolate moment.)

He retrieves a plastic bottle and pours a thin river into her hairline. Body temperature is best managed with extremities—head, hands, toes, nose. He watches the water disappear into a valley of tangled black strands, then pours a generous amount into his hand and grips her toes.

Heat sears his skin. His bones are molten and his muscles quake with fury as his partner remains terrifyingly still.

He climbs resolutely to his feet.

(He will rain hellfire upon every inch of this place. He will find whoever did this, and he will leave the cameras on and let them be a cautionary tale to anyone else who ever tries to mess with this beautiful woman for whom he cares with all the sentiment his brittle frame can muster.)

“YOU!” he thunders at the ceiling, searching with wide eyes for the blinking red lights. “You are an abomination! Your very existence defiles the entire name of humanity! She could die in here! She could…”

He thinks of the boy from Le Milieu, of the women they rescued from a trafficking ring, of the poor kidnapped child they managed to locate in a hole in the ground before death befell.

“She is good and kind and brilliant and capable, you arrogant, pathetic excuse for a sentient being! YOU ARE TAKING THE BEST OF US!”

He grabs the nearest object—the large, ugly lamp—and hurls it at the camera in the corner. Then, remembering the laws of physics, he drops to the ground to cover Watson from any shards that may ricochet. Amidst the clatter of ceramic against tile, he hears the curiously familiar crinkle of plastic.

With bated breath and the smallest bubbles of hope in his chest, he lifts his head to study the mess he has made. He finds four water bottles and an assortment of what appear to be meal replacement bars.

“Watson,” he gasps, bracing himself against his left arm so he can shake her with his right. “Watson, I’ve found food.”

In his excitement, he snatches the nearest open water bottle and douses her with its remains.

“Watson,” he pants, “you must wake up.”

She blinks one eye open and groans, muttering something about sleep and respect.

(Forget her laugh. This is the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.)

“Watson,” he gasps, his twitching fingers hovering nervously over her head.

(He wants to stroke her hair and kiss her forehead and tug her to him until he can feel her heart beating against his. He wants constant, tangible proof that she is alive and unharmed by this miserable experience.)

“I heard you,” she grumbles. “I’m awake.”

His smile is manic. He does nothing to temper it.

“Watson,” he chides as gently as he is able, “you need to eat. I believe you may be suffering from a combination of hypoglycemia and exhaustion.”

“There’s no food,” she mutters into the mass of nylon.

“But there is.” He leaves her side only for a moment to retrieve the collection of sustenance he has discovered—all-natural Epic and Kind bars that boast turkey, cranberry, walnuts, and some pressed mixture of pineapple, kale, and spirulina. He notes with no small amount of satisfaction that there is no high fructose corn syrup to be found.

“Come,” he tells her, lifting her into a sitting position with unsteady, uncertain hands. “You need protein.”

He props her head up on his knee and feeds her one of each bar in bite-sized pieces. Periodically, he gives her sips of water, rambling all the while about the nutritional benefits of this particular cache.

“…also, neither brand consents to added sugars or unnatural preservatives, so the digestion of both should be easy on your stomach, which I would imagine is quite sore.”

“Sherlock?” she interrupts. “What happened?”

“Ah.” He fiddles with the wrappers until she is sure the crinkling will drive her insane. “You fainted.”

She lays her hand on his, and the relief is so sudden and overwhelming that he aches with it.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and means it.

He inhales shakily and looks away.

“Quite all right,” he tells the shattered lamp. “I subjected you to my severe bout of hypothermia. I suppose turnabout is fair play. Although,” he adds sternly, leveling her with his best and most intimidating glare, “I do caution you to actually consume your share of the rations this time.”

She tilts her head defiantly, big brown orbs boring into him. “I’m not going to apologize for that.”

He huffs indignantly.

“I have to ask, though,” she continues, raising her voice pointedly, “how much longer before the handcuffs came out?”

His eyes widen in confusion. “Sorry?”

“I pass out for—what? Ten minutes?—and you already have me in my underwear? Surely the Peerless model wasn’t far behind.”

The whites of his eyes look bright around the reddened rims of his eyelids. She watches in wry amusement as the color drains from his face.

“Missing Mistress Felicia, were you?” she persists.

Finally, he takes a breath. “You’re joking,” he deduces incredulously.

She has the gall to smile. “You do look nice in boxers,” she teases, taking a long pull from the bottle she finally has the strength to clutch.

He is at once irate and profoundly grateful. “Watson, I assure you, those were the longest ten minutes of my entire life.”

His words settle like dust in the sudden silence, and she threads her fingers reassuringly through his.

“I’m okay.”

He squeezes her hand so tightly that her knuckles turn white, but she doesn’t let go.

He retrieves the broken chair from the other room and destroys the two remaining cameras while Watson regains her faculties. When he returns to her, beard askew and sweat streaming from every pore, she passes him one of the remaining bars. “You should eat now.”

His eyes narrow dangerously. “Or I could save the remaining rations on the off chance your exhaustion should return. Self-sacrifice seems to be a burgeoning epidemic.”

“Don’t be bitter. You need your strength.”

(He needs her strength, but he knows better than to admit that aloud.)

He unwraps one of the Epic bars, glaring at her all the while, and she rolls her eyes.

“Can you pass me my shirt?”

He stretches back to retrieve her chemise, muscles cording beneath taut, glistening skin, and she watches as his tattoos bend with him.

“When did you ink ‘stamina’ on your forearm?” she asks before she can stop herself.

He dangles the cotton in front of her with carefully constructed stoicism. “When I needed a reminder that living would be more courageous than not.”

Her brow knits in concern. “Do you still need that reminder? ‘Cause I’m not afraid to hug you again.” She leans forward to retrieve her blouse, and they hear the gentle creak of wood at the same time.

“No,” he admits with the smallest hint of a blush, guiding her arms through the sleeves the way he has chivalrously done with so many coats in the past. “My reminder lives and breathes these days. Lean forward again.”

This time, something groans beneath her. She bounces a bit, and something squeals in protest. Their eyes widen simultaneously as their gazes meet.

Watson cannot contain her grin. “I think there’s a door underneath this sleeping bag.”

Chapter Text

Finding the door is (relatively) easy. Opening the door proves to be much, much more difficult.

Once Watson has gotten to her feet and protested appropriately—“Really, Sherlock? Do you have to leave broken glass on every floor?”—they discover that the sleeping bag is bolted down. Even after zipping it up, the bulk thereof proves difficult to navigate.

“We can cut it away from the door,” Sherlock offers, brandishing his Peerless 801P model like a pocketknife.

Joan winces. “You want to hack two holes in a perfectly good sleeping bag?”

“Oh, of course,” Sherlock retorts, throwing his arms about. “NOW you suddenly care about the condition of our nighttime amenities. No problem destroying a posh pillow-top mattress, but a sleeping bag is where you draw the line?”

She bites her lip and stares, wide-eyed and conflicted, at the nylon sack. When their eyes meet again, her doe-eyed gaze slays him.

“You were cold,” she all but whispers.

(He is not accustomed to being the subject of someone else’s concern. Morland Holmes was absent on his best days and abhorrent on his worst, and everything Sherlock knows about his mother is now tainted by the black shadow of addiction. Even the limited scope of Mycroft’s affection is soured by disdain and misunderstanding. Watson’s anxiety—the attentiveness with which she addresses even his most trivial needs—moves him in ways he cannot begin to verbalize.)

He places a warm, reassuring hand on her fallen shoulder. “We won’t be stuck here overnight again. We’re getting out of this dreadful place as soon as possible.”

She snorts. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Prying the trapdoor from the floor is like prying open the jaws of life—even without the sleeping bag obfuscating its outline. The trapdoor is comprised of solid oak slats, and it sits so snugly in its frame that neither Sherlock nor Joan can grip enough to lift it more than an inch or so.

“We need a lever if we’re going to make any progress,” Sherlock concludes, sucking petulantly on a splintered finger.

Joan, who is sitting against the wall with her legs splayed out in front of her, gives him a fond smile. “I love the way you say things,” she muses warmly. “Lee-vah. Proh-gress.” Her whole body quakes with a silent chuckle. “Prih-vacy. Sheh-dule.”

He dips his chin and gives her a dumbfounded, incredulous look. “I can butcher the language like a proper American, you know,” he retorts dryly. “Leh-ver. Prah-gress.” He continues to rattle off American pronunciations as he holds her gaze, exaggerating the vowels and chewing the consonants like a proper New Yorker. “Pry-vacy. Sk-edule.”

“I’m serious,” she argues, swatting gently at the foot with which he is almost touching her. “I love that you haven’t lost your accent in all these years I’ve known you. I love that you stubbornly hold onto things like tea and Yorkshire puddings as yours. I think it’s really beautiful.” Her brow creases ever so slightly, and suddenly her gaze is searching. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you that before.”

Sherlock’s eyelids slant dangerously low over his irises as his head tilts. “Don’t do that.”

With grimy fingers, she picks at the dusty hem of her dress shirt and levels him through heavy lashes. “Do what?”

“Get sentimental,” he retorts, his voice steely. “You don’t start with rubbish declarations of affection unless something is coming to an end, and we are not ending, Watson.”

Her gaze drifts to the immovable door in defeat, and Sherlock’s aortic valve constricts painfully in his chest. He crawls forward and grips her ankle with a bloodstained palm.

“Look at me!” he demands with a growl. “We are not done here.”

“There are scratch marks on the cinderblock walls,” she says lowly. “In every room, the floor has streaks—marks most likely made by someone dragging furniture. And I know you, so I know you’ve noticed the bloodstains on the oak slats in that door.” She inhales sharply and traces one of the black marks on the stone floor with a broken nail. “We’re not the first people to be trapped in here. And the fact that our captors are still active means that the first people to be trapped in here probably never made it out.”

(He should be proud, because he taught her how to do this, but all he feels is the leaden weight of desperation in the pit of his stomach. He knows what it’s like to do this without her, and there is a reason he told heroin and London both to sod off.)

“I am the pessimist in this partnership,” he hisses. His callused fingers tighten their hold on her ankle. “Now is not a good time for us to switch roles.”

“I’m not being a pessimist!” she yells, kicking angrily at his iron grip. “I’m being a realist, Sherlock! I fainted on you, okay? You had to undress me so I wouldn’t stay unconscious from hunger and heat exhaustion!”

“And you had to literally wrap your body around mine to keep me from shivering into oblivion!” he bellows. “That’s what partnership is for!”

“You’re missing the point,” she snaps, pushing herself to unsteady feet.

“And what point is that?” he thunders, scrambling to stand so his hands can steady her.

“We might not make it!”

The words ricochet against the walls, ceramic bullets that hit the ground and shatter.

She stumbles, chest heaving, into the wall behind her and plunges her fingers into her hairline. She squeezes her eyes shut for just a moment, just long enough to realize that her hair is too tangled to comb with her fingers and she hates this whole fucking situation.

She tries to summon her diplomacy, the soft, soothing voice that allowed her to tell patients they had inoperable tumors or chronic autoimmune conditions or some other terrible thing like the dead weight of an incompetent detective.

“There may be another exit,” she says finally.

(She does not open her eyes, because she can say this, damn it, but she cannot look at him while doing it.)

Swallowing feels like an impossible task. “You may have seen something that I missed, and you may have ruled it out because you thought I couldn’t make it.” She clenches a tiny fist at her side. “I’m giving you permission, Sherlock. More than that, I’m begging you—if you know another way out, take it. Don’t stay here for my sake. Don’t make me responsible for depriving the world of the great Sherlock Holmes.”

It is quiet for a long time. She hears the slap of bare feet against concrete and wonders if he has walked off.

When she blinks her eyes open, Sherlock is right in front of her, cradling her wrist and scratching at the cuff of her shirt with something that feels sharp.

She listens to the tiny screams of a thousand threads and fights the urge to rake her nails through the beard he is growing.

“Perhaps,” he murmurs softly as he works, “you should be more concerned about depriving me of the great Joan Watson.”

When she looks down, she sees that he has carved a tiny S into the fabric of her sleeve.

“What…”

“You are a detective, Watson,” he chides shakily, tucking the Peerless model back into the pocket of the dust-covered slacks he has re-donned. “Deduce.”

His lips are a trembling white line as she studies the contours of his filthy, sweat-stained forehead. Dust has collected in the wrinkles, making him look much older than his forty-four years.

When her eyes begin to leak, he brandishes his forearm pointedly. “I would etch the whole word into your very arm, but we have neither the time nor the proper tools for that.”

(She had thought, for the smallest, most blissful of moments, that the “S” stood for Sherlock. After all, he carved his name onto the walls of her heart a long, long time ago.)

“If you still need a reminder,” he whispers, his voice like velvet against chafed, angry skin, “I am not afraid to hug you again.”

Gratitude erupts like a volcano in her chest as he leans forward, caressing her oily cheek with his knuckles and tracing her chapped lips with the pad of his thumb.

“You are the heart, Watson.” He says it with all the reverence of a prayer. “You are the esteemed catalyst that turned sobriety into a habit, sponsorship into friendship, a trance into a share, and an independent consultation business into the most fruitful relationship I’ve ever known.   Detective Bell became Marcus because of you. I had the courage to train Kitty because of you. I still have a job with the NYPD because of you.”

She ducks shyly. “That was because of your father.”

“No,” Sherlock argues, forcing her chin upwards until she sees only two wide, indigo orbs in sallow cheeks. “That was because of you. I would never have called my father on my own behalf—but to save your job? I had no qualms.” He exhales, and she feels the gust of his breath on her face. “Because of you,” he insists, “I have a life to get back to, and that life is as much yours as mine. You are the heart,” he repeats with emphasis, “and you cannot die. I will not permit it.”

She drags the cuff of her sleeve across his forehead, erasing the years from his face.

“I’ll take that hug now,” she whispers with the ghost of a smile.

He does not hesitate, does not flinch or twitch as he gathers her in his arms, and she thinks, there really are no rules in captivity.

Newly resolute and invigorated, Watson wrestles her tangled hair into a bun meant for business. “So, does your gallant speech mean that you have, in fact, found another exit?”

Sherlock, whose every nerve ending is still alive and buzzing with the memory of her skin, begins bouncing guiltily on his toes. “Um…” he coughs. “No. I was hoping my encouragement would incite an inspired solution to our lever problem.”

She grins at the way he carefully pronounces “lever” like the Brit he is. “We could try using the broken table.”

“It wouldn’t work,” he argues. “The legs couldn’t hold the weight of the oak.”

“What about the ladder?”

“In theory, we could put enough pressure on the ladder’s legs to offset the trapdoor,” Sherlock agrees, “but one of us would have to hold the door aloft while the other wedged the ladder underneath, and I’m not sure either one of us has strength enough to lift the ladder alone right now.”

Joan, who can feel her stomach contemplating the consumption of a kidney just to prolong bodily functions, acquiesces. She reaches over to her slacks, dangling forlornly from the hot metal folding chair, and liberates the tie from her front pocket. Sherlock takes it from her without preamble and winds it around her hair, securing the bun with a double knot.

Watson stares at the folding chair with unprecedented intensity and tries to convince herself that she’s not the least bit affected by his proximity.

(She could really use a chair right about now. Preferably one on which she could actually sit without burning her skin off.)

Realization coaxes the whites of her eyes into view. “What about the wooden chair?” she muses. “We could wedge its back underneath the door, then push the legs to raise it.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen appreciatively. “You know,” he marvels, “that just might work. Good show, Watson.”

She smiles demurely. “Don’t thank me yet. We still have to go get it.”

“We’ll need to enlarge the hole in the wall.” Sherlock’s eyes widen, and his fingers wriggle excitedly by his thigh. “I’ll go get the spotlight.”

They make their way to the first square room together this time. Sherlock notices two things immediately upon arrival: the Whynter ARC-12S is back on, and someone has installed two new cameras.

The mattress has been moved back into place. Fragments of glass and tape recorder still litter the floor, but this time, they provide the base for a large boot print.

“At least one of our captors is male,” Sherlock relays quietly, gesturing with the slightest tilt of his head. “Size twelve, by the looks of it.”

“And whatever game he’s playing is still seriously afoot,” Watson murmurs. “Finding that A/C unit couldn’t have been easy for him. I practically buried it.”

(He loves the way she steals his phrases and makes them her own.)

“I’m sure he had another,” Sherlock volleys. “As you pointed out, we are not his first captives, and we are most likely not meant to be his last.”

The observation is ominous, but its honesty galvanizes Joan. Building a case aloud with him, compiling grim details for informed assumptions—this is a process she recognizes. Their process.

She juts her chin defiantly and reaches for the wooden chair. “Then I guess we have some expectations to thwart.”

Sherlock regards her with something akin to a smile as she drags the chair across the floor, adding new scratch marks to the floor’s Pollock of captivity.

She rights the chair with a huff and steadies herself against the wall before delivering a murderous glare. “Are you going to help me with this or what?”

“In a moment,” Sherlock assures her. “It seems our captor has re-stitched the mattress. Do you suppose additional provisions are inside?”

Joan’s eyebrows arch appreciatively. “I think it’s worth a look.”

She retrieves her own handcuffs from her pants’ pocket and uses the teeth of the clasp to saw at the new threads. The sewing is sloppy, and the string gives easily.

“He must not’ve had much time,” she remarks. “The stitches are larger and less thorough than before.”

“I can’t believe he had time at all,” Sherlock grumbles. “How did he get in and out without either of us hearing him?”

“Theoretically, I was unconscious and you were…breaking lamps,” Joan sighs. “Either that, or we were both destroying that wall.”

Sherlock shakes his head vehemently. “I would’ve heard something, Watson. I always hear something.”

Joan sits back on her heels and watches him with a furrowed brow as he tugs at the fabric with nervous, twitching hands. “Sherlock,” she chides sympathetically. “You can’t be too hard on yourself. You’re exhausted, dehydrated, and probably hungry.”

“Exactly my point,” Sherlock snaps. “My faculties are slipping. Our faculties are slipping. This is a game of endurance, Watson, and our captors are winning.” He peels back the fabric to reveal two organic granola bars that proudly proclaim “NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP!” and a tiny plastic bag full of white powder.

Almost immediately, Sherlock is back on the train tracks, staring into a rusted tin box while Oscar bleeds at his feet. His heart pounds at his sternum, begging for euphoria.

“He’s been listening to us.”

Her words reach him through a tunnel, muddy and distorted as blood roars past his eardrums. He wants. He wants. He needs.

“He’s playing with us,” Watson continues, outraged. “He wants us to know that he heard your lecture about high fructose corn syrup and your speech about relapse.”

“Impossible,” Sherlock argues, his gaze still trapped by the mesmerizing beauty of oblivion. “I destroyed the cameras.”

“Maybe we missed a few cameras,” she rants. “Maybe he had recording devices in the vents.”

Like a moth to a flame, Sherlock’s hand flies slowly but surely toward the stash in the mattress. “Maybe…” he muses.

Watson’s thin, steady surgeon’s fingers grip his forearm in a vice.

“Don’t even think about it,” she growls. “You’re not allowed to die in here either.”

His heart is a hole in his chest that aches and throbs. “Watson…”

“No,” Watson snaps. “Stamina. You’ve already got it tattooed on your forearm. Do you want me to carve it on there?”

He meets her gaze sheepishly, grey-blue against bright onyx. With her free hand, she snatches the granola bars.

“Get the chair,” she hisses. “Do not pass ‘go,’ do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“I find,” he confesses as his eyes drift longingly back to the mattress, “that my usual cravings are harder to manage under the current circumstances.”

Watson presses the granola into his hand. Then, she retrieves the tiny plastic bag from the mattress and rips it open, scattering powder all over the glass-laden floor. She puckers her lips and blows, and the powder outlines the boot print.

“Quick,” she demands, her voice loud and authoritative against the whirring of the Whynter ARC-12S. “What kind of shoe is it?”

The answer bubbles up from some deep, forgotten nook of his brain attic. “A farming boot. Bekina, by the looks of the treads in the sole. They’re also used as all-weather boots for people who live in rural areas. Not a trendy brand, so it is unlikely someone would purchase them for impractical reasons.”

Sherlock realizes with a start that he—shirtless—is shivering again. Whether the tremors are the result of adrenaline, anticipation, or genuine disagreement with the elements, he can’t be sure, but his body is a tuning fork that has been struck against a table.

“So we’re probably being kept somewhere rural,” Watson deduces, interrupting his frantic thoughts.

He knows the drug is odorless, but he swears he can smell it. His veins ache for fire.

“Y-yes,” he stammers. “Rural.”

“SHERLOCK!”

His name, shouted at ridiculous volume with the same urgency that plagued the recording, finally brings some sort of reprieve. His gaze finds Watson by the hole in the wall, struggling to lift the wooden chair that would normally be no match for her strength.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

He closes his eyes, anticipating a debilitating yen for the destructive force he’s tried so desperately to leave in the past. Instead, he feels Watson’s tearstained cheek beneath the worn skin of his knuckles and the warm weight of her wrist in the palm of his hand.

“I really do love you. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

He swallows around the lump in his throat and shuffles stiff, cold, clammy limbs toward the only woman with the power to beautifully, constantly surprise him. He gives one last glance to the scattered powder before reaching down and gripping the legs of the chair with shaking hands.

“It’s sturdy enough, right?” Joan prompts. “To be our lever?”

Her British accent as she utters the word “lever” is terrible. His features contort in disgust, but the small, answering smile on her face is a balm that calms his racing heart.

“Should do,” he agrees, lifting the chair to waist level.

She waits until they make it past the first hole in the wall to rest a moment. Her sharp eyes trace his dust-covered form with unmistakable concern.

(Sometimes, her very gaze makes him feel naked.)

“Are you okay?” she asks gently.

Her voice holds no trace of the sober companion. She is asking solely as a friend, and the realization grips his ribs painfully as he gives her a grave nod. With a wall between him and the heroin, he feels like he can breathe again. The urge to lick it off the stone floor has mostly passed.

“Yes.” He clears his throat awkwardly. “Thank you,” he adds, and means it.

(He means it for so many reasons that he fears he would lose his voice again trying to articulate them all.)

“We really should work on your British accent, though.”

She laughs out loud, gifting him with a warm smile and a brief squeeze of the hand. “Anytime.”

Together, they hoist the chair across the domed room, through the hole in the wall, and into their own personal sauna. When they finally set it down, both of them are exhausted and sweating profusely, but they capitalize on their momentum. With Sherlock yelling directives and Watson swearing a blue streak, they manage to wedge the back of the chair under the heavy oak slats. By the time they each grab a leg, shoving the chair forward until the edge of the trapdoor is resting against the seat, Watson has lost two nails to the cause, and Sherlock’s hands are bleeding again.

“I think,” Sherlock pants, “that I am beginning to understand your theory about the importance of sleep.”

The corner of her mouth curls in a pathetic excuse for a smile. “Maybe we should rest a minute.”

“Perhaps, yes,” he agrees breathlessly. He splays his legs in front of him and uses the remaining strips of his shirt to wipe the sweat that rolls through his forest of hair in lazy rivers. The bloodstained beige fabric quickly turns black.

He glances over to tell Watson that he is, for the first time in recent memory, yearning for his bed, but she is a swaying pile of scantily clad limbs atop the discarded sleeping bag, eyes at half-mast.

Something large and bitter lodges itself just below his larynx. “Watson?”

Her throat bobs as she swallows. It takes her an inordinate amount of time to meet his gaze.

His eyes widen in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

“Dizzy,” she slurs. “S’ok. ‘M fine.”

“You most certainly are not,” Sherlock retorts, crawling over to her. He presses the back of his hand to her forehead. “Are you ill?”

“Jus’ tired,” she sighs.

“You may also be dehydrated.” Sherlock glances around the room, searching for any remaining bottles of water. He finds one, unopened, towards the far corner of the room. It must have rolled away before either of us had the chance to consume it. Stupid, stupid…

Shards of ceramic crunch beneath his feet as he retrieves the bottle and unscrews the cap for her.

“Drink.”

Her fingers slide along the ridges in the plastic, but the bottle starts to tip as soon as he relinquishes control.

Watson is many things, but feeble is not one of them. He crouches, brow furrowed in concern, and holds the bottle to her lips until he sees her throat begin to ripple.

“How much water did you drink?” he demands.

She blinks slowly up at him, her lips parted in a silent “oh” of surprise. “I don’t…”

He rolls his eyes.

(It is easier to be angry at her than to acknowledge, even for a moment, how profound a sense of loss he feels at even the thought that she may not survive this.)

“Keep drinking,” he snaps, tilting the mouth to her lips once more. She swallows until her eyes are wrinkled buttons in sallow cheeks, until her countenance twists in disgust, until she sputters and weakly tries to push him away.

She coughs, and he thrusts one of the granola bars towards her, lips pursed in distress.

“Eat this.”

Normally, the blatant imperative would elicit some sort of glare, but her expression remains disturbingly childlike. She fumbles with the wrapper, crinkling and twisting the ends with near limp fingers, until he reaches over and opens it for her. Even the movements of her jaw as she chews are sluggish and uncoordinated.

“Watson,” Sherlock barks.

Her answering gaze is unfocused as he unwraps the second granola bar and holds it out expectantly. “Take another.”

Her brow furrows in slow motion as she chews the remainder of the first. “But that’s yours.”

“Please,” Sherlock hisses. “Please choose this moment, this critical moment of your care, to explain to me how an equal division of rations is more important than saving your life. I would relish the opportunity to lampoon you for your blatant hypocrisy.”

She blinks once. Twice.

“Neither one of us is dying in here,” Sherlock growls. “Take the damn granola. Your metabolism is faster than mine. You need the carbohydrates.”

She takes the offering and eats it guiltily, watching him all the while. He stares back, his eyes wide and expectant. When both snacks are gone, he hands her the water. This time, her fingers find purchase and her feeble grip holds.

Sherlock’s shoulders sag with relief, and the air rushes out of him in a current as she finishes drinking on her own.

“Better?” he prompts when she sets the empty bottle on the stone floor.

She inhales sharply and meets his eyes with an exhausted iteration of the searching gaze with which he has become so familiar over the past five years.

“I would kill for a nap right now.”

(He wants to hug her, wants to pull her into his arms and kiss her smack on the lips in a way that would doubtless offend her Puritan sensibilities for saying something that is so typically Watson.)

“Yes,” he says instead, “but would you consent to be killed for a nap right now? Because that appears to be the risk we are facing.”

She closes her eyes. “I know this sounds pathetic to you, but this is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without sleep.”

Sherlock unwraps the last of the pineapple-kale-spinach bricks. He pinches the top off and hands it to her. Mercifully, she takes it without protest, and he puts the rest of the mossy green concoction in his mouth.

“It doesn’t sound pathetic,” he admits as he chews.

She dips her chin pointedly, and he snorts.

“I miss my bed, Watson. Me.” He gives his head an incredulous shake. “You’re not the only one who’s exhausted.”

She pushes herself calmly to her feet. She dusts herself off and reaches for her slacks, which she tugs on one leg at a time. Then, she holds out a hand to help him up.

He takes it.

(He doubts she could bear even half his weight at the moment, but he relishes in the electricity of skin against skin. Touching Watson, feeling the gentle throb of her pulse against the crook of his index finger, moors him like a ship to shore. Here, suspended in this awful place where neither time nor sustenance properly exists, he is painfully adrift without her.)

He stretches sore, sweaty limbs until his eyes are in line with her crown.

(Her presence is so overwhelming, so alive that he often forgets how very small she is.)

“Let’s do this,” she tells him, narrowing her eyes at their potential pathway to freedom. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Chapter Text

They each choose a leg and apply pressure. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches the way his muscles cord. She studies the threads of sinew, the clench of the deltoids and the glistening stones of his triceps and supraspinati as he thrusts his entire weight onto the chair. Exhaustion nudges her insistently, but Sherlock’s sure, frantic movements are like caffeine, surging through her veins and anchoring her in consciousness.

The oak slats lift, and the familiar scents of dust and soil waft toward them on invisible clouds of cold air.

“Yes!” Sherlock crows through clenched teeth.

Sweat pearls at her temple like tears as she fights to stay focused. “We’re going to have to push the door the rest of the way.”

“On my count,” Sherlock agrees. “One, two…”

She mirrors his movements as he replaces his arms with his leg and reaches up for the edges of the wood. Together, they heave the trapdoor until the wood clatters against the stone floor and the chair topples over into the space below.

“Partnership,” Sherlock professes breathlessly, holding his hand out for an atypical high-five. Joan slaps it gratefully, but he surprises her by closing his fingers around hers and pulling her into a firm embrace. His chest expands against her sternum as he pants, his damp pectorals laving her bare collarbone.

(She feels like he is breathing for both of them, like the air in his lungs is filling hers.)

He presses a kiss to her sweat-soaked hair as he exhales, resting his cheek briefly on the crown of her head, and her eyes burn with the weight of unshed tears.

(She’s pretty sure they should’ve done away with the rules a long time ago. Boundaries are overrated.)

The door’s metal handle reveals itself, large and silver and shining, even in the dim light of the room. On their other side, the oak slats are pristine, and she knows in an instant that no previous captive has made it this far.

“You’re humming,” he observes, his voice a muted murmur against her hairline.

Her lips relax into a smile against his collarbone.

(She has the inexplicable urge to rake her teeth along its edge.)

“Should I know the tune?” he persists, prodding her with a stiff finger.

“We’ve come a long, long way together,” she sings, badly, “through the hard times and the good…”

(As her train of thought follows the earworm down its dangerous lyrical tunnel, she thinks it may be best that Sherlock doesn’t know how the song ends. Lord knows his ego is large enough as is.)

He releases her with a curious look and marches awkwardly to the edge of the square-shaped hole in the floor.

“Be careful,” she cautions, following him slowly.

“It didn’t sound like the chair fell far,” he remarks, leaning forward to examine the space, “but it is awfully dark down there.” He spins on his heel to face her, dress shoes clicking on the concrete. “Watson, do you suppose your iPod has a…”

She watches in terror as his foot reaches for absent ground, and her stomach lurches into her throat as gravity pulls him backwards.

He falls in a disjointed series of snapshots—the scratch of a heel against the edge, the flailing of arms, the failed purchase of fingers against stone—as her pulse throbs in her ears.

Adrenaline surges like fire through her veins. She slides forward like she’s stealing home and thrusts her arm over the edge, barely grazing his elbow before he disappears from view.

He lands with a crash and a yell, and an ominous, foreboding feeling wraps icy fingers around her intestines.

“Sherlock!” she cries, feeling her entire body weight in the tug on her diaphragm. She slaps blindly at the space beneath her and feels soil. God, I hope he landed on something soft.

(He must survive. She refuses to walk out of here without him.)

“Sherlock, can you hear me?”

She fumbles in her pocket for the iPod. Almost immediately, she hears his voice bleating her name from its tiny speakers.

She presses pause and inhales shakily as she finds the LED flashlight in the small sea of apps. Her thumb leaves a smear of oil on the screen as the light flickers to life. She peers over the edge again and illuminates an eight-foot drop onto what looks like a dirt floor.

Sherlock is splayed at the bottom, tangled with the broken chair. She can’t see any obvious compound fractures, but the sight does nothing to alleviate the incessant pounding of her heart against her sternum.

“SHERLOCK!”

He groans, and her entire body sags against the warm concrete in relief.

He’s alive. He’s fine. He HAS to be fine.

“Sherlock!” she calls again, trying to summon her sense of surgical clarity. Fear gives her voice an uneven vibrato. “Are you okay? I need you to answer me.”

He mumbles something incoherent and begins to stir.

“Louder,” she demands, her voice full of doctoral authority as the potential consequences of the fall run like a news ticker across the top of her vision. Concussion, cracked ribs, compound fracture to the ulna…

“I slipped,” he repeats, his tone sharp with disdain. “Of all the stupid, moronic…”

She spots a series of footholds carved into the wall like a ladder and breathes a sigh of relief. “I’m coming down!”

“No, d…” He shifts into something that resembles a sitting position and cries out loudly in pain.

“Too late,” Joan mutters, tucking the iPod into her bra. The light spills onto the wall, setting her path on fire. Epinephrine makes her tired limbs steady and sure as she descends.

When her bare toes find solid ground, she heaves a sigh of relief and whirls around to examine her partner, who is looking up at her with angry, wounded eyes.

“I think I may have dislocated my shoulder in my graceless descent,” he growls.

She brushes the pads of her fingers over every inch of his skin, searching for lacerations, fractures, or signs of internal bleeding.

“Watson,” he snaps angrily. “The shoulder.”

“With all due respect,” she hisses, “you don’t have a medical degree, and you just fell eight feet onto a wooden chair. I’m not satisfied that you’re in any condition to diagnose yourself.”

His shoulder looks disproportionately square, indicating an anterior dislocation. If he has any other injuries, reducing the shoulder could aggravate them exponentially. She doesn’t want to risk pneumothorax, or turning a hairline fracture into a compound fracture.

“I may have also bruised my tailbone,” he huffs, “but I do not feel any of the nausea or confusion that characterize a concussion.”

She rolls her eyes and rocks back onto her heels. “You aren’t presenting with any other obvious fractures. How do you feel?”

“Like a wanker,” he grumbles. His eyes widen imploringly as she reaches around to feel the back of his head for bumps. “We are so close, Watson. I can feel it. If my injury prevents you from…”

Her eyes narrow to slits as her hands fall away. “Stop.”

He inhales sharply. “But I must insist that you…”

She plants a finger on the center of his lips and levels him with her most lethal glare.

“If you tell me to go on without you,” she cautions, eyes glittering defiantly in the glow of the LED torch, “I will punch you in the face.”

They face off for a moment, glare on glare.

(What Sherlock learns—what he always, always learns—is that Watson’s glare is far more effective.)

He swallows deliberately, and she thinks she can feel the ghost of a conciliatory smile against her knuckles.

“Perhaps,” he begins tersely, “you would consider adjusting the joint so we may continue.”

She hesitates—not because she doesn’t want to help him, or because she doesn’t know how, but because she’s not sure she has the strength to provide a proper reduction. Exhaustion and hunger have severely limited her physical capability.

He tugs on the hem of her shirt with his good hand, and she meets his gaze apprehensively.

“I trust you,” he says, his voice a low, healthy hum.

She sets her jaw and squares her shoulders. The tunnel is cold, and she can see the hairs on his chest and arms standing in protest.

They need to get out of here quickly, before their fallible bodies succumb to circumstance and cease to function.

“Tell me what you noticed about the door,” she says, reaching for the arm that dangles uselessly at his side. “Tell me what you’ve deduced so far.” She lays her hands on him and feels gently for confirmation of the anterior dislocation, seeking the appropriate points at which to apply pressure so she doesn’t cause or exacerbate any nerve damage. When she has decided upon the most efficient approach, she meets his eyes.

“This will hurt,” she tells him honestly, “but don’t stop talking.”

He smirks. “I had no idea you were so very fond of the dulcet tones of my voice.”

(She tightens her grip ever so slightly, and he wants to tell her, hold on. Don’t let go.)

“Tell me what you noticed,” she reminds him with the ghost of a smile.

“None of the tell-tale scratch marks or bloodstains apparent on the original side,” he begins, glad for the chance to catalog aloud. “And yet the hinges didn’t squeak as we opened the door, which indicates frequent use. Footholds in the wall are an equally promising find—it is doubtful that a killer would go to the trouble of properly modeling an escape path for his victims. Add that to the boot prints your torch seems to be illuminating with the aid of your brassiere, and…”

He feels the delicious press of Joan’s fingers on his forearm and shoulder. Then, there is a sickening crack as the head of his humerus is shoved back into its socket, and pain washes his vision white. Searing heat rips down his arm.

He gives an involuntary shout of protest, and it echoes against the soil walls of the tunnel.

“Reverberations,” he recites with a gasp, his voice breaking over the syllables, “indicate that the tunnel continues for at least a kilometer—roughly half a mile in American measurements—if not more. It appears we have found the means by which our captor has been entering and exiting.”

“One of them,” she corrects. “We can’t forget about the trapdoor in the ceiling.”

“Oh,” he breathes, reaching up with his good hand to wipe a tear that has escaped confinement. “Yes, that.”

“Don’t move,” she warns. “We need to stabilize the arm to prevent further injury.”

“With what?” Sherlock grumbles.

Watson whips off her shirt, and Sherlock’s eyelids stretch so far open that he wonders if his eyeballs will be the next appendages to leave their sockets.

(He has seen Watson in various states of undress. They do, after all, cohabitate. He’s never been this close before, though. Her breasts are brushing his torso and setting a tiny corner of his brain attic on fire. Her bare shoulder is close enough to taste.)

She reaches up to lace the makeshift sling around his neck, and he dips his chin so that his nose brushes her crown. Beneath the drone of pain, his nerve endings are singing—perhaps a faint echo of the tune Watson introduced earlier.

(It’s not just that she’s a beautiful specimen, biologically speaking. It’s that, even in this hellhole, touching Watson is like coming home.)

He waits while Watson ascends the wall to retrieve their clothing and any other objects that may be of use. The temperature in the tunnel indicates that it is bitterly cold outside; the chill seeps through the soil and into the soles of Sherlock’s exhausted feet. (He insisted that Watson take his shoes so as not to cut herself on any of the broken glass he has so liberally distributed across their prison.)

She finally descends, breasts hidden by her dusty vest and jacket, looking a bit like a child as she shuffles forward in his loafers. She drops the broken spotlight unceremoniously onto the broken chair and holds his blazer out to him.

“I find I regret the systematic repurposing of my chemise,” Sherlock confesses as he slides his good arm through the outstretched sleeve. “Its warmth would be beneficial at this juncture.”

Watson rolls her eyes. “Maybe try not to cut yourself so much next time.”

She passes him the shoes and tugs his used socks onto her bare feet.

(He notices with no small amount of gratitude—and amusement—that she has holstered her heels in her pockets like guns, ready for retrieval at a moment’s notice.)

“I sincerely hope there is no next time,” he retorts.

A blush colors Watson’s hollow cheeks.

“However,” he continues brusquely, “if I am to be kidnapped again, I’m sure I would prefer to endure it with you by my side.”

(What he means to say is that he is so desperately grateful to have her here, with him, making every bit of this bearable and survivable.)

Watson wrinkles her nose. “Thanks?”

They walk as quickly as their battered, exhausted bodies will allow. Sherlock carries the iPod with his good hand, illuminating their path as Joan lugs the spotlight forward. Sherlock periodically expresses concern about the demands of its weight on her strength, but she refuses to be unarmed whenever they finally reach the exit.

“We have no idea what’s waiting for us at the end of this thing,” she points out.

“With any luck,” Sherlock counters, “it’s a large bowl of macaroni and cheese. I find I have a rather persistent craving.”

(She decides the situation must be dire if Sherlock Holmes, the man who eats purely for fuel, is expressing such an impractical yen.)

She watches him plow on, pausing in his wide-legged gait every so often to sniff the air, or to crouch down and trace a finger along one of the stones lining their path.

(He is so endearingly weird.)

“Just so you know,” she says before she can stop herself, “you scared the shit out of me when you fell.”

Sherlock glances over his shoulder and arches an unimpressed eyebrow. “Yes, well…you incited a similar reaction when you collapsed, so I suppose we’re even.”

She blushes. For a moment, she follows him in silence, imagining the state he must’ve been in to tear her shirt off and throw a lamp at the wall.

“I’m sorry you had to undress me,” she admits sheepishly. “I know how you feel about unnecessary touching and forced intimacy.”

He snorts incredulously. “Watson, there is no personal boundary I wouldn’t cross, no long-held proclivity I wouldn’t abandon to save your life. Besides,” he continues pointedly, “you laid your entire body across my shivering form and administered what can only be called a full-body massage.” He pauses for a moment to navigate a particularly narrow part of the tunnel. When he speaks again, his voice betrays his nervousness. “I’m sorry I made you violate your boundaries by removing your shirt in such close proximity.”

She scoffs. “Partnership before boundaries,” she declares firmly. “As long as I’m around, you’re not allowed to die. Okay?”

His lips curl curiously in the ghost of a smile, and he is suddenly grateful for the dark. “I shall endeavor not to disappoint you.”

He takes a few more steps forward, then whirls around to face her. The gray hairs in his beard look silver in the light. “Watson?”

“Holmes?”

“That’s the only real rule of captivity,” he amends solemnly. “No death.”

She studies the shadow of his back and the slope of his injured shoulder, watching for any other ailments as he moves doggedly forward.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?”

“Marcus and the captain?” Sherlock heaves a sigh. “I suppose it depends on whether a case has arisen in our absence. Our captor chose an opportune time to seize us, given that we’d just rained justice upon Miko Smith for his murder of those two children and their mother.”

She’d been on her way back from a bar in Midtown, where she’d met a few others from Major Cases to toast the deceased and celebrate the painful case’s conclusion. Sherlock had declined the invitation.

“Where were you,” she asks, “that night we were taken?”

“I’d just left a meeting with Alfredo. He’s in the process of testing Porsche’s new alarm system, so he offered me a ride.”

She hears none of the usual tells in his voice—no frantic vibration from jumping limbs, no defensive edge, no forced descent in pitch. He’s telling the truth.

She smiles. “I’m glad you and Alfredo are reconnecting.”

“To be honest,” he counters, “I’m just glad that he’d already sped off by the time our culprit put this game in play.” She watches as the shadow of his head shakes incredulously. “He’s suffered enough for his connection to me.”

Something in his voice ties knots in her stomach. “What happened with Oscar wasn’t your fault.”

“Just like your kidnapping wasn’t my fault?”

She rolls her eyes, hoping that he can feel her exasperation, even if he can’t see it. Sherlock may be prideful to a fault where his intelligence is concerned, but he has also turned self-flagellation into a fine art. “It wasn’t.”

“Hm.” His skepticism is a fog that settles uncomfortably in the sudden silence.

“It wasn’t,” she insists, jogging forward until they are shoulder-to-shoulder. “The fact that you can understand and catch psychopaths doesn’t make you responsible for them.”

Sherlock arches a lethally determined eyebrow. “Without me, neither you nor Alfredo would’ve had any connection to the people who committed such heinous crimes against you.”

“Without you,” Watson counters, “Mycroft wouldn’t have had a bargaining chip with which to negotiate my safe return, and I wouldn’t have had any of the skills necessary to locate Alfredo.”

“Without me, you wouldn’t have needed them,” Sherlock insists.

“Oh, please,” Watson scoffs. “You think I wasn’t a target before I met you? You think being an ‘addict sitter’ didn’t invite all kinds of shady characters into my life?”

He ignores the twinge of regret he feels as his insulting assessment of her former profession is thrown back at him, dripping with disdain and framed in air quotes. “You were prepared for addicts,” he retorts, “not for psychopathic killers, cabals, and mobsters.”

Watson rolls her eyes. “You already know about my fascination with the mob and the degree to which it predates you.”

“You’re missing the point,” Sherlock growls. “I made you a promise, Watson. One I had fully intended to keep.”

“You do keep it!” she yells. “That’s the point!”

Her voice echoes along the walls, not unlike the explosion of the bullets from Le Milieu’s hired gun. She shrinks back down in the wake of the waves.

“Look,” she amends, placing a hand on his good shoulder and spinning him until their gazes meet, “you say you’re better with me, right?”

Her hand slides down his arm, setting every inch ablaze until she winds her cold fingers through his. He searches for the gold flecks in her irises like one seeks water in the desert.

“It goes both ways,” she says firmly. “I’m better with you. I’m better because of you. You’ve made me smarter, stronger, safer, and braver. I’m sure Alfredo would say the same.”

Her eyes are so bright and her timbre so solemn that he almost believes her.

She suspects they’ve covered a mile by the time Sherlock finally speaks again.

“Cow dung.”

Her eyes widen in alarm, and she leaps from one foot to the other to avoid whatever Sherlock has sensed.

He rolls his eyes in exasperation as he fixes the light on her. “Not in here, Watson. Outside.”

Joan settles skeptically onto two feet. “Do I even want to know how you can discern cow dung this far underground?”

“How can you not discern it?” he retorts incredulously. “The scent is almost unbearably pungent.”

She tilts her nose up and attempts to sniff, but the manipulation of breathing patterns makes her instantaneously dizzy.

“I think our captor may be a farmer.” He inclines his head for another deep whiff and wrinkles his nose distastefully. “Either a cattle rancher or a dairy farmer, judging by the sheer amount of cow dung.”

Watson’s deductive wheels begin creaking to life. “That would make sense, given the Bekina boots and the scale of this operation. The length of this tunnel and the elaborate set-up of the initial area, with the multiple conjoined rooms—that’d be hard to do in the city. Too many eyes, not enough space.”

“Indeed,” Sherlock murmurs. “Speaking of space…” He tilts the light up to reveal another series of grooves in a wall that appears to terminate the tunnel. “I believe we may have found our exit.” He traces the grooves with the light until he reveals a metal grate above their heads. With careful attention, he grips the iPod between his teeth and uses his good hand to remove the sleeve of the jacket draped over his injured shoulder.

Behind him, Watson gapes. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Preparing to climb the wall,” he answers calmly. “I’d hardly be the gentleman Britain’s finest boarding schools trained me to be if I let you go first. Besides, I have far more training in self-defense.”

“You also have a far more recent injury,” Watson snaps. “Besides, how are you going to grip that vent AND maintain balance with your arm in a sling?”

“Stabilization isn’t required for a relocated limb,” he grumbles. “It’s merely a formal medical suggestion. There’s no scientific proof that it yields more effective results.”

“But there is scientific proof that a relocated limb is more likely to dislocate again! Are you seriously going to risk both of our lives just to uphold some archaic notion of chivalry?!”

He glares. She glares.

(Her glare is still better.)

Sherlock inhales sharply. “Ladies first,” he concedes bitterly with a dramatic sweep of his arm.

The air is colder immediately beneath the grate. Watson chooses, perhaps naively, to believe that the chill is proof that they’re about to experience winter sunlight and fresh air for the first time in days. She scales the wall quickly, galvanized by the possibility of freedom. With every step, her shivering increases.

“It’s freezing up here,” she mutters.

“I suspect from the whirring that we’re beneath yet another air-conditioned domain,” Sherlock laments from below.

Watson rolls her eyes and reaches out a hand, winding her fingers through the spaces of the metal grate. It bites her palms like ice, numbing the nerve endings before the persistent burning sets in.

She musters all of the strength her exhausted form possesses and pushes against the grate until she hears the telltale scrape of metal against tile.

Below her, Sherlock coughs uncomfortably. “Should you require assistance, I can…”

“No,” she interrupts pointedly, the word sliding out between gritted teeth. “I’ve got it.”

“As you wish,” he grumbles.

To her surprise—and his—she slides the grate across the floor until the entire opening is visible. She climbs high enough to peer over the edge before making a graceful descent.

“Well?” Sherlock prompts expectantly.

“You were right,” she admits with a sigh. “We’re being held on a dairy farm.”

Sherlock’s left eyebrow scales the wrinkled skin of his forehead skeptically. “And you know this because…”

“I don’t,” Watson concedes reluctantly, “but this tunnel dead-ends into what looks like a walk-in freezer. Either we’re being held on a dairy farm, or we’re being held by people who really, really like yogurt, ice cream, milk, and cheese—specifically of the Slo-N-Smooth variety.”

His lip curls distastefully. “I detest their yogurt. It blends dreadfully with the honey our bees provide.”

“Good,” Watson retorts, “because after this, I can assure you that I will never want to see it again.”

He heaves a sigh and stares back into the black abyss from which they’ve come. For just a moment, helplessness overwhelms him, clawing at his throat and seizing his lungs. Watson’s hand finds his good shoulder, and he closes his eyes as the tension bleeds out of him.

“Go on up,” she urges. “I’ll spot you.”

“I could just remove my arm from the sling,” he points out petulantly.

Her eyes narrow lethally. “Try it,” she agrees, and her voice is a soprano sliver of steel. “See what happens.”

He turns around without further protest and begins his one-armed ascent of the footholds. Roughly halfway up, he feels the reassuring press of her hand in a vaguely inappropriate place and takes pause.

“Keep going,” she urges gently. “I’ve got your back.”

He finds that swallowing is suddenly very, very difficult. “It would appear,” he counters, voice cracking, “that what you actually have is my bum.”

(She gives it the slightest squeeze and tells herself that the extra pressure is meant to help, that she in no way actually wanted to squeeze his butt.)

(He tells himself that any reaction on his part is the product of delirium, exhaustion, and hunger; that he is in no way suffering any sort of physical attraction to Watson.)

“I have handcuffs in my pocket,” she reminds him with what sounds like a smirk. “I can break them out if you think they’d make this more comfortable for you.”

He continues his ascent at a rapid pace. (And if the image of a brassiere-clad Watson handcuffing him to a ladder makes its way into the light of his brain attic—well, that’s her fault, really.)

Chapter Text

Once both Sherlock and Watson have two feet on the cold tile floor, they quickly replace the grate, lest their captors attempt to follow.

“It’s bloody freezing in here,” he gripes upon standing, rubbing his hand along his sling-held arm for warmth.

Watson’s palms trace similarly firm paths along her triceps. “Yeah, if we never run the A/C in the brownstone again, I’m not exactly going to be sad about it.”

Sherlock hums in agreement and spins in a slow circle, deductive capacities creaking reluctantly to life.

Myriad containers in bottles and cylinders of varying sizes boast opaque, pastel-colored concoctions obscured ever so slightly by the Slo-N-Smooth logo. Off to one side, a shelf supports a small wall of yellow, saran-wrapped bricks. Cheese, his brain offers. Cheddar, most likely.

“Well,” he murmurs disdainfully, coughing as the cold air seeps into his lungs, “there goes my craving for mac-and-cheese.”

Watson wrinkles her nose. “Do you think these people have any idea what kind of an operation is tied to their dairy farm?”

“Someone has to know,” Sherlock murmurs as he traces the contours of a milk bottle with a grimy index finger. “That tunnel has been used recently, and not just by us.”

Watson, too, had taken note of the boot prints, still slightly damp and roughly the same size as those they’d found near the mattress. She glances around the small space of the walk-in, searching for similar signs of occupancy. As she moves, the fluorescent light illuminates the heel of a familiar tread pattern along the edge of the tile just beneath a thick metal door.

She immediately kneels and swipes at the tread with the pad of her finger. “He left through this door,” she relays, glancing fearfully up at her partner. “Recently, too. The print’s still wet.”

He scans the perimeter again with razor-sharp focus, cataloguing the details—seven shelves high, roughly thirty centimeters in depth, burnt red tile that tapers to our trapdoor, disguised (or perhaps additionally functioning) as a drain. Mop and half-full bucket of soapy water in the corner, but the dry floor indicates that the cleaning, while recent, did not occur within the last hour.

“Sherlock,” Joan hisses from her perch behind the door. “He could be waiting for us on the other side.”

Sherlock’s grey-green gaze traces the gleaming edges of the windowless door. “Doubtful. His presence and his adjustments to our area of captivity indicate that he expects us to remain down there at least a bit longer.”

“Or he intends to kill us and use the space for someone else,” Joan returns in a bitter whisper.

“No,” Sherlock argues, spinning a slow circle to examine the shelves again. “You said it yourself; those additions were deliberate and personal. Besides, he’s not a hands-on murderer. He kidnaps, yes, but his victims kill themselves. The scratch marks on the floor and the bloodstains on the oak slats indicate a struggle against the environment, not another person. I’d be surprised if his victims ever see his face.”

“Do you think he works alone?”

“He very well could,” Sherlock admits grudgingly. “The entrance to the tunnel functions easily and inconspicuously as a large drain in a room where such a thing is frequently necessary. If any product spills on the floor, it must be cleaned immediately to prevent mold, mildew, or contamination.”

Watson glares distrustfully at one of the milk bottles bearing the cheery Slo-N-Smooth label. “Maybe I’ll go vegan after this.”

Sherlock snorts, and it echoes loudly in the small, cold, tiled space. “Don’t be ridiculous. You love my omelettes.”

Watson dips her chin pointedly. “‘Love’ is a strong word.”

(You used it for me, Sherlock thinks. Twice, in fact.)

He arches a confrontational eyebrow. “Tell me you wouldn’t love an omelette right now.”

Her mouth waters at the thought, and a smug smirk steals across his grimy features. She rolls her eyes and, for a moment, they are back in the brownstone, having a stupid fight over nothing to pass the time. Then the refrigeration gnaws at her exposed skin with sharp, icy teeth, and she realizes that every visible inch of Sherlock’s bare chest is covered with gooseflesh.

“You can’t make me an omelette until we get out of here,” she volleys.

Sherlock splays his fingers abnormally wide and makes a gallant sweep toward the door. “By all means,” he prompts expectantly.

With a heavy, apprehensive sigh, Joan grips the handle with red, trembling fingers and tugs.

The handle doesn’t budge.

She tugs again. Beneath the whirring of the air conditioning, she hears the tinny click of the bolt against the strike plate and groans.

“It’s locked.”

She can’t see Sherlock rolling his eyes, but she can feel it. “Of course it is.”

She leans down until her ear is in line with the lock and jerks the handle again. “It sounds like a deadbolt,” she admits ruefully. “The pitch of the click is too low for it to be a standard lock.”

In spite of the looming chill and the dire nature of their situation, he finds himself smiling.

“You read my essay on auditory lock discernment.” Obviously. Idiot.

“Yes.” She stands, and her whole body quakes with a violent tremor. “Occasionally, I do listen when you talk.”

Sentiment guides his uninjured hand to her shoulder, where he squeezes gratefully.

Her eyes flutter shut, and he studies the small valleys in her forehead where exhaustion and dehydration have wrinkled the skin.

“Please tell me you have some sort of lock-picking kit in your pocket,” she breathes.

“Afraid I left that in the other jacket,” he laments.

She inhales, and the smoothness of her deltoid fills his palm beneath the cotton of her jacket. “Then tell me there’s something in here we can use.”

He reluctantly relinquishes his hold on her to spin in a slow, shivering circle. His cerulean gaze settles firmly on the Slo-N-Smooth Classic milk bottles with wire bail lids, and the tangled vine threading through his rib cage begins to relent.

“There’s something in here we can use,” he replies dutifully, retrieving a bottle.

Together, they remove the lid and flatten the wire bail into a mechanism suitable for depressing the spring-loaded pins. Once their makeshift lock-pick is complete, Joan kneels by the door and begins the arduous process of navigating the cylinder. Sherlock paces behind her, calling out orders at random intervals.

“Remember the series of clicks for which you’re listening, Watson.”

“All locks, like surgery, require a steady hand—even the deadbolts, Watson.”

“Be thorough, but do remember that there isn’t a visible switch for this particular form of air conditioning. We don’t want to freeze to death in here, Watson.”

She’s fairly certain from the awkward, jerky emphasis of syllables in the last phrase and the heavier rhythm of his feet against the tile that he’s switched to jumping jacks to keep himself warm.

Her fingers are red from the cold, and dehydration has puckered the skin of the pads. Her limbs are stiff, rigid, and trembling, and the fine motor control required to successfully pick a deadbolt eludes her.

(She has the spirit of defiance, the determination to persevere, and the lack of respect for this criminal authority required to really, truly manage an escape. She lacks only the command of her physical self, and she hates that her incompetence is going to endanger Sherlock in any way. Because asking for his help could result in permanent damage to his recently reduced limb, but refusing his help could mean killing them both.)

It’s like I can’t do anything without him.

She glares at the ceiling and blinks back the tears that threaten to trail icy rivers down her gaunt, chiseled cheek.

“I can’t do this,” she all but whispers. The percussive clattering of feet ceases immediately.

“Of course you can,” Sherlock retorts. “I trained you. The wire bail isn’t ideal by any means, but your skills are more than adequate in surpassing any obstacle the bail introduces.”

She closes her eyes and forces herself to search for the humility she required of her clients as a sober companion. Strength in defeat. Power in vulnerability. What a load of crap.

“I can’t feel my fingers.”

She swears she can hear him blinking owlishly behind her.

“Oh,” he says at last, a baritone syllable of foreign surprise.

She forces herself to hold the bail in place, even as her hand shakes. Every single one of the room’s 34 degrees is a needle in her metacarpals.

She feels the warmth of his breath on her neck as he kneels behind her, hears the pounding of his heart against his sternum as the effects of his physical exertion begin to dissipate. When he speaks again, she feels the vibrations of his voice against her back.

“How far through the cylinder did you navigate?”

“Just past the halfway mark,” she laments. “There’s a really stubborn pin against the wire, and I can’t steady my hand enough to depress it.”

She sees rather than feels the pads of his fingers slide into the valleys between her metacarpophalangeal joints.

“Christ, Watson!” he exclaims, resting his chin on her shoulder. “Your hand is freezing!”

“It’s kind of cold in here,” she deadpans.

He inhales sharply and cradles her thighs with his. “I’m sorry I don’t have the immediate use of both my hands. Normally, this would be my responsibility.”

She immediately hears the leaden weight of guilt in his tone. “You’re injured, Sherlock. That’s not your fault.”

“But hypothermia is yours?”

She rolls her eyes. “Hypothermia or not, I should be able to pick a freaking deadbolt.” Her frustrated sigh pillows like cotton in the air in front of her.

“You’re extremely competent, Watson. In fact, you’re very nearly done here,” he murmurs appreciatively as he relieves her grip. Together, they hear the metallic clink that signifies the depression of yet another spring-loaded pin.

“If I were really competent,” she grumbles, “we’d be out of here already.”

“If you were truly incompetent,” he counters with his characteristic frankness, “we’d both be dead.” As if on cue, the last pin clicks into place, and she feels the corners of his lips pushing upwards against the hollow of her cheek. “Pull the handle.”

She does, and the door swings open, inviting a cloud of warm, musty air that hints at grass and hay and cows.

“All right?” he asks gently, pocketing the makeshift pick. She nods.

“You?”

“Bit chilly,” he admits. Laughter bubbles up unexpectedly, a muted cackle that shoves at her stomach and warms her toes. At the small of her back, his abdomen trembles with an answering chuckle.

(Her laughter is the greatest of gifts—one he has no idea how to summon, but wants to receive again and again.)

He inhales deeply and peers around the doorway, his smile slipping beneath the weight of their plight.

“The doorway is clear,” he murmurs. “I see two female workers manning the feeding stations, but there’s a row of cows between us and them. Sunlight is streaming through the windows to our left, so I believe that direction is our best bet. Are you prepared to make a run for it?”

She gives a tight, curt nod.

His Adams apple bobs against her jaw. “Good. We take the shortest path to the exit, and we run until we find shelter.” He takes a sharp breath, and she feels his muscles clench behind her. “If we should get separated…”

Joan squeezes his knee with fingers she cannot feel and grits her teeth. “We won’t get separated.”

His following inhalation is shaky at best. “I understand why it’s unpalatable to consider such a turn of a events, but…”

“But nothing,” Watson interrupts firmly. “We’re not getting separated. Period. End of discussion. I’m not walking out of here without you.”

“And if I fall behind?” he persists, a bit grumpily.

“Then pick up the pace,” she growls, “or expect me to come find you.”

She feels the clench of his jaw at her temple and rolls her eyes. “Okay, seriously?” she hisses, narrowing her eyes at the shadow of his nose in her peripheral vision. “Would you really leave me behind if I asked you to?”

He huffs a belligerent sigh.

“I rest my case.”

For a moment, the enormity of what they’re about to do steals his breath, and his arm wraps around her midsection in a desperate grip.

“Do not die.” He squeezes the words out between gritted teeth and trembling lips.

She gives his knee a reassuring squeeze. “Can we stand up now? My toes are numb.”

The space is larger than he expects, and everything echoes in an infuriating way (including his painfully rapid heartbeat), but both size and sound help to obscure them as they hurry toward freedom.

They pass the two women monitoring the feeding stations, roughly six meters apart. (Their boots are Servus Economy Knee Boots, tall and black and lightweight—size seven at most, far too small.) There are twenty cows in the feeding stalls; none in what he can see of the snow-covered pasture, which is far away and blurry at best. A tall, thin young man with bushy blonde hair and dirty blue coveralls is scooping manure with a shovel. (His boots are steel-toed Tingleys, dark brown neoprene—size fourteen, extra narrow, all wrong.)

Overhead, ceiling fans whir lazily at a speed that makes each blade visible. The main office sits empty to their left, separated from the fray by a large glass wall. Just past that, a unisex restroom and a sharp turn to the left.

They round the corner at a massive tear, and suddenly the scent of cow is overwhelming. He chooses to focus on that.

(He cannot think about the way blood is roaring past his ears or the way his percussive breaths mingle with Watson’s labored breathing. He cannot think about the ebony strands that lick his forearm or the way her fingers fit snugly between his proximal phalanges. He certainly cannot concern himself with the terrified thudding of his heart against his ribcage or the answering call of Watson’s pulse at her wrist.)

The milking stations unfold before them, one long row of towering, gleaming metal. He forces himself to register the large stack of towels at the end of the line, the bright orange buckets of iodine solution, and the spidery milking arms that dangle from the ceiling, suspended by thick chains.

Directly in front of him, the sudden dearth of sunlight turns Watson’s long mane from gold-tinged mahogany to inky black.

Wrong, shouts a primal voice from the depths of his brain attic. Something is WRONG.

A tall, stocky figure emerges from the farthest milking stall bearing a navy drawstring bag stuffed to spilling with soiled towels. As the figure turns to fuss with the stall door, Sherlock traces stained black coveralls down to damp Bekina boots.

Time stops.

He digs his heels into the dirt, eyes wide.

Just ahead of him, Watson trips, seemingly in slow motion. It takes an entire year for her phalanges to slip from his grasp as she careens headfirst into the man’s broad back—at least sixteen stone, over two meters tall, calluses on the hands stained with flecks of drywall, and MY GOD WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE.

“I’m SO sorry,” he hears her say, muddy and distorted like they’re both underwater. “My partner and I were taking the tour, and then we got, like, SUPER lost. Plus, I totally picked the wrong day to wear heels, which apparently means I’m falling all over perfect strangers, and…”

Bright green eyes bore into him beneath blonde bangs shot through with silver. Bushy grey eyebrows rise ever so slightly as those green eyes find Joan, and Sherlock feels like the wind has been knocked out of him.

“Lost?”

The resonant baritone sends shivers up Sherlock’s spine. Watson gives her vest an embarrassed tug and grins sheepishly in his peripheral vision.

“Well, you know…”

She takes an awkward step back, and Sherlock snatches her to his chest, hoping the impact will restart his stuttering heart.

Across from them, the silver-haired man flashes a tight-lipped smile.

“I’m glad you two have each other,” he murmurs, voice soft and disturbingly silky.

He feels the exact moment Watson realizes to whom they’re speaking. There’s no visible tell, but her heart begins beating a frantic rhythm against his forearm, and her abdomen bunches beneath his elbow.

“So you’re looking for the way out?”

When she speaks, her voice is deceptively light and steady. “That’d be great.”

The farmer heaves the laundry bag from his shoulder. It settles in a cloud of dust between them. He takes a large step closer, and Sherlock’s stomach forms a crippling knot.

“Back that way.” Large, thick fingers fly toward the archway through which they’ve just entered. “Must’ve just missed it.” He reaches into his pocket and his thick, clay lips curl in a warm smile. “If you give me a minute, I can take you myself.”

Fear wraps long, icy fingers around Sherlock’s neck.

“Watson,” he whispers, his lips barely moving. “Run.”

She feels the impact of every step like the gunshots she expects to hear any minute now.

“Sherlock,” she gasps, breathless.

“Right behind you,” he hisses. “Keep moving!”

The deceptively smooth baritone rings out behind them.

“Don’t forget to grab your jackets at the front desk on your way out!” Joan feels the reverberations of the chuckle that follows in the marrow of her bones. “It’s cold enough to catch your death out there.”

She runs blindly, navigating the maze of feeding stalls and dodging barrels of chopped alfalfa, propelled forward by the rapid rhythm of Sherlock’s feet behind her and the brush of his hand against her hip.

Every square inch of her exhausted frame is thrumming with terrified tension as she presses her back to the wood of a door marked “Cleaning Supplies.” Beside her, Sherlock vibrates with nervous energy.

“Watson!” he hisses. “We cannot stop!”

She inhales sharply. Fear is an iron brand on her heaving chest as she unearths the stolen cell phone. “I need a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute!” he snaps. His consonants are barbs, his whisper a dagger. His eyes are saucers, darting every which way as his fingers twitch impatiently. His familiar hyperactivity almost makes her smile. Almost.

She follows the fingerprints on the screen to deduce the passcode and unlocks the phone. Her fingers are trembling—not from the cold, but from the adrenaline flooding her nervous system—as she accesses the “Share My Location” feature and sends a pin to Marcus and Captain Gregson. Her accompanying text—URGENT NEED HELP ASAP SEND TEAM –JW—is one of which she is sure Sherlock would be proud. As soon as she receives confirmation that the text has been sent, she powers the phone off and pockets the SIM card so it can’t be wiped remotely.

She looks up into the full weight of Sherlock’s gaze.

“You picked his pocket,” he gasps. Even his twitching fingers have gone still.

“Create a distraction, make contact elsewhere, maintain conversation,” she recites—partially to placate him, but mostly to calm her racing pulse. The flood of adrenaline on an empty stomach is beginning to make her dizzy. “It seemed like the fastest way to get a message to the captain.” She takes another deep breath, and the influx of oxygen blurs the edges of her vision. “Granted, that was before I realized who he was, but…”

Suddenly, she is pressed against his collarbone, breathing into the knot of her own dusty shirt as Sherlock mumbles into her hair—something that sounds suspiciously like “infuriating, brilliant, reckless, stupid woman.”

His fierce embrace has pinned her arms to her sides, but she tries to give his hip a reassuring pat.

“Watson?”

“Holmes?”

“You really must stop touching my bum.”

They race through the bottling area, past the label applicator and the conveyor belt on which the bottles are assembled. A single employee—a short, stocky blonde woman—is manually casing the milk bottles at the end of the line, but the pasteurization tank keeps them from her limited sight line.

There is no visible exit.

They climb aboard the scaffolding surrounding the homogenization tanks, their footsteps obscured by the growl of the conveyor belt and the loud beeping of the label applicator.

Watson spots a glass door toward the beginning of the assembly line. She mutely points it out, and Sherlock nods a heavy head in agreement. She gives his arm a squeeze, and they are off again.

They dart through the glass door only to find themselves trapped amidst a small fleet of insulated tankers in a broad indoor garage, and a crushing helplessness permeates the buzzing fog of adrenaline.

“Shit.”

Watson’s exclamation echoes alarmingly in the sudden silence. He’s never been much for cursing, but Sherlock finds himself echoing the sentiment.

“Shit indeed,” he grumbles, pausing against the cinderblock wall to catch his breath.

His chest aches. Every muscle in his body has its own pulse, and each throb seems to pull his limbs farther apart.

Watson’s eyes dart fearfully through the door. “Is he following us?”

“Not yet,” Sherlock mutters, “but I’m sure he will once he realizes you have his phone.”

“About that,” she retorts breathlessly. “Do you want to start thanking me now, or when the captain shows up?”

He winces. Every breath is a lance through his ribs.

“I might need a minute,” he confesses, voice hoarse.

Watson spins on her stiletto heel, chocolate eyes wide. She is immediately Dr. Watson.

“What’s wrong?” she murmurs, laying the backs of her fingers across his forehead to feel for fever. Moments later, he feels the warmth of her palm against his neck, applying pressure to examine his lymph nodes.

He means to wave her off, but his traitorous mandible juts pitifully into her open hand. She lifts the other hand to rake her nails through his hair, caressing the bare skin above his beard with her thumb.

“Sorry,” he mumbles sheepishly, feeling his cheeks flush with embarrassment. “It seems hunger is a demanding mistress.”

“Hey,” Watson murmurs soothingly. “You’re doing better than I was. I fainted, remember?”

He swallows the tears that threaten to surface. “I believe that image is one I shall be doomed to remember forever.”

She cradles his jaw firmly in both her hands. “I’m alive,” she assures him. “So are you.” Her lips press into an apologetic line. “We have to keep moving so we stay that way.”

He allows his forehead to fall forward until it rests on her crown.

“We tore down walls with handcuffs and picked an impossible deadbolt with a milk bottle,” she all but whispers. “This is the easy part.”

He inhales, and the faint traces of lilac and honey are a balm for his very soul. “I don’t think any of this is meant to be easy.”

“Maybe not,” Watson agrees, voice strong and solid and surer than he’s felt in a long while, “but we’re still getting the hell out of here.” She gives his scruffy beard a tug. “Come on. One last push. I think I see the exit.”

He follows her along the cinderblock wall of the garage and through a glass door marked “LOBBY.”

(He’d follow her anywhere.)

They enter a narrow hallway with two bathrooms and a water fountain. A security camera in the corner catches his eye as Watson tugs him five long steps forward into a sharp right turn.

He may not be physically following us, Sherlock thinks as the entryway unfolds like a cheery country palace before them, but he is following us. Our escape, like everything that preceded it, is a test.

He wonders what happens if they pass.

“Goodness gracious! Y’all look like you been through a war!”

His gaze drifts to a white podium and register, where a petite brunette with braided pigtails and a maroon t-shirt that reads “I like my men like I like my milk—Slo-N-Smooth” in looping white script is gaping at them in unabashed horror.

“Yes, well,” he retorts grumpily, “we got quite the hands-on experience.”

He notices a clothing rack nearby that boasts her atrocious attire in multiple colors. The lit shelves beneath the register showcase a collection of mugs bearing the Slo-N-Smooth logo. To their left, another clothing rack displays an assortment of hooded sweatshirts.

(He cannot imagine why anyone would want a souvenir from this dreadful place.)

Watson strides purposefully to the counter and lays an expectant hand on the glass surface. “We left our coats at coat check,” she explains firmly.

“’Course! Let me just grab those for you real quick. Names?”

Despite her best attempt at a confident exterior, Joan’s response emerges as a threadbare question. “Holmes and Watson?”

“Be right back!”

The brunette spins in a cheerful circle, slides a door open behind her, and begins rifling through the variety of outerwear inside.

Watson’s determination wanes ever so slightly as apprehension kicks in. Is this a trap? Some sort of code? Has he tampered with the coats somehow?

(A rigid, shivering Sherlock quakes at the edges of her memory, and she decides it doesn’t matter. They cannot go outside without jackets. She won’t watch him suffer hypothermia again.)

“Oh, these!” The receptionist retrieves two long, familiar black coats and trots back to the counter with a broad grin. “They been in here forever!” She smoothes them out beside the cash register and winks. “You must’a made a special trip. No one takes two tours in a week!”

“Fascinating place,” Sherlock intones dryly, eyes darting around the makeshift gift shop. “Couldn’t stay away.”

“Well, I’m so glad y’all came back for these,” the petite brunette grins, leaning over the counter to pass the coats to Watson. “I thought for sure we were gonna have to toss ‘em! Nice coats like these, that’d be a shame, y’know?”

Watson shakes the coats expectantly, running her thin fingers over every inch of the black wool.

(Their phones and watches are gone, but Sherlock’s lock-picking kit sits snugly in the inside breast pocket of his pea coat, and their gloves are folded into the outside pockets. She can’t feel any of the inconsistencies in weight or texture that might indicate a tracking device.)

Sherlock remains focused on the petite brunette with the magnetic nametag that reads MINDY in large, block capitals and OKLAHOMA in smaller print beneath. Mindy gives him a knowing smile.

“Those feedings get dust all over you, don’t they?”

Sherlock gives his dirt-covered trousers a cursory glance. “Yes,” he hedges suspiciously.

“Don’t I know it!” Mindy exclaims with a broad grin. “First time I helped Liza feed them cows, I lost my best pair of blue jeans. Been wearing ripped ones to work ever since!”

Satisfied with the results of her inspection, Watson threads her arms through the wool sleeves and adjusts the tie around her waist. “Sounds awful,” she muses sympathetically.

Sherlock lifts his arm absently as Watson helps him into his familiar double-breasted pea coat. It still smells like his favorite cologne.

“Tell me, Mindy,” he murmurs with what he hopes is a smile. “Do people often forget their coats during a tour of the factory?”

“Oh, gosh,” she chuckles. “Not when the weather’s like this. Too damn cold to forget anything you can put between you ‘n the elements, y’know?”

“Mm,” he hums thoughtfully.

Mindy drops contemplative hands on the counter. “E’ry now ‘n again, though, some couple leaves their jackets behind.” She shakes her head fondly. “Always breaks my heart to think of ‘em gettin’ home and realizing their outerwear’s gone. We ain’t close to much out here, y’know? Ain’t exactly easy to come ‘n get stuff.”

“Definitely not,” Joan agrees with a smile. “Worth the effort for these, though.” She gives Sherlock’s arm an insistent tug, but he doesn’t budge.

“Is it always a couple?” he prods, taking an interested step forward.

Mindy blinks in bemusement, and Sherlock fights the urge to roll his eyes.

“The people who leave their overcoats, I mean,” he clarifies. “My…partner and I aren’t the only forgetful ones?”

Watson’s fingers tighten painfully around the bicep of his uninjured arm.

“Shucks, no,” Mindy giggles. “I dunno what it is, but I guess two people got twice as much to remember, y’know? You might be the first to come back for ‘em, though.”

“Really.” Sherlock arches a curious eyebrow. “What do you do with the abandoned overcoats?”

“Keep ‘em for a week and donate ‘em.” Mindy gives one of her braids a thoughtful tug. “Got a lotta homeless in the city who need somethin’ warm, y’know? ‘S not like being back in Oklahoma where winter’s a couple days o’ snow and a big push for Starbucks’ hot chocolate.”

“Well,” Joan interjects with false cheer, “we’re grateful that you kept these.”

“We always give it a week,” Mindy assures them with a warm Southern smile. “Figure if they ain’t come back after a week, they ain’t comin’ back at all.”

She exhibits no tics or twitches, and there’s nothing sinister in her smile. If she knows, Sherlock thinks she’s doing a remarkable job of hiding it.

“Thank you,” he offers, laying the words down like bait as Joan’s grip on his arm becomes violent. “You’ve been most helpful.”

Mindy blushes and dismisses the compliment with a bashful wave. “You’re too sweet.”

Behind him, Joan gives a most unladylike snort and reaches for the door. With one last intense assessment of Mindy’s youthful features, Sherlock reluctantly follows her.

Mindy’s sweet soprano chases them into the cold. “Y’all come back now!”

(He politely refrains from telling her that he hopes he never, ever sets foot on Slo-N-Smooth Farms again.)

The moment the door shuts behind them, Joan takes off running. The stilettos make her knees ache, and the snow immediately soaks through the socks she’s borrowed from Sherlock, but her rapid heartbeat is a pulsating reminder to put as much distance between them and the Slo-N-Smooth farm as possible.

“Watson!” Sherlock yells, his voice carrying across the frigid wind. “What are you doing?”

She whirls around angrily. “I could ask you the same question!” she hollers. “What the hell was that?”

“I was conducting the beginning of an investigation,” Sherlock bites out, finally catching up to her. They’ve been out in the elements for less than five minutes, and he can already feel the cold numbing his ears and seeping into the spaces between his toes. “I thought you of all people would appreciate the opportunity to gather evidence.”

“We were kidnapped, Sherlock. That asshole kidnapped us, and we escaped on his watch. We don’t have time to gather evidence! We need to get the hell out of here before he finds us and takes us back!”

Her cheeks are crimson from cold and hollow from hunger. Her cheekbones are razor-sharp against the snow’s white backdrop. Her eyes are furious, but he can read exhaustion in every inch of her thinning frame.

“He’s not following us,” he assures her. “Not physically, at least.”

Riding on the coattails of yet another fear-induced adrenaline spike, Watson finds the statement strangely prophetic.

“You don’t know that,” she argues lowly.

“Actually, I do,” Sherlock counters. “He had the opportunity to confront us outside of the milking stalls, but he didn’t. He also could’ve made his way to the gift shop while we were struggling to navigate the bottling facility, but he didn’t do that either.”

“So you think he’s done with us.”

Sherlock shakes his head, and the wind roars past his ears. “I wouldn’t go that far. There are security cameras throughout the facility. I’m sure he watched us escape.”

“I don’t get it,” Watson mutters. “He clearly went to a lot of trouble to construct a space to hold us. Why would he just…let us go?”

Sherlock’s eyes dart back toward the door through which they’ve come. He has faith in his deductive prowess, but not enough to risk Watson’s life by standing as bait in a snowstorm. He wraps his uninjured arm around her shoulders and begins guiding her toward what he can see of the road, moving at their usual brisk, New York City clip.

“He didn’t just let us go,” he volleys meaningfully, the cold air searing his lungs. “He dropped us, drugged and handcuffed and separated, into a place with no visible food or water. Every moment we’ve seen since is one we have earned by fighting against our circumstances.”

Watson winces as snowflakes adhere to her eyelashes. “Exactly,” she agrees emphatically. “After all of that, this seems…too easy. We basically just walked out the door, Sherlock. He even told us where to find our coats.”

“He removed our watches and cell phones,” Sherlock counters.

“But he left your lock-picking kit and both pairs of gloves.” To emphasize her point, she slides her hands into her pockets and tugs the leather over her freezing fingers. Once the gloves are secure, she reaches into Sherlock’s outside pockets and does the same for him, taking care not to jostle his recently reduced shoulder.

(It feels like years since they were in the tunnel.)

“Better?” she asks expectantly. Her thumb rubs soothing circles along his metacarpals.

(He never wants to remove his hand.)

He inhales sharply, mouth dry. “We’re still roaming through the woods in the dead of winter, Watson. It’s not as if he handed us the keys to a getaway car.” He blinks painfully into the white abyss that stretches out before them. The snow is falling leisurely now, gently icing the fourteen inches piled on the ground. The wind, however, seems to be picking up.

They need to find shelter. Quickly.

“Where are we?” he asks, his voice muted by the icy gust.

“I’m…not really sure,” Watson admits, sounding contrite. “I was typing so fast…”

The guilt in her voice is a knife through his sternum. He pulls her closer, uses his gloved hand to brush the snow from her hair.

“It’s okay,” he tells her, and means it. “Your reckless stunt probably saved our lives, Watson. I’m just trying to figure out how long we have before help arrives.”

“Awhile,” Watson laments. “I didn’t catch the name of the town, but judging by the map, we’re nowhere near the city. And with all this snow…”

Sherlock stares past the road they’ve very nearly reached, into the trees. Walking long enough to stumble across an abandoned shed or a sympathetic farmer seems like an impossible task.

He feels Watson’s hands on his shoulders, turning his collar up and tucking the lapels of both jackets into his chest.

“He didn’t keep our scarves, too?” he hears himself say, bitterly. Her sharp inhale makes him regret the words immediately.

“We’ll find somewhere to squat,” she says carefully, “and then we’ll readjust to maximize body heat. In the meantime…”

“You’re doing the best you can,” he interrupts, his voice low and remorseful. “I know that. I just…”

He trails off shamefully, and she ducks her chin to meet his gaze, arching her eyebrows expectantly as she flattens her own lapels and adjusts the tie like a headband over her ears.

He’s not vain. He’s cold. It’s a purely utilitarian desire. Still, he can’t seem to rid the embarrassment from his tone as he confesses, “I miss my hair.”

To his surprise (because she is, still, a constant surprise to him), she doesn’t laugh. Instead, she interlaces her fingers at the crown of his head, pressing leather-clad palms to the sparse hair and warding off the chill. Then, she reaches into her jacket, unearthing and unfolding a woman’s winter chapeau. She dusts the remaining snowflakes from his forehead and tugs the knit cap down as tightly as it will fit, aligning its bow with his right eyebrow.

“It’s not really your style,” she observes, lips quirking amusedly.

“Pity,” he murmurs dryly. “I care so much about appearances.”

Her smile blooms, bold and beautiful, in spite of hunger and exhaustion and everything else this wretched experience has thrown at them. And it’s not a laugh, maybe, but he still feels like he’s won some sort of twisted winter lottery.

“I’ll be sure to shield you from any gawking onlookers,” she says, brown eyes twinkling in the quickly dimming light.

(She wants to kiss him right here in the middle of a snowstorm for making any—every—bit of this bearable.)

“What a relief,” he deadpans.

Then she laughs, and he tugs her back against his side, hiding his own broad smile from view. This time, when they brave the elements, the world doesn’t seem quite so cold.

They find a large barn across the road, roughly half a mile down. Its windows are boarded, and the doors are padlocked shut, but the roof appears to be intact. Sherlock eagerly produces his lock-picking kit and begins thumbing through the tools.

“I can help,” Joan offers, kneeling down next to him until her knees depress the snow. Sherlock bats her hands away impatiently.

“Nonsense,” he grumbles. “I can pick a lock one-handed—especially with the proper tools.”

Joan shivers beside him. “I know, but it’s, like, negative four degrees outside.”

The corner of his mouth lifts in a wry smirk. “It’ll be a good test of my skills.”

She snorts derisively. “Haven’t your skills been tested enough?”

He picks the lock anyway—one-handed, snow-soaked, starving, and beyond any normal definition of sleep-deprived—in less than five minutes.

“Show-off,” she grumbles as they tumble inside. “I can’t believe you did that while your hand was shaking.”

“Practice,” Sherlock assures her modestly. “As someone who’s been through withdrawal almost as many times as Keith Richards, I have lots of experience with shaking hands.”

She blinks at him in surprise. “Did you just make a pop culture reference?”

“Keith Richards is British.”

“Still counts,” Joan mutters.

It’s not much warmer inside the barn than it is outside, but the lack of wind provides significant relief. Joan can feel her lungs expanding without protest. It no longer hurts to swallow. Still, pins and needles pierce every inch of her exposed skin as Sherlock shuts the door behind them and drops the wooden latch into place, and her toes are ice cubes inside the wet socks.

The massive space is divided into two rows of empty horse stalls with a long, wide center aisle. Sherlock toes off his wet shoes at the entrance and directs his gaze to all four corners of the ceiling, nervously scouring the rafters.

(Logically, he knows they’re not being followed. Mentally, physically, he can’t quite shake the feeling that those bright, intense green eyes are still watching them.)

“Do you see any cameras?” Watson asks with an apprehensive vibrato.

He looks back at her in surprise. Her eyes are wide and fearful, darting around the space suspiciously.

“I don’t see any yet,” he admits quietly, “but it does seem prudent to check.”

“We should look in the stalls, too,” she murmurs. “Not just for cameras, but for bugs. He was definitely listening to our conversations somehow.”

(He’s been routinely disposing of the tiny listening devices known as “bugs” at the brownstone for months now. He’d thought, perhaps naively, that they were his father’s doing. He wonders now if their captor began listening a long time ago.)

She leaves a pile of wet socks and stilettos next to his drenched dress shoes and begins searching the row of stalls on the left. He bounces on his toes, drawing strength from the dry, solid earth, and heads to the right.

Joan scours the barn like a woman possessed, tearing through piles of straw and pulling at loose slats in search of any surveillance technology.

She finds nothing.

When she’s satisfied that she’s left no bale unturned, she rushes to meet Sherlock in the last of the empty stalls, her heart hammering against her sternum. The combination of exhaustion and adrenaline is making her vision fuzzy, but she rubs her eyes against their unfortunate circumstances and forces herself to focus.

“All clear on my end,” she informs him softly, just in case the dairy farmer is listening.

Sherlock stands unsteadily from his crouch and dusts the remnants of straw from his trousers with his free hand. “Same.”

A tiny balloon inflates in her chest. It feels strangely like hope. “You mean he’s not watching us anymore?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s watching,” Sherlock volleys solemnly. “It would appear, however, that his surveillance capabilities do not extend to this particular barn.”

The tide of adrenaline ebbs, and relief crashes like a wave over her trembling limbs. For the first time since she woke in the domed room—handcuffed, with bleary eyes and a slack jaw pressed to a stone floor—Joan Watson dares to relax.

As epinephrine wanes, a bone-deep fatigue brings her to her knees in a pile of forgotten straw.

“Oh my God,” she breathes, leaning her head against a bale of hay and allowing her weary limbs to finally succumb to gravity. “We did it. We’re safe.”

“For the time being, yes,” Sherlock agrees warily, “provided we don’t freeze to death before help arrives.”

Joan allows her eyes to flutter closed for a beautiful, blessed moment. “We won’t freeze to death,” she assures him. “We can burrow under the hay and share body heat.” She unties her jacket and slips it on backwards so it billows over her like a blanket. She curls into a ball and groans, feeling a glorious stretch across her aching shoulder blades. “I am so tired.”

Her long black hair lays, damp and bedraggled, atop an ill-formed bale of hay. The hems of her trousers are soaked and soiled, torn at the edges and stained beyond repair. Her toes are bright red and bruised as they disappear beneath the black wool of her long coat. With her eyes closed and her face covered in drywall, dirt, snow, and the odd sprig of chopped alfalfa, she looks oddly childlike.

A lump the size of a small boulder lodges itself just above his larynx. Anger, fear, hope, dread, gratitude, affection, and exhaustion well up in his chest and crest at the corner of his eyes in one big, hot ball of detestable emotion. The edges of his ears feel warm in the worst, most embarrassing way, and his pectorals quiver with the beginnings of a spectacular sob.

One bloodshot brown eye blinks open to glare at him.

“Sherlock,” she grumbles, already half asleep. “Get down here. It’s cold.”

He kneels reverently in the straw beside her, gathering more of the stray pieces into a makeshift mattress. When he’s satisfied that he has created enough of a buffer between them and the cold, cold earth, he gathers his knees beneath her coat and presses them to the backs of her legs. He feels the warmth of her skin through two layers of freezing cotton, and it steals his breath.

(He’s afraid to hold her.)

He sweeps her drying hair forward, creating a space for himself at her side, and slides the tentative, jittery hand of his immobilized arm along her waist until her back is pressed firmly to his torso. He dares to bury his face in the musky warmth of her neck.

She nestles into him with a soft, sleep-thick sigh of contentment, and his heart stops.

(He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to let go.)

“I thought I was going to lose you,” he gasps, the words rushing unbidden between accidentally parted lips. A traitorous tear traces a searing path down his cheek and into the hollow of her ear.

“You’ll never lose me,” she murmurs—easily, dismissively, like the very idea of it is a joke.

“You can’t promise that,” he argues, jaw trembling. He thinks of the farmer’s predatory green eyes fixed devastatingly on Watson and tugs her more tightly to him.

“And yet,” she breathes, “I have.” She slips her outside arm from its sleeve and threads her fingers soothingly through his.

Her breathing slows to deep drags that rock against his abdomen, and he follows the last traces of lilac and honey into a deep sleep.

Chapter Text

She wakes because the world is shaking. Violent shivers wrack her petite frame. Her teeth clack angrily against each other. She feels a deep, persistent chill in the marrow of her bones.

Another experiment, she thinks. The heat has gone out, but her bed is not this scratchy, and her heart isn’t hammering painfully and rapidly against her sternum because of the cold.

She remembers piercing green eyes and bloodstains on oak—not a case, too personal—and a frantic dash through an unfamiliar dairy farm.

Kidnapped!

She hears the word in her own voice, shouted, and it is a vacuum that sucks all the air from her lungs.

Sherlock said they weren’t being followed, but she feels the pursuit like a field mouse anticipates an owl.

Sherlock.

She tries to roll over, but a solid, scrawny chest and familiar scruff obscure her path. Relief seeps through her pores immediately, and she sinks into him as though deflated.

He too is shivering, so violently that his teeth are performing Steve Reich compositions directly into her left ear.

(She knows Steve Reich because of Sherlock. She knows so many things because of Sherlock.)

They have to get warm.

Their trudge through the snow soaked her slacks from the knee down. They fit like sleeves of ice over her calves. She’s almost certain that Sherlock’s predicament is similar.

With trembling fingers, Joan tugs her arms out of her coat sleeves, reaches down, and undoes the button and zipper on her slacks. She tugs them off slowly and methodically, sliding them over rigid muscles, and drops them in a heap outside of the tent her coat has made. Then she spins in Sherlock’s grasp until they are nose-to-chin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into his collarbone as she undoes his fly.

(She’s seen him shirtless dozens of times—usually in the morning and late at night, especially when he’s had visitors or is dangling by his feet from that God-awful frame he drags out of the closet when he needs a “shift in perspective.” She’s even seen him naked before—accidentally, in silhouetted profile, relieving himself in the bathroom after a few rounds with Mistress Felicia. He’s not exactly what Joan would call modest, but this—using deft surgeon’s fingers to remove his pants in his sleep—feels strangely, dangerously intimate, like a gross betrayal of trust or an ugly distortion of foreplay.)

“I’m really sorry,” she amends as her white knuckles brush the taut cotton of his boxer briefs. “But…this is a medical necessity.”

She leaves the blanket long enough to hang their slacks on the stall’s feed door, navigating the space with the last shreds of sunlight to litter the barn floor. On her way back, she sees something maroon peeking out from beneath the disassembled hay bale.

Saddle blankets.

Her teeth clack angrily together as she reaches for the blankets, trying not to disturb Sherlock. With jerky movements and shivering limbs, she unfolds the wool and lays it atop her unfolded jacket. Sherlock sneezes into the resulting breeze and scrubs his face with a sleepy palm.

“W’son?”

“It’s ok-kay.” She slides under their makeshift bedclothes and threads her limbs through his, slotting her calf between his knees and curling her toes around his ankles. “We’ll be a lot warmer in a few minutes.”

He wraps both injured and uninjured arms around her and squeezes until her nose traces the notch at the base of his neck. She feels the solid sinew of his chest against every inch of her torso. His breath pillows against her forehead, wet and warm.

“Stay,” he mumbles, gliding the fingers of his injured hand between her proximal phalanges.

“I’m not a d-dog,” she grumbles, trying desperately to stop shivering.

He lets out a deep, rumbling snore in response, and she rolls her eyes.

(Orders or none, she will always stay.)

The first time he wakes, the world is cold and black, but the fingers of his left hand are curiously warm—and occupied.

There is a sharp pain in his stomach, and his tongue feels dry and rough.

His trousers are gone, but his legs are warm, tangled with unfamiliar skin.

“Watson,” he croaks, struck with a sudden debilitating fear.

A creaking mandible nudges the edge of his clavicle.

“’S ok.”

The voice, low and sleep-thick, is just beneath his chin. He feels its vibrations in his chest.

“Sleep,” it says, and so he does.

Someone is howling.

Joan’s gritty eyes flutter open, and she blinks uncertainly into inky black.

“Sherlock?”

The words finds breath before she even realizes what she’s saying. Something screams outside, long and high-pitched and terrifying, and she tugs the covers more tightly around her.

Her nose wrinkles in the darkness. Something smells awful.

“Sherlock?”

A snore erupts at her left ear, and her exhausted muscles seize in fear.

“’S a test,” mumbles a raspy, familiar tenor against her cheek. His beard dusts the curve of her jaw, and every tired inch of her relaxes into the British mess at her back.

“A test?” she repeats uncertainly.

“Mm.” Sherlock curls the tips of her fingers into his fist. “Wants us to pass.”

He punctuates the statement with another earth-shaking snore.

She decides that, if he’s still forming complete sentences, he must be okay. Howling pierces the silence once more, muted by the thick wood walls that separate them from the elements.

Wind, she thinks as exhaustion tugs at her eyelids.

She presses herself more firmly into the warmth behind her and succumbs to sleep once more.

The crack of wood against wood reverberates like a gunshot against the walls of his skull.

Everything hurts.

Everything.

The sharp blade of mental acuity to which he is accustomed has dulled to the efficacy of a butter knife. Deductions arrive slowly, like slugs along concrete.

Shoulder aching—most likely due to the reduction Watson performed in the…tunnel? Yes, there was a tunnel. Short enough to be manageable and long enough to be obnoxious.

Feet aching—an unfortunate consequence of running through a labyrinth of dairy equipment and trudging through roughly three kilometers of snow in dress shoes, without socks. Blisters are almost a certainty—must examine further.

Dreadful “pins and needles” feeling in right hand—undoubtedly the result of Watson’s weight on my arm for a significant period of time.

Tailbone aching—certainly an effect of that STUPID fall.

He hears the muted, unhurried thud of footsteps against dirt, and “panic” is much too nice a word for the terror that seizes his ribs and shoves his heart into his sternum. He hears his own manic breathing in surround sound, a labored panting that seems to echo through the barn above the howling of the wind. A beam of light creeps menacingly along the wall, and Sherlock feels for the blanket with lifeless fingers as he struggles to curl his legs and Watson’s closer to their chests.

If they are hidden by the wool of Watson’s coat and what feels suspiciously like a saddle blanket, perhaps those ominous emerald eyes won’t see them, won’t take them back and force them to escape all over again.

(He’s not sure he could do it again. Resolve is buried too deeply beneath the ache of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion.)

He closes his eyes and watches with growing horror as the black around him fades to a hazy orange.

(He could do it again, would do it again, for Watson.)

The panting is louder now, and he begins to wonder if the breaths are still his.

Am I dead? Surely being dead wouldn’t hurt this much. Death should feel like heroin—a blissful void.

The footsteps cease, near enough that the final thuds are not muted. Something warm and wet nudges insistently through their makeshift blankets, vanishing as quickly as it comes. A shaft of light emerges as it peeks through the other side, and Watson gasps.

“Detective Bell! I think we’ve got something!”

Chapter Text

“I’ve got to hand it to you two. You’ve got some strange ideas about what it means to take a vacation.”

Sherlock surveys the scene around him. The Search and Rescue K9 is sitting patiently amidst four of New York’s finest, looking quite pleased with itself. He vaguely recalls Watson scratching its ears before they were forced to sit up and consent to a brief examination by an EMT. “Nice hat,” Bell had said. Sherlock reaches a shaky hand to his cranium. Watson’s chapeau is still there, ostensibly keeping him warm.

He loathes the slowness of his current thought process, like honey tumbling through the holes of a sieve.

“In what universe,” he begins dryly, injecting his tone with as much apathy as he can muster, “does this appear to be a vacation?”

“You gonna try and tell me those aren’t your pants dangling from the stall door?” Marcus retorts.

Sherlock stills. A brief tactile assessment reveals that, while his pants are still firmly in place, he is missing his trousers. He turns to Watson in surprise.

“Did you remove my trousers?”

Watson groans and is immediately chastised by the young wielder of the stethoscope. “It’s not what it looks like,” she grumbles. “They were soaking wet from the knees down, and you were shivering so hard it woke me up.”

He narrows his eyes skeptically. “You stripped me?” he repeats incredulously. “In my sleep?”

“I did what I had to do,” she retorts defiantly. “Besides, you stripped me first!”

“You had fainted from heat exhaustion!” Sherlock erupts. “I’m sorry, Watson, but I wasn’t going to let my reluctant respect for your prudish Puritanical sensibilities prevent me from keeping you alive!”

“Given that you have absolutely no ‘prudish Puritanical sensibilities,’” she snaps, using weak fingers to make something that barely resembles air quotations, “I didn’t think you’d mind me taking your pants off to heat you up!”

“Should I separate you two or get you a room?” Marcus quips with forced levity.

“We had a room,” Sherlock retorts. “Several, actually—although navigating them proved to be rather difficult.” He glances at Watson, and the memory of her unconscious form presses sharply against the base of his skull. “I believe we’d prefer not to be separated, though, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I second that,” Watson mutters.

“I’m sorry,” Marcus says, his voice uncharacteristically grave and remorseful for a cop.

Sherlock’s gaze swings lazily toward the detective. He studies the dark valleys above the maxillary sinus, the tight press of the lips and the added crease at the corners. He notes the way Marcus’s temporomandibular joint protrudes and recedes.

“How long?” he murmurs.

Marcus inhales shakily. In his blurry peripheral vision, Sherlock sees dusty creases deepen along Watson’s usually pristine brow.

“How long what?” she prods, but Sherlock’s gaze never leaves Marcus.

“How long have we been missing?” he clarifies, arching expectant eyebrows. His skin feels too tight for his face. Wayward muscles itch and burn.

Marcus swallows visibly. “I don’t…”

“We went to the bar to decompress after the Miko Smith case. Sherlock and I were taken that night.” Watson’s voice is at once gentle and firm. “How long ago was that?”

Marcus studies them both with wary, narrowed eyes. A single eyebrow scales his forehead slowly.

“You really don’t know?” he prods incredulously. His gaze lands expectantly on Sherlock. “You couldn’t figure it out by charting the slant of the sun or whatever?”

A pang of guilt lances Sherlock, and the voice in his head that chants Useless! gets obscenely loud.

“We were kept underground.” Watson’s voice is not gentle anymore. “How long, Marcus?”

“Five days.” He glances apologetically at his watch. “Six, if you count today—it’s after midnight.”

Her breath hitches. The barn spins around her. For a moment, the floor feels dreadfully close. Then, she feels Sherlock’s steady hand between her shoulder blades.

“Breathe,” he all but whispers, for her ears only.

She turns to face him, feeling unmoored. His eyes, bright and cerulean against the dirt-smeared canvas of skin, tether her.

“Did you know?” she asks breathlessly. He told her once that he had counted the days without her, after the whole mess with Mycroft and Diogenes and MI-6. “Were you keeping track?”

“Of course,” he replies immediately, his voice an offended tenor purr against the overwhelming din of police activity. “I took constant inventory of rooms, furniture, food, water, exhausted possibilities for escape…”

“Of time, Sherlock,” she grumbles, allowing a bit of exasperation to creep into her tone. Five days. My God, that’s a long time.

Sweat glistens on the mountains that form amidst the confused wrinkles on his brow. “Why would I keep track of time?” He sounds genuinely perplexed. “You were with me.”

(If her heart increases its steady pounding against her sternum, if the pads of her fingers find purchase on the stark solidity of his wool-clad bicep, if her breath hitches uncomfortably in a spastic bronchial tube, it is because of the shock, and not at all because his words seep into her most painful empty spaces.)

Marcus and his team have the decency to turn around while they put on their slacks. Standing is difficult; despite their few hours of rest, exhaustion has ravaged Joan’s limbs, and her stomach aches with hunger. She feels dizzy and sluggish, like each thought is crawling to consciousness through a vat of molasses.

Five days. It feels simultaneously like a blink and a lifetime.

She glances at her partner just in time to see him pitch forward with wide eyes. She catches his shoulders with shaking hands before he can cause himself further harm.

“This feels like withdrawal,” Sherlock grumbles.

“It is withdrawal,” she hisses. “From food. And sleep.”

“We just slept,” he argues, raising his voice above a whisper. “I shouldn’t be this bloody clumsy.” He spits the last word as though its mere existence in the English language is a personal affront.

“You’re not clumsy,” Joan snaps, holding the pants open so Sherlock can fit his quivering legs inside. Mercifully, the ankles seem to have dried a bit. “You’re hungry. I know that’s a foreign feeling for you, but…”

“Bollocks,” Sherlock retorts. “The average human can survive for twenty-one days without food. We’ve barely scratched the surface of that. Besides, we didn’t starve, exactly. We were given snacks.”

“What, four nutrition bars each? Over five days of manual labor?” She braces herself against him as she tugs the waistband of her slacks over her hips, swaying unsteadily.

“I suppose our situation did involve a fair bit of exertion,” Sherlock muses.

“Understatement of the century,” Joan grumbles. “Did any of your starvation statistics include anything about demolishing walls and its effects on food intake?”

“No,” Sherlock admits sheepishly. “Perhaps I can write a synopsis of our experience and offer it as an addendum to the current research.”

“I want a burger before I even think about contributing to that,” she mutters. “Maybe two.” She stands up and meets his gaze. His wrinkles look like cracks as he offers a small, awkward, fragile smile.

Joan swallows the growing threat of sentimentality and resumes her interrogation of Marcus.

“How much do you know?”

Marcus’s eyes narrow in an unspoken question she has no interest in answering.

“About the kidnapping, I mean,” she clarifies quickly. She catches sight of her emergency contact in her blurry peripheral vision, and something ugly and unfamiliar tightens her throat. “Did…” You see gruesome murders every day, Joan. Spit it out. “Did you even know we were gone?”

His expression softens into something like pity, and Joan wonders how many times she will see this expression on his face in the days to come. I don’t need your pity, she wants to say. I scaled a fucking wall using one fucking stiletto. We were there, and it sucked, but we got out together, and you don’t get to look at us like that.

“I’m not asking to be accusatory. We had just finished a case. It’s not unheard of for us to go off the grid for a few days.”

“We knew you were gone.” Marcus’s voice is gentle. “There was a murder the next day—body stabbed sixteen times in an elevator. When the captain and I couldn’t get ahold of you or Sherlock, we figured something was wrong. I went by your place, and Ms. Hudson—says she’s your housekeeper?—found a note from the both of you saying you were taking an extended vacation.”

Sherlock snorts. “Please. As if either of us even understands the meaning of the word.”

“Speak for yourself,” Joan returns without malice. “After this, I’d be more than happy to spend a week on a beach somewhere.”

Sherlock arches his eyebrows as he studies her, and she tries not to feel naked under his gaze.

(In the darkest, most guarded recesses of her mind, she acknowledges that she would give many, many things to spend a week on a beach with Sherlock.)

“Anyway,” Marcus plows on, watching each of them suspiciously, “we figured something was up. Turns out there’ve been a few similar disappearances. I was in the process of chasing down a lead when your text came through.”

Sherlock looks surprisingly pleased. “Then you got him, did you?”

“You know who did it?”

“Not his name,” Joan admits, “but we could easily pull him out of a lineup.” She inhales sharply as menacing green eyes appear amidst stray pieces of straw on the dirt floor. “Late fifties, early sixties,” she manages around the terrified lump in her throat. “Grey hair. Green eyes. Six feet, about two hundred twenty-five pounds.”

Sherlock’s hand on her elbow feels like a shield against the outside world. “Scar on his left eyebrow,” he adds thickly. “Almost imperceptible limp, suggesting an old injury to his right leg of which there may be record. Dairy farmer. Size twelve Bekina boots.”

“Are you sure he’s a dairy farmer,” another uniformed officer asks with notebook in hand, “or was he just dressed like one?”

“His operation seemed fairly extensive, and he runs it out of a warehouse connected by tunnel to the Slo-N-Smooth farm,” Sherlock returns hotly, hating the way his consonants scrape at sloppy vowels. He hasn’t had a proper drink in five years, but he feels drunk.

Marcus’s gaze bounces thoughtfully from one partner to the other. “Was all this collected through deductive reasoning, or do you have concrete proof?”

“I have his cell phone,” Joan interjects. “He may have concrete proof there.”

Marcus caps his pen thoughtfully. “If that’s the number you used to text us, it’s registered to a Richard James Slovenik.”

“Excellent,” Sherlock grumbles. Hunger slashes his stomach with titanium claws. (He silently curses Watson for forcing him to sacrifice space in his brain attic for that terrible film about some antihero named Wolverine, of all things. In the same breath, he wonders if she still finds the actor attractive.) “Is he a dairy farmer?”

One of the uniformed officers nearby drops his pen in astonishment. “He’s not just a dairy farmer,” he admits. “Slovenik’s the owner of Slo-N-Smooth farms. He inherited the place when his father passed.”

Sherlock meets Watson’s gaze with narrowed eyes. “How recent is his father’s passing?”

“Not recent at all,” the uniformed officer—whose nametag reads “Fishkin”—replies. “Must’ve happened over a decade ago now.”

“So whatever operation Slovenik is running out of that farm is his, not his father’s,” Watson clarifies. Sherlock acknowledges the deduction with a nod.

“Then we have an arrest to make,” he replies with a meaningful glance at Marcus. “We should go now, before he has a chance to destroy evidence.”

“Nobody’s doing anything tonight,” Marcus counters. “It’s almost midnight. Farm’s closed.”

“So what?” Sherlock hisses. “I have a lock-picking kit with me. We could easily penetrate the farm’s defenses and obtain proof of our abduction.”

“Absolutely not,” Marcus argues. “If Slovenik really is the guy who took you two, we want to take him down the right way—dot our Is, cross our Ts. I don’t want to take any chance that he gets out on some technicality…”

Sherlock wrinkles his grimy nose and begins to anxiously wriggle and flex his fingers. “You aren’t actually suggesting we wait for a warrant, are you? He saw us escape! It’s quite likely that he immediately retreated into that Godforsaken prison to obliterate any lingering proof of our capture! If we don’t go right now, we’re giving him a chance to elude us entirely!” He shakes his head incredulously. “Did you even question him? Did you even go to the dairy farm?”

Marcus has the grace to look simultaneously affronted and apologetic. “Of course I went to the dairy farm,” he snaps. “By the time we got there, Slovenik had left for the day, and the receptionist said you two had left looking a little worse for the wear.”

“Understatement of the century,” Watson grunts behind him.

“Besides,” Marcus barrels on, “the fact that you think he did it isn’t enough to justify an arrest warrant.”

“I don’t just think he did it!” Sherlock explodes. Silver threads twinkle like holiday lights at the edges of his field of vision. “I know he did it! I looked that loathsome man in the eye and saw nothing but contempt!” Green eyes burn his retinas as panic escalates. Suddenly, breathing is difficult. The world begins to tremble. “He almost fucking killed Watson, Marcus, and if we don’t move as soon as bloody possible, he’s going to get away with it, and I can’t live with myself if that happens! I can’t…”

The silver threads are a tapestry, weaving together of their own accord and coloring the whole scene a fuzzy, terrifying white. His chest heaves uncontrollably, yet he can’t seem to get enough air. He feels something like porcelain beneath his chin and along his mandible and leans into the cool touch, hoping for relief.

“Sherlock, I need you to breathe, okay? Look at me. LOOK AT ME.”

He feels the press of four white walls, the scrape of cold air against his throat, and the chalk of plaster on his hands. Blood streams down his arms as hunger carves deep holes in his obliques.

“SHERLOCK!”

I will tear down the walls again to find you, Watson. I would tear down a hundred walls.

Something vicious squeezes his skull at the temples.

“SHERLOCK!”

The silver tapestry fades to black.

Chapter Text

Something vicious squeezes his skull at the temples.

“SHERLOCK!”

The silver tapestry fades to black.

She doesn’t think; she just does. One second, she is clutching Sherlock’s limp shoulders with white knuckles, watching in horror as his bloodshot, ever-changing eyes roll back into his head. The next, she is kneeling beside him with a stethoscope in hand and demanding intravenous fluids from the EMT.

She’s not sure where she got the stethoscope, but the affronted expression on the EMT’s face makes for a decent deduction.

“That looked like a panic attack,” the EMT offers tersely. “With all due respect, Miss Watson, he probably needs a dose of benzodiazepines so we can get you all out of here safely.”

“He’s a recovering addict,” Joan snaps. “For the last five days, his food and water intake has been severely, devastatingly limited. He doesn’t need benzos; he needs a bottle of Gatorade or a fucking IV. Either give me one of those things or get out of my way and let me work.” She huddles over Sherlock’s slumped form and directs a feral glare to the rest of the team. “And it’s Dr. Watson,” she hisses as an afterthought.

“Dr. Watson,” the EMT amends, “I understand that you’re under a great deal of stress, but I can’t let you treat your friend in the field like this. Not when your own faculties may be compromised due to the ordeal you’ve just been through.”

He says more, but Joan can’t hear him over the frantic, labored sound of her own breathing. Her gaze strays to Sherlock, looking distorted and still and wrong against the floor of the barn. She reaches down and presses the diaphragm of the stethoscope against his matted chest hair, listening.

“Sherlock,” she hisses, surrounded by the whoosh of his breath and the throb of his rapid pulse. She revels in these signs of life like a baby in its womb. “Wake up.”

Force of habit guides her surgeon’s fingers to the soft skin of his inner thigh, which she pinches firmly.

“I need those fluids!” she barks in the general direction of the EMT, but her gaze remains firmly fixed on the grimy skin of the broken man in front of her.

“We made a deal,” she hisses, moving the instrument’s diaphragm to the far side of his chest, just at the base of the ribcage. “No dying in captivity. Wake up.”

A rustling behind her interrupts the steady, muted rush of air that testifies to the functionality of Sherlock’s lungs. When she turns, the EMT is brandishing an adult-sized cannula and attempting to find a vein along the back of Sherlock’s hand.

“He’s dehydrated, and his veins are already weak because of his history,” Joan argues. “He’s going to need a smaller cannula.”

“All due respect, Dr. Watson,” the EMT drawls in a thick New York accent, “I’d like to take over here. It is my job.”

“Joan,” Marcus murmurs. His voice sounds impossibly close, but she still jumps in surprise when his hand finds her arm. “Let him work, okay? Sherlock’s gonna be fine, but only if you let this guy treat him.”

No, she thinks. I have to keep Sherlock alive.

One second, she is breathing heavily, gripping a stethoscope with shockingly steady hands and shaking beneath Marcus’s grip. The next, she is rooting through the EMT’s pack and flawlessly inserting a child-sized cannula into Sherlock’s most prominent vein.

She’s not entirely sure how the EMT ended up on the ground.

She’s not entirely sure she cares.

She feels the icy bite of nickel-finished steel on the raw skin of her wrists, but Sherlock’s facial features are twitching in that adorably belligerent way that means consciousness is imminent, so she inhales deeply and allows herself to be handcuffed.

His first thought upon waking is that he has the mother of all headaches. He feels the unwelcome stretch of adhesive against newly cleaned skin and the prick of something foreign between his metacarpals.

He doesn’t stir until he realizes that the hand on his arm is not Watson’s. Then, he struggles violently and blindly, croaking her name through a painfully dry throat as sturdy, corded arms—most certainly male—press him firmly into the dirt floor.

“Sherlock, it’s okay.”

She sounds wrecked, but he blinks his blue eyes open and eagerly drinks in the sight of her—black hair matted to her temples, eyelids at half-mast, thin arms obscured by an awkwardly bent torso.

“It’s okay,” she repeats, rising to kneel beside him. “You passed out, but you’re okay.”

His head feels impossibly heavy, so he sets it back down in the straw and traces the ground with the back of his skull, keeping Watson in his field of vision.

“Wh—” he begins, but the syllable fails to resonate against the ash in his mouth. He swallows serrated air and winces.

“Can you drink?” asks an unfamiliar baritone. When he nods, a large, callused hand reaches around to support his neck as the stranger guides the mouth of a bottle to his lips. After four long gulps, he feels almost human again.

He tilts his gaze awkwardly toward his partner. “I’m surprised you’re letting someone else tend to this,” he chokes out with forced nonchalance.

“Letting is a gross overstatement,” she grumbles. “I was restrained for putting in your central line without ‘assistance’.” She sounds uncharacteristically snide as she rolls her shoulders forward until the metallic rings on her wrist catch the light.

“Smith & Wesson Model 300? Watson,” Sherlock scoffs, “I believe we both know how quickly you can get out of those.”

Behind her, Marcus coughs uncomfortably.

“Ah,” Sherlock intones, allowing the smallest of grins to grace his exhausted features. “You’re being guarded by the great Detective Bell.”

“The great Detective Bell is exhausted,” Marcus grunts, pushing himself back up to a standing position. “So if you’re back to making snarky comments at my expense, I’m gonna go ask Millbrook PD if we can start getting out of here.” He turns expectantly to Watson. “Can I trust you not to sock another EMT in the gut while I’m gone?”

She rolls her eyes and hands him the Smith & Wesson Model 300 handcuffs, newly unhinged. Sherlock arches a proud eyebrow and allows himself a satisfied smirk.

Marcus winces. “I don’t even want to know,” he mutters as he pockets the handcuffs, heading toward the front of the barn.

Sherlock watches him go, memorizing the rhythm of his gait and the weight of his footsteps, before turning to the large male EMT to his right. “If you deemed a dose of intravenous fluids essential for me, you ought to do the same for her.” He waves a hand in Watson’s direction, flinching when the extension tubing obstructs his movement.

“I’m good, thanks,” Watson mumbles in return. “Marcus forced me to drink one of those bottles while we were waiting for you to wake up.”

“Her vitals check out,” the EMT offers when Sherlock examines him doubtfully. “She’s hungry, I’m sure, but she’s hydrated enough to pack a pretty mean punch.”

Sherlock notes with surprise that Watson offers neither an acknowledgment nor an apology as the EMT begins packing up his supplies. A blessed moment later, he leaves the two of them alone to breathe.

“You were right about the withdrawal,” Sherlock admits, eyes wide and searching. When Watson meets his gaze, his lips quirk in a small, conciliatory smile. “It appears that my body needs more in the way of sustenance than I thought.”

Unruly eyebrows scale her wrinkled, dusty forehead. “I’m sorry, did you just acknowledge that you might have been wrong about something?” She reaches for the IV bag in mock fear. “What the hell did they put in here?”

“I fainted, putting you in so much distress that you assaulted a medical professional in front of a colleague whose opinion you hold in high esteem,” Sherlock replies softly. The depth of his remorse surprises him. “I thought you might be owed a concession.”

She studies him at length, and he forces himself to hold her gaze. Usually, he finds Watson to be somewhat emotionally enigmatic, but tonight, he can read her quite clearly.

You scared the hell out of me, says the furrow in her brow. The silver glint in her eyes gasps, I thought you were dying.

“I’m alive,” he assures her softly. “I know I have a tendency to…bend the law to my will…”

“Or ignore it entirely when you don’t feel like it benefits you,” she interjects sharply.

“But,” he concludes pointedly, “I have great respect for you, Watson, and I would not break the rules we make together. I have no intention of dying tonight.”

He watches as the rise of her chest pushes at her vest and forces the lapels of her jacket open.

“You might need to go to the hospital,” she says finally. “For your shoulder, I mean. And for all of those cuts, to make sure they’re not infected.”

“Nonsense,” he grumbles. “You fixed my shoulder, and I can tend to these cuts on my own. The only thing I need at this point is a substantial meal and sleep, though I am loathe to admit it.” His eyebrows climb hopefully toward the hem of Watson’s chapeau, still perched on his head. “You mentioned burgers, did you not?”

She can’t stop looking at him.

Her eyes trace his outline like a sketcher’s pencil, examining his edges over and over until his shadows seem darker and his pale pallor more pronounced in the scattered light of the police-issued flashlights. He has yet to sit upright of his own accord, which worries her, but the subtle lift and fall of his chest assures her that he is, in fact, alive.

“We made a deal. No dying in captivity.”

“I have great respect for you, Watson, and I would not break the rules we make together. I have no intention of dying tonight.”

Somewhere beyond the barn, someone wants them dead. And, while she often feels Moriarty’s presence like a pair of eyes on her back or an offensively chilly breeze coaxing goosebumps from her arms, this threat feels immediate. Sherlock was fairly insistent that their abductor wasn’t following them, but—as he’s just admitted—he can be wrong.

“Watson?”

His eyes, a hazy, searching green, are proof that the word fine will bear no weight here. They narrow suspiciously at her, and she grasps weakly for whatever thread of conversation he expects her to follow.

“Burgers sound great,” she says finally. “I’m starving.”

She’s surprised when she feels pressure against her metacarpals—not because Sherlock is touching her, but because she can’t remember threading her fingers through his.

(She can’t remember when her hand in his became a natural occurrence. Perhaps somewhere between the domed room and the square room, between the freezing cold and the staggering heat.)

“We can stop for food on the way back to the city,” Marcus offers, startling her out of her intense study of Sherlock.

(She wishes they were alone again—not necessarily in captivity, or on the dairy farm, but home. She misses their shared space with their shared thoughts. Even after all of this—especially after all of this—they are a team, and Marcus’s voice feels like an intrusion.)

Whatever spell has befallen them is shattered by the petrified fluttering of Sherlock’s dusty eyelashes.

“We’re not going back to the city,” he counters firmly, his accent sharp and crisp in the cold air. “Not until our captor has been caught.”

Joan’s eyebrows rise beneath the tie that still serves as her makeshift headband. “You don’t want to go home?”

“And risk getting snatched again?” Sherlock bites out. “No.”

Her chin dips expectantly. “You don’t think the brownstone’s safe.”

“I know the brownstone isn’t safe.” Sherlock inhales sharply. When he catches her eye, his expression is uncharacteristically contrite. “There were listening devices. Before…”

Rage blows her pupils wide and propels her forward. “You found listening devices in our home and you didn’t tell me?!”

Sherlock struggles to a sitting position and sways, looking affronted. “I thought they were my father’s! The fact that Morland Holmes is a corrupt and shady character seemed hardly worth mentioning! It’s not like it’s new information!”

Anxiety balloons in her throat and in her lungs, inflating her trachea until she feels as though swallowing and breathing are impossible tasks. She imagines another pair of ears lurking in the corner of the red couch as she curls up opposite Sherlock, the snide smile of another forming as she argues with him about playing the violin at four o’clock in the morning.

When she finally speaks again, the words are hushed and incredulous. “So he’s been listening to us this whole time.”

“I don’t know for sure,” Sherlock admits, slightly mollified, “but it’s the most likely explanation. I have the destroyed bits in a box in the hall closet. We can examine them upon our return, but I’d prefer not to return until Marcus and the captain have Richard Slovenik in custody.”

“I told you, Sherlock,” Marcus grumbles. “I don’t have enough evidence to bring him in.”

“Maybe not now,” Sherlock counters grudgingly, “but you might after Watson and I inspect the cell phone she acquired during our escape.” Joan’s eyes widen in surprise when he meets her gaze desperately. “Once we’ve eaten,” he tells her urgently, “we can reach out to Mason or to our friends at Everyone.”

Joan inhales sharply. “Do you really feel like repaying a debt to Everyone right now?”

Sherlock contemplates the proposition for a moment before his features distort in a displeased grimace. “Mason, then. I suspect it won’t take him much time at all to transfer the data from the mobile to a separate server where we can examine it in greater detail.”

“Mason’s already done some research on Slovenik,” Marcus interjects pointedly. “In fact, he’s probably still doing research on the guy, provided that his mom hasn’t come to get him yet.”

Joan and Sherlock narrow their eyes confusedly in Marcus’s direction, but Joan speaks first. “How do you know Mason?”

Marcus shrugs. “I told you. I’ve been working with Ms. Hudson.”

“Can we have this conversation somewhere else?” Officer Fishkin groans. “Not to be disrespectful, Detective Bell, but it’s almost four o’clock in the morning. If you and your colleagues don’t need anything else from us, I’d like to get back to the station.”

“Actually,” Marcus sighs, “if you don’t mind, these two could probably use a tail.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Sherlock assures the officers, struggling to stand. Joan’s hands instinctively find purchase on either side of his ribcage, steadying his lanky, wavering frame with what little strength she still possesses.

(She knows, as she struggles to bear both his weight and her own, that no one is going after Slovenik tonight.)

“Sherlock,” Marcus levels, “whether Slovenik snatched you or not, your captor’s still out there, and I’d feel better if I knew someone in uniform was watching your back.”

“Oh, I’m not denying the need for security,” Sherlock volleys, waving his hand dismissively and jostling both cannula and extension tubing. “I would merely prefer to use one of my Irregulars for that.”

Joan reaches for Sherlock’s port with fond exasperation and begins carefully removing the cannula from the back of his hand. She notes with some small degree of satisfaction that the EMT hands her the bandage and sanitized cotton ball without protest.

“You have a guy who offers private security?” she muses incredulously. She presses the cotton ball against Sherlock’s wound and tucks it beneath a pink, sparkly Dora the Explorer Band-Aid.

(She is fairly certain the EMT offered that particular Band-Aid on purpose.)

He arches an eyebrow and delivers a knowing smirk. For a moment, they are back in the brownstone, and she is rolling her eyes as he sorts jars of mold colonies in the fridge or agar dishes full of dirt on their kitchen table.

“Of course you have a guy,” she mutters.

Route 44 stretches out before them, a grey river nestled in a valley between two mountains of snow-covered evergreen firs. It’s a beautiful scene, especially when viewed from the warm cabin of Marcus’s sedan, but Sherlock isn’t watching any of it. As heat spills from the vents, Sherlock huddles in the passenger seat, cradles the wrist of his recently reduced shoulder, and studies Watson through the rearview mirror.

She’s removed the tie from her hair and is attempting a braid, her deft surgeon’s fingers working shakily through the dusty ebony strands. In the neon blue light of the car’s interior, her prominent cheekbones are blades, stretching pale, sallow skin to breaking.

She’s nestled in the backseat, but it feels too far. He wants to feel the warmth of her skin and the metronomic throb of her pulse in her wrist. She is breathing, groaning, and occasionally speaking, but he still feels desperate for proof of life.

He’s not sure the need will abate until Richard Slovenik is in police custody. In his peripheral vision, he sees the LED screen of the sedan’s radio flashing 4:25 AM.

“After we secure sustenance,” he begins authoritatively, “we should return to Slo-N-Smooth Farms immediately for a further examination of the property. I imagine they’ll open for the day no later than seven o’clock.”

If Marcus is surprised by Sherlock’s agenda, he hides it with the smallest quirk of an eyebrow. “You really think you’re in the right shape to be going after your own kidnappers?”

Sherlock abandons the rearview mirror long enough to level his colleague with the strongest glare he can muster. “Time is of the essence, Marcus.”

“You know what else is of the essence?” Watson entreats from the backseat. “Sleep.”

Sherlock spins in his seat to face Watson, hating the way his hazy field of vision quivers like Jell-O. “You honestly think you’ll be able to sleep while our kidnapper runs roughshod over upstate New York?”

He watches the slow ripple of her throat as she swallows.

“I think it’s taking every ounce of energy I have not to fall asleep in the back of this car.”

He twists his torso, making tiny lacerations in the tissue of his exhausted oblique muscles until he is facing Watson. Then, in the heat of the car, with immediate concerns of survival no longer clouding his judgment, he takes the time to really, truly study his partner.

Her eyelids hang heavily over a slit of glimmering chocolate. Even in the warm air, she shivers. Her entire frame quivers with every inhalation.

You see, his own voice chides, but you do not observe.

“We should book a hotel room,” he tells Marcus, returning his gaze to the windshield. “Take our food to go.”

In the rearview mirror, he sees Watson drop her head against the back of the leather seat, exposing the thin, sweat-soaked column of her throat.

“I’m sorry,” she all but whispers to the ceiling. “Maybe, after a few hours and some food, I’ll be…”

Her apology is a knife through his heart. “Nonsense,” he interrupts firmly. “We both need rest. I was lying on the floor of an abandoned barn with an IV in my arm less than an hour ago. Besides, I’m sure Marcus will be all too happy to return to Slo-N-Smooth Farms in the morning for another look around.”

Marcus arches a skeptical eyebrow. “You were kidnapped, and you want me to go back to the scene of the crime without backup?”

“Of course not,” Sherlock scoffs. “We’re only a few hours from New York City. If you call the captain now, he can meet you by the time the farm opens at seven.”

Marcus is quiet for a moment.

In the silence, Sherlock hears the terrible sounds of a knife tearing through human tissue sixteen times. “He’s on a case,” he murmurs knowingly. The memory of Marcus’s admission feels centuries old. “The stabbing.”

Marcus nods reluctantly. “Talked to him less than an hour ago for the most recent update,” he offers. “It took a serious turn this morning. A kid was taken.”

“By the murderer,” Sherlock finishes quietly, ignoring Watson’s horrified gasp.

Marcus’s eyes widen. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Your tone of voice,” Sherlock confesses, grateful that at least some of his mental faculties appear to be functional. “Because we’re not on our way to meet the captain right now, I’d also venture a guess that both the child and the killer have been found.” He tilts his chin expectantly. “That was the update, yes? Is the child all right?”

“Are you all right?” Marcus retorts.

Sherlock spends approximately two seconds studying Watson’s face in the mirror, just to remind himself that she’s alive. They have clarity of mission: get food, get a hotel, go to sleep, find Slovenik. For once, his brain has no space for anything else.

What should I do next? That is a simple, pressing question—one he can and must answer quickly.

He has no time to determine whether or not he is fine.

“We should order food,” he mutters finally. “Marcus, may I borrow your phone?”

At some point between Pleasant Valley and Fairview, Joan falls asleep, her aching head balanced precariously between the edge of the backseat and the window. When she wakes, she finds that the car has come to an abrupt stop, and the interior is bathed in the white light of a Courtyard Mariott sign. A large bag proclaiming “The Acropolis Diner” occupies the seat beside her. The air in the vehicle is heavy with the mouthwatering scent of diner fries.

“I took the liberty of ordering us three appetizers and four entrees,” Sherlock offers, peering around the bucket seat to meet her gaze. His eyes are clear blue and impossibly wide. “I hope you don’t mind that I upgraded your order to sweet potato frites. The vitamins afforded therein seemed to make it a more beneficial choice.”

Joan peers into the bag and snatches the first fry she sees. It melts into a delicious combination of oil and spices on her tongue.

“Oh my God,” she moans, reaching for another. “I so want to hug you right now.”

“The hug will have to wait until Marcus secures our rooms for the evening,” he returns with a hint of amusement, “but I would gladly settle for a fry in the interim.”

She tucks two more fries between her teeth and passes him a small handful. Moments later, he groans loudly from the front seat.

Joan snorts incredulously. “Is that the first fry you’ve had?”

“Of course!” Sherlock sounds offended. “My father may be a monster, Watson, but I was raised with proper manners. When sharing a meal, it is customary to wait until one’s partner is conscious to begin eating.”

She is oddly touched.

(Sherlock’s concept of “gentleman” often eludes her completely—she’s not sure why it extends to takeout, but not to dishes; to the division of time in the bathroom, but not the presence of body parts in the fridge.)

She reaches into the bag and rewards him with a particularly crispy chicken tender, which he consumes at an obscene volume.

(The sight of his eyes rolling back into his head leaves her mouth feeling strangely dry.)

“Try a chicken tender,” he orders breathlessly.

The delightful burst of pepper and buttermilk makes her whimper a little.

“Oh my God,” she gasps.

“Indeed,” he murmurs.

Giddy from the prospect of a normal blood sugar level, Joan finds herself snickering. “You realize what this sounds like, right?”

“Coitus?” he guesses, reaching greasy fingers into the backseat in a silent request for more. She obliges with a small handful of fries, humming her agreement.

“It’s quite strange,” he confesses through a mouthful of sweet potato. “Until now, I’ve never understood the equation of food with orgasm.”

“That’s the starvation talking,” Joan replies knowingly. “I mean, this is really good, but your elephant dung tea would probably taste like God’s food right now.”

“I’ve starved before,” Sherlock counters, “but previously, I’ve found absolutely no similarities between sex and food.”

“Well,” Joan muses with a small smile, “to be fair, I’ve never met a french fry that would suspend me from a six-foot ladder using a pair of handcuffs.”

He studies her with narrowed eyes. “Is that a disparaging jab at my proclivities, Watson?”

She grins. “Just an observation.”

“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it,” he cautions.

Even now, buoyed by the clouds of heat emerging from the vents and the heady scent of myriad comfort foods wafting from the bag, she can feel the familiar press of the Peerless 801P model, branding her hip with its closed steel circuit. Her cheek still hosts the cool ghost of a stone floor, and the white walls are an ache at the back of her retinas. If she closes her eyes for just a second, she can hear…

“WATSON!”

Her eyes snap open.

Sherlock is watching her with unmasked concern, so she exhales slowly and takes a contemplative bite out of what looks like a stuffed mushroom.

“All things considered,” she admits with forced nonchalance, “I think I’d like to take a break from handcuffs for awhile.” When she meets his gaze, he looks a bit like a deer in headlights.

We can’t talk about it yet, she realizes. He’s not ready.

She imagines Sherlock, handcuffed to the ladder with his eyes closed, gripping the rungs as though they are his only tether to sanity.

“Mushroom?” she offers.

“Two adjoining suites with king beds in each,” Marcus announces, doling out room cards like the reluctant chaperone of an expensive high school field trip. “Your father called ahead of time, just like he promised. The rooms are reserved under the names Marcus and Andre Bell.” His eyebrows lift in surprise. “Apparently, the lost luggage was left in Marcus’s room, but I’m not sure which key that is.”

Sherlock feels rather than sees Watson’s inquisitive gaze. “Lost luggage?”

“While you were sleeping,” he admits carefully, “my father called. Apparently, he and Marcus have been…corresponding.”

He finds he has a difficult time ridding his tone of distaste. Marcus is a good man, one for whom Sherlock has deep respect. He doesn’t want Marcus’s reputation to be tarnished by any sort of association with his father.

(The look on Watson’s face leaves no question that they will be discussing these feelings later.)

Watson turns the full force of her investigative attention to Marcus. “Really?” she prods with no small amount of disbelief. “You and Morland?”

“He offered to help!” Marcus protests. “By that point, I was willing to take all the help I could get!”

“Anyway,” Sherlock segues pointedly, “I asked my father to provide us each with pajamas and a change of clothes. I also asked him to deliver a blank, untraceable laptop with a compatible transfer cable. It seems he complied with my request.” He tilts his head toward Watson. “With Mason’s help, we can transfer data from Mr. Slovenik’s mobile to the laptop...”

“Without fear that the phone will be wiped remotely,” Watson finishes. “Smart.”

“Yes, well,” Sherlock murmurs dryly, “I have my moments.”

He watches as a small, knowing smile crosses her delicate features.

“Do I have time for a shower before we break out the electronics?”

The question takes Sherlock by surprise. Watson did manage to sleep in the car, but her exhaustion is still apparent in the deep purple thumbprints beneath her eyes and the black shadows that lurk in the hollows of her cheeks. He’s not convinced for a second that she has been physically restored by a snooze against the window and a handful of diner food. Her expression is resolved, though—almost eager.

She would do it now, he realizes incredulously. She would conduct a thorough investigation after a thirty-minute catnap if she thought that’s what I needed to feel safe.

He inhales sharply and tugs his concise to-do list from the wall of his brain attic. Get food, get a hotel, go to sleep, find Slovenik. He draws a thick, black line through the first two items.

“You have time for far more than a shower,” he assures her, his voice thick with gratitude. “When you’re done, we can finish eating, and then we’ll take advantage of the beds provided. I think we’ll both be more capable of deductive assistance after a full night’s sleep.”

Watson’s features contort suspiciously. “Okay,” she mutters slowly, “who are you, and what’ve you done with Sherlock?”

He almost—almost—cracks a smile. “Marcus has graciously offered to continue the investigation while we rest so we don’t lose valuable time.”

Watson gifts Marcus with a grateful smile. “Thank you,” she murmurs, reaching out to give Marcus’s hand a grateful squeeze.

(Sherlock tells himself firmly that the ache in his chest is not jealousy.)

“I’m gonna go take a shower,” Watson offers as her hand returns to her side. “Meet you back in your suite for dinner?”

He nods slowly, and she slips through the door of the first suite. He hears the click of the electronic lock. Immediately, fear seizes his throat and sets his lungs on fire.

Slovenik could be waiting, green eyes grey eyebrows tanned skin slight scars watching her as she locks the door and steps into the bathroom. He could grab her, callused hands on sallow skin before she ever has a chance to scream and she still has those fucking handcuffs in her pocket and sweet potato fries and the odd chicken tender do not possess nutrition enough to endure this again and HOW DID I LET HER WALK THROUGH THAT DOOR WITHOUT GETTING A KEY TO HER ROOM WHAT IF SHE…

Suddenly, he is pounding on her door, abandoning the takeaway to the floor so he can reach into his pocket for his own pair of handcuffs. “Watson!”

The door opens almost immediately. Her wide, onyx eyes peer out through the crack, just above the chain she has already put in place.

“All right?” he asks breathlessly.

“Half-naked,” she replies, and he listens for the sound of water running. The pitter-patter of drops against the shower tiles is barely louder than the rush of blood past his ears.

“We should exchange keys,” he chokes out, thrusting his extra card toward her, “just in case.”

“Good idea,” she agrees amiably, disappearing for a moment.

The three seconds it takes for her to return with her key card stretch like years across his racing heart.

“Here.” Her gaze darts to Marcus for a brief moment before she leans forward and lowers her voice. “I also opened my adjoining door,” she offers guiltily. “You know, just in case.”

He nods emphatically. “I shall do the same.”

She dips her chin gratefully. “See you soon.”

The door closes, and Sherlock clutches her key card so tightly that its edges sting his palm and slice the knuckles between his proximal and middle phalanges.

“Sherlock.”

He spins with wide eyes to face Marcus, still panting.

(He’d completely forgotten the detective was there.)

Marcus passes him the takeaway bag. “You might want this.”

Sherlock accepts it without a word, wrapping his fingers around the handles in determined fists. Get it together, Holmes.

He heaves a sigh, forces his shoulders down, and tries to unclench his jaw. The fluorescent lights of the hotel hallway illuminate the glitter of his obnoxiously pink Band-Aid.

Marcus scratches the back of his neck. “Look, um…we don’t really talk about stuff.” He chances a nervous glance at Sherlock. “It’s not really my thing, and I don’t think it’s yours either.”

Sherlock’s lips purse expectantly. “Stating the obvious isn’t your thing either, Detective.”

Sherlock watches as Marcus bites the inside of his cheek, presumably to fend off an equally defensive retort. “I don’t know what you two went through out there,” he continues softly, “but…when you passed out? Joan leveled that EMT.”

“Yes,” Sherlock hedges suspiciously. “Watson is quite adept at hand-to-hand combat.”

“It’s more than that,” Marcus argues. “In the five years we’ve worked together, Joan’s been kidnapped and held hostage, and I’ve never seen her get violent. This time, a trained medical professional tried to insert an IV that she thought was too big for you, and she delivered a shot to the gut so hard that he landed on the floor.”

Sherlock feels his jaw twitch. His neck elongates, and his scapulae slide down the back of his ribcage until he is standing at full height and attention. “If you’re suggesting that she deserves some sort of disciplinary action…”

Marcus lifts both hands until his fingers are splayed and his palms are turned innocuously toward Sherlock. “No,” he says seriously, eyes wide. “I told the EMT that she’d been through an ordeal and that kind of behavior was uncharacteristic. He chalked it up to too much stimuli and not enough sleep, but…we both know she’s different. Hell, you’re different.”

“I’m exhausted,” Sherlock counters, narrowing his eyes defensively. “I know it’s a state you’ve not seen me in before, but…”

“Something terrible happened,” Marcus interrupts. “You went through something seriously shitty together, and it changed you—both of you—profoundly.”

Sherlock inhales deeply and returns to his list. Get food, get a hotel, go to sleep, find Slovenik. His fingers tighten around the handles of the takeaway bag until his knuckles are white against the smattering of dark hair on his hands. The odd brown character on his plaster dances in the light. He wonders if, now that food and hotel have been obtained, he too can fit a shower into his self-imposed schedule.

He wonders how much longer he can stand here without tearing down the walls in his need to see Watson, to take her pulse and hold her close and keep her safe.

“He’s still out there,” he tells Marcus between gritted teeth. “Every moment we stand in this hallway, we’re both wasting valuable time that could be spent finding our abductor and bringing him swiftly to justice.”

“I’ll go back there as soon as the farm opens, just like we talked about on the way over here,” Marcus assures him. “I’ll bring an investigative team with me and ask to see the walk-in. I’ll examine the drain for the tunnel. If it has been filled in, we’ll use your impeccable sense of direction and whatever clues I can find to locate the building where you and Joan were being held, okay?”

Sherlock says nothing—not because he has nothing to say, but because he’s still struggling with the concept of breathing.

Marcus dips his chin pointedly. “I’m not sleeping on this one, Sherlock. You and Joan are family to me, and I’m going to do everything in my power to wrap this thing up as quickly as possible so we can get back to catching the other bad guys.”

He swallows the lump in his throat. A shower. Preferably at a warmer temperature than usual.

“Thank you,” he manages to mutter.

“I’m not done,” Marcus volleys. “Look, the last time something traumatic happened, you hopped on a plane to England and vanished for eight months.”

The shame that presses against the back of Sherlock’s larynx proves a much more difficult lump to swallow.

“She survived,” Marcus continues. “She put one foot in front of the other and did the job while you were gone, but I don’t believe for a second that it was easy for her or that what you did was fair. So, this time…”

Sherlock blinks against the painful sting at the corners of his eyes and glances from the ceiling (taupe) to the door (burnt orange, recently repainted) to the carpet (high-performance, tightly wound, designed specifically for a significant amount of foot traffic, steam-cleaned once a week)—anywhere but Marcus’s face.

“Don’t let her down,” Marcus mutters finally.

“I’m not…”

The words catch in his throat. Sherlock coughs to clear it.

“I would stop being a detective,” he says gravely, his voice hushed by reverence. “I would quit the city and…learn to hang my hat on a rusty nail in a farmhouse in rural Texas if she asked me to.”

When he finally meets Marcus’s gaze, his tears have solidified into steely, grateful resolve.

“What I am saying is this,” he offers softly; “I would leave the work before I would ever leave Watson again.”

Marcus gives him a tacit nod of acknowledgment that Sherlock accepts in silence. He turns toward the door and reaches into his pocket for the key Marcus handed him only moments before.

“Sherlock?”

He glances over his shoulder, feeling raw.

“We’re gonna get this guy.”

With his own tacit nod, Sherlock disappears into his suite.

Chapter Text

Joan tips the branded box into her palm until the complimentary soap slides out. She tosses the box into the trash and tugs the shell-shaped washcloth out of its nest in a folded bath towel. Then, she steps under the spray and tilts her head up until warm water spills down her face.

At first, it feels divine. Then, it feels like drowning.

She turns her back to the showerhead and works the bar of soap into lather with the washcloth. She scrubs her skin slowly and gently, watching as bubbles and dust collect in the bottom of the bathtub. The floor of the basin changes from beige to grey before her eyes, and the generic floral scent—Pea blossom? Cherry almond?—overwhelms her.

When the washcloth begins to darken, she sets it aside and liberates the tiny shampoo bottle from the inlaid soap dish. With sluggish, exhausted fingers, she squeezes the entirety of the bottle into her palm and works the clear, viscous liquid into the roots of her hair.

Another generic scent, this one closer to tea tree oil, explodes amidst the growing cloud of steam.

She works her fingers through the tangles in her long black mane, pausing frequently to lean against the tile. For just a moment, she closes her eyes and tries to focus on breathing.

“WATSON!”

Her eyes snap open. Suddenly, the tile is too smooth, too white, and she is back in the domed room, paralyzed by fear and circumstance and so very alone.

Her eyes widen, and she jerks open the shower curtain until she can see her thin, exhausted frame in the quickly fogging mirror.

“Sherlock?” she calls uncertainly.

I left him. I left him alone in the hallway with Marcus like it was nothing, like we didn’t just spend five days trapped in some underground hell created by a psychopathic dairy farmer. If Slovenik followed us, if Sherlock was taken…

Fear wraps icy fingers around her lungs and squeezes until she has to grab the curtain rod for support.

“Sherlock?”

She is leaking soap, water, and shampoo onto the floor and reaching blindly for a towel when she finally hears him reply.

“Watson? Is that you?” His voice seems to be getting closer. “Are you all right?”

She manages to slide her body back behind the curtain seconds before his grimy face peers around the door.

Her relief is immediate and crippling. Her knees buckle, and she slides down the wall until she is sitting beneath the spray, her face a mess of warm water, tears, and bath products.

Am I crying? When did I start crying?

“The Marriott’s complimentary toiletries are offensively pungent,” Sherlock remarks with a disapproving grimace.

She can’t help it; she laughs. Loudly and a bit maniacally.

“Watson?” he asks again, stepping fully into the bathroom. “Why are you sitting down in the shower?”

“I got dizzy,” she lies easily. “Are you okay?”

“Tip-top,” Sherlock replies wryly. “My father sent over matching pinstripe pajama bottoms. His idea of a joke, I presume.”

“Probably the best his henchman could find on short notice,” she volleys. His eyebrows climb appreciatively high on his forehead as he considers the idea.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he murmurs. “Shall I help you up, or return to unpacking?”

“You can…” She trails off and closes her eyes, leaning her head back against the tile until the spray is drowning her again. This is pathetic, Watson. Stop being pathetic.

She hates that the voice inside her head is a raspy tenor with a familiar British accent.

“It may be prudent for me to bring you your sleep wear so you have clothes into which to change,” Sherlock muses. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

She uses the handrail to pull herself back up into a standing position and rinses the soap from her body and hair. A generous dollop of conditioner coats her fingers, allowing her to comb through the knots that have formed from days without brushing. She leaves the conditioner in for a moment and grabs the bar of soap, scrubbing until her skin is a clean, angry pink. Various lacerations sting as the soap intrudes, and she reminds herself to check for signs of infection.

Her feet require special vigilance. When she hears the telltale slap of Sherlock’s measured steps against the linoleum, she is perched on the edge of the tub, threading the last sliver of soap between her bruised and bloodied toes.

The floor of the basin is rust-colored when she finally stands to rinse her hair.

“Your flannel pinstripes await,” Sherlock announces with a flourish. “I am sorry that the t-shirt is so unabashedly tourist-y, but I’m afraid our options are limited.”

When her hair feels smooth, light, and familiar in her fingers, she drains the excess water from its length and peers around the shower curtain.

Sherlock stands before her, still soiled and newly shirtless, holding a pair of striped pajama bottoms and an “I (heart) NY” t-shirt in the hand attached to his uninjured arm—which, thankfully, appears to be clean.

It takes Herculean effort to arch her eyebrow. “Did you just say ‘tourist-y’?”

He winces. “It would seem that a combination of sleep deprivation and exposure to American vernacular nullifies the rules of English grammar to which, under normal circumstances, I so strictly adhere.”

“Right.” She blinks. “You didn’t shower?”

“Oh.” The whites of his eyes are starkly bright against the Cézanne strokes of rust and grey along the dusty planes of his face. “Not yet. I was…distracted by the contents of the luggage.”

(He does not tell her that he has been perched in the living room of her suite, listening intently for any signs of distress.)

“Why don’t you just use my shower? The water’s already warm,” she offers. “If you hand me a towel really quickly, I can just leave the water running for you.”

(She refuses to think about the fact that Sherlock will be naked in her shower, painting the sinew of his lithe frame with her sliver of soap.)

He looks guilty for a moment, like he has (once again) set fire to one of her favorite brassieres. “I left the valise on your bed.”

“O-kay,” she murmurs, skeptically drawing out the first vowel as she accepts the towel that dangles from his rigid arm. “Did you try to remove its zipper for a survival kit, or something?”

His eyes widen appreciatively, and his head takes a thoughtful tilt.

“Don’t even think about it,” Joan interjects firmly. “Get in the shower. Then you can change into your own tourist-y clothes, and we can eat.”

She slides the curtain open and steps out into the steam, the towel wrapped securely around her raised, angry skin. He is already bowed, sliding his destroyed slacks down thin, muscular legs. The bathroom’s halogen bulbs illuminate his back and its sundry lacerations, and she tries not to notice the prominence of his ribs beneath the dirt-covered tattoos.

(Even battered and bruised and upside-down, he is a painfully beautiful man.)

She retrieves her new clothes from the counter and hears the telltale whisper of boxer-briefs against the linoleum floor. In the mirror, she catches a glimpse of his bare, white bottom before he vanishes behind a cream sheet of vinyl.

“Watson?” he barks not a moment later.

“Still here,” she replies from the doorway. She slides the t-shirt over her head and wraps the towel around her hair as she shakes out the aggressively folded flannel pants. The mere attempt to lift one leg nearly tips her over, so she takes a seat on the floor and slides the warm fabric slowly over her calves, one leg at a time.

“I’m going to need another bar of soap.”

He clings to the image of Watson’s bare legs upside-down, sinewy and strong and scrubbed a vibrant pink—presumably by the wet, wrinkled cloth that hangs haphazardly from the support rod installed for handicapped guests (colloquially known as the “grab bar”). He does not focus on the white-knuckled grip with which he holds the grab bar, the rhythmic assault of the shower’s warm stream against his back, or the black particles that march like rows of ants toward a rapidly clogging drain.

Sherlock is aware of the effects of fatigue on his person. More than once, he has pushed his agile body past the socially acceptable limits, denying it food, sleep, or drink in favor of productivity. He knows intimately the twinge of tears in the muscle fibers, the silver aura of exhaustion that makes his vision fuzzy and unstable. Even the ache in his recently reduced shoulder is far from foreign.

He is less familiar with the ring of fear that has settled around his lungs, inhibiting inhalation and making him feel as though the oxygen he so desperately needs is permanently out of reach.

(Mycroft had asthma as a child. Perhaps it is genetic, and he only needed to inhale a certain amount of drywall to activate the gene. He prefers this explanation to the thought that he suddenly cannot breathe unless Watson is in sight.)

He closes his eyes and traces the curve of her calves. He follows the winding path to the crimson crease of her knees, but the backdrop is a canvas of black nylon, and she is unresponsive when he reaches to stroke the gentle hourglass of her ankles, and he can’t breathe because why isn’t she responding she woke up and we ran until those dreadful rooms were a not-quite-distant memory and…

His eyes snap open, and he takes a breath so deep that it produces a sharp pain in his diaphragm. His grip on the grab bar tightens, and his shoulder twinges in response.

“Watson?”

He listens to the panicked strain of vibrato in the echo of his raspy tenor along the tiled walls for all of three-point-seven terrifying seconds before he hears her reply.

“Yes?”

He sags against the tiled wall in relief, gripping her used washcloth with his white-knuckled hand.

“I…”

The word is a gasp, a croak lost in the rush of the water and barely audible above the throbbing roar of blood past his ears.

He clears his throat and gathers his limbs into a pile on the floor of the tub.

“I’m going to need another bar of soap,” he calls, watching forlornly as the extant bar shrivels to a shard in the spray.

(It sounds much better than, I seem to have developed an irrational fear for your life, which can only be quelled by your constant, unrelenting presence within my weary arm’s reach.)

Moments later, he hears the rasp of cardboard and the muted slap of feet on tile.

“Sorry,” she murmurs as her hand reaches past the edge of the curtain. “I forgot how much scrubbing was required.”

He grabs her wrist and tugs until he can reach the soap. As he uses the friction between his palms to coax lather from the bar, he can almost hear her frown.

“Are you sitting on the floor?"

“Dizziness is an epidemic,” he remarks wryly. “I blame the lack of sweet potato fries at Slo-N-Smooth Farms.”

He watches as the shadow of her petite frame sinks to his eye level, rustling the shower curtain in its wake. Her forearm rests on the ledge of the tub, so close that he could reach out and stroke her fingers through the vinyl sheet.

“I think that, for the foreseeable future, I’ll be blaming a lot of things on Slo-N-Smooth Farms.”

He hums in agreement, watching as the word “stamina” reappears beneath the bubbles. Tiny red sparks accent the letters; a collection of testaments to the veracity of the word on his skin.

(He wonders for the briefest of moments how deep those wounds would have been had Watson not made it out alive.)

“You can start eating without me, you know,” he murmurs to the shadow at his side. “I know how hungry you are.”

She snorts derisively. “Do you really think I’m mean enough to finish those fries without you?”

He wants to call her attention to the archaic notions of waiting for an entire party to begin a meal, but sentiment stifles the words that threaten to bubble forth. Instead, he soaks his skin with soap as her shadow sits nobly beside.

She leaves when he begins to emerge, allowing him a modicum of privacy.

(He wishes she hadn’t.)

She doesn’t eat all of the fries without him, but she does pick her way through one of the orders as she spreads their feast across the coffee table. She recognizes her burger immediately, and she’s pretty sure the salad is hers—Sherlock has, on more than one occasion, expressed vehement antipathy toward salmon. The grilled chicken Caesar wrap looks like something he would eat on days when he’s feeling particularly mindful of nutrition. The other sandwich—which seems to be a pan-fried peanut-butter-and-jelly—is truer to his tastes in comfort food. He’s also ordered fried chicken tenders, stuffed mushrooms, and some sort of egg concoction involving spinach.

She perches on the edge of the tightly upholstered couch and debates slicing her burger in half with a plastic knife while exhaustion tugs at her eyelids.

“Did you order the entire menu?” she asks when she hears the brush of bare feet on carpet behind her.

“Not even close,” he admits, reaching over her to retrieve the fried sandwich, “but I’m beginning to wonder if I should have done. I could easily consume half of this tonight—though whether fatigue overrules my desire for sustenance remains to be seen.” He lingers just a moment too long, and she hears a series of slight inhalations.

Is he sniffing my hair?

“You smell wrong,” he blurts in irritation as he makes his way to one of the burnt orange armchairs. Almost immediately, his scrubbed features contort in surprise, as though his mouth has betrayed him.

She arches an unimpressed eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you’d grown so attached to the scent of sweat and flaking sheetrock.”

“Not that,” he mumbles, his right hand drawing twitchy circles in the air as his left struggles to hold the sandwich upright. “Your hair, particularly after washing, usually emits a strong floral scent.”

“Lilac,” she offers. “Apparently, this particular hotel didn’t want to spring for the Suave Naturals series.” She studies him for a moment, almond eyes narrowing suspiciously. “How do you know what my shampoo smells like?”

He looks simultaneously confused and offended as he reaches for a fry. “Watson,” he chides, “I served as my own olfactory expert for years before I ever consulted with The Nose. My sense of smell is exceptionally…”

He’s halfway through the word “exquisite” when her eyes widen in realization.

“Wait a minute,” she murmurs. “They didn’t change the scent, did they? You’ve been adding honey to my shampoo!”

Twin dabs of rouge appear at the tops of his cheekbones. “Research indicates that it promotes follicle strength and hair growth,” he recites sheepishly into the crimson smear of jam that gleams through the fault lines of his sandwich. “The recommended dose is one teaspoon per washing, but it seemed more prudent to do the math and mix in the appropriate amount, given that you have a tendency to shake the bottle before applying its contents to your hair.”

When he glances up, big blue eyes innocently wide and luminous in the hotel’s ambitious lighting, she is still wearing the mysterious expression that means either surprise or anger. (Five years, and he’s still not entirely sure which.) He swallows awkwardly and gestures toward the styrafoam container in her lap where her deluxe jumbo burger—lettuce, tomato, onion, add avocado, no ketchup, because ketchup is for fries and Watson abhors the mixing of condiments—remains untouched.

“Provisions?” he offers hopefully. “Per your request at the farm, I ordered your burger without cheese.”

(She is always amazed by the degree to which he uses his gigantic brain for her benefit.)

“Thanks,” she replies, lifting the lid and removing the pickle first. “For what it’s worth, you smell wrong, too.”

He narrows his eyes suspiciously. “My shampoo is perfume-free.”

She savors a fried mushroom with a smirk. “Your cologne isn’t.”

This acknowledgment elicits the smallest of smiles. She celebrates the victory by retrieving the first half of her burger.

(He doesn’t bother asking how she knows about the cologne; the bottle of Chanel was, after all, a Christmas gift from Watson.)

(She doesn’t bother admitting that she bought an extra bottle and sprayed it around her apartment for weeks after he left for MI-6.)

He reveals his privileged upbringing by sampling a bit of each of their myriad dishes—three stuffed mushrooms, one chicken tender, two bites of his chicken Caesar wrap and half of a deliciously warm Monte Cristo. She mows diligently through her burger, pausing only to offer a bite that he graciously declines—“Not an American trend I ever really understood, to be honest.”

The corners of her lips dip ever so slightly in disbelief. “I know I’ve seen you eat a burger before.”

“Only for sustenance, Watson,” he insists dismissively. “If I’m seeking beef, I find I much prefer a good steak or shepherd’s pie.”

Her eyes widen appreciatively, glimmering like dark brown Mancala stones against the thin, pine planes of her face. “Oooh, I love shepherd’s pie. Is there a good place for it in the city?”

There is a cut on her forehead, an angry dash just above her supraorbital foramen that gleams crimson in the light. The skin that surrounds it is puckered and pink, indicating inflammation and irritation. He can’t remember when she might’ve gotten it.

“Watson. Watson, wake up.”

“Sherlock?”

He meets her gaze with wide eyes and tries to replace the image of Watson, unconscious and overheated on the floor, with the living, breathing picture of sentience in front of him.

“Le Chéile.” The lilting French syllables emerge as a croak. He clears his throat before continuing. “Just off Cabrini Boulevard in Hudson Heights.”

Her chin lifts in interest. “We should go,” she murmurs. “When we get back home, I mean.”

Her use of “when,” subtly emphasized, is not lost on Sherlock.

(Very little—if anything—about Joan Watson is lost on Sherlock Holmes.)

She swallows the last bite of beef, savoring the last smear of avocado with a barely audible moan. Sherlock reaches for the other half of his breakfast sandwich.

“Fried PB&J?” Watson queries.

“Monte Cristo,” he corrects, pinching off a corner and thrusting it forward. “The turkey is lackluster, but the French toast is sublime.”

Her eyes narrow suspiciously. “You refused my burger, and now you’re offering me your food?”

“We have a veritable feast on this table, Watson,” he mutters dryly. “I’m not likely to starve anytime soon.”

“You know,” she replies, reluctantly accepting his sample, “I would’ve said the same thing a week ago.”

“All the more reason to gorge ourselves now,” he remarks, enjoying a long, luxurious gulp of ice water. “Tomorrow, our battle begins anew.”

She steels herself by plucking a chicken tender from the dwindling pile. “So the plan,” she begins cautiously, “is for Marcus to head back to the farm as soon as it opens? With backup?”

He nods. His head feels impossibly heavy. “He may be there already,” he remarks with a cursory glance at the nearest alarm clock’s neon green display. “Seven AM is fast approaching.”

Her brow furrows. Her eyelids flutter shut, and she plants thumb into temple and forefinger into frontal bone—Watson’s classic headache tells. When her eyes finally reopen, her gaze drifts toward the inconspicuous black suitcase on her bed. “What about the blank, untraceable laptop? Did your father deliver?”

He stares uncertainly at the abandoned pinch of toast on her plate. “He did.”

She inhales audibly, an effort he recognizes as her attempt to “rally.” She plants both feet on the floor and presses her palms to her knees. “Should we go ahead and download the information from Slovenik’s cell phone?”

Despite his promise of sleep and the marked to-do list that hangs in a place of prominence in his brain attic, he still feels the urge to grab the laptop and begin investigating. Every ounce of fear that squeezes his lungs is screaming that he find Slovenik right now and bring him to justice—and yet he sees the gravitational pull of sleep on Watson’s wan face.

(He finds that the weight of his eyelids is, unfortunately, directly proportionate to his glucose level. He estimates that his propensity for mistakes may suffer the same link—and a mistake in this case would be a grave transgression against Watson for which he refuses to be responsible.)

“Not tonight,” he concludes reluctantly. “I think we’d best wait for Mason. We only get one chance to strip the phone of information before it becomes a beacon for Slovenik. Better not to muck it up.”

She nods thoughtfully. “What else do we need to do tonight?”

(She is trying so hard to stay awake for him. Beneath the fear and the dwindling hunger and the exhaustion, he feels a strange, grateful tightening in his chest.)

He swallows the last of his French toast melt and gives the coffee table a cursory glance. “Put the remaining food in the fridge?” He studies Watson cautiously. “Unless, of course, you’re still hungry.” When she glances up from their smorgasbord, he gives her a sheepish quirk of the lips. “I may be a step past full.”

She returns the smile. “I think I’m simultaneously horrified by my own gluttony and terrified that we’re never going to eat again.”

“Yes,” Sherlock murmurs wryly. “I believe the latter was the sentiment that guided me toward the last stuffed mushroom.”

She snorts. “Well, at least we know we’ve got breakfast.” Her eyes narrow toward Sherlock with the ghost of a mischievous twinkle. “Provided, of course, that you don’t mind eating a chicken Caesar wrap first thing in the morning.”

“I’ve begun the day with stranger meals,” he acknowledges. “How do you feel about a morning portion of salmon salad?”

“Like it’s a hell of a lot better than a granola bar,” she grumbles.

He can’t argue with that.

They close the styrafoam containers slowly, hands and limbs brushing as they move around the table and gather their rations into the small refrigerators provided. When the door shuts for the last time, Watson reaches over and retrieves the pinch of French toast from the edge of her empty burger plate. He watches as she pushes it past full pink lips and sucks gently on the tips of her fingers.

The tiny moan that emerges is almost more than he can bear.

“Saved the best for last,” she offers sheepishly when she notices his stare. “You’re right; that’s delicious.”

She doesn’t mention his blush, but he feels it all the way to his toes.

She opens and closes all the windows, just to be sure they’re secure. She tugs both drapes and sheers across the expanse of panes, just to be sure they can’t be seen. She loses track of how many times she checks the locks. When exhaustion threatens to level her on the floor in front of the flat-screen, she hastily grabs a desk chair and drags it over to the door, tucking the curve of the back beneath the handle.

(She feels no small degree of relief that she doesn’t require Sherlock’s help. Apparently, one recovers physical strength more quickly than security.)

When she turns around, Sherlock is standing in the doorway of her bathroom, brushing his teeth in slow, counterclockwise circles as he stares at her.

She drags a shameful hand through her tangled, drying hair. “I know it’s silly, but…”

He leaves, presumably to rinse. When she looks up again, he is directly in front of her, offering a hairbrush.

“I repurposed a lamp in the securing of my suite,” he confesses with wide eyes. His lips purse as his chin tilts up, then dips to the left. “I wrapped the cord around the knob and balanced the lamp on the luggage rack so that, in the event of an attempted entry, it will shatter quite spectacularly on the floor.”

Joan’s eyes widen appreciatively as she studies her handiwork. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“The desk lamps are mobile,” he offers. “But it may be equally effective to push the table against the chair to reinforce the blockade.”

Once his vision has been realized, she wrinkles her nose at the small tower of furniture. “Do you think we’re being too paranoid? I mean, you did say you didn’t think he would follow us.”

He believes in his own deductive prowess—arguably more than he believes in any other aspect of himself—but he also remembers with startling clarity the crippling fear that seized him when he first heard that distant recording of Watson shouting his name.

He begins a thousand sentences before the words actually emerge, halting and cautious.

“I am a good detective,” he admits thoughtfully. “The best, even, but…I have been wrong before, and if I am wrong in this…”

He doesn’t elaborate, but she hears in his quiet resolve the remnants of the man who held the found Irene Adler with splayed fingers and white knuckles, shouting in despair and leaking tears of horrified relief.

When she meets his gaze, she feels the icy breath of the ARC-12S on her forearms. He inhales, and she watches his pectorals shove at the heart on his t-shirt.

“I will not risk your life for a theory.”

She feels her eyebrows pinch the skin above the bridge of her nose, feels the hot press of tears against her frontal sinus and the corners of her eyes.

(I can’t imagine my life without you, she wants to say. I’m so glad we both made it out alive.)

She reaches up and tenderly traces the curve of his acromion with feather-light fingers. “You really should secure this shoulder.”

He rolls his eyes, and the spell that had momentarily befallen dissipates with his exasperated sigh. “I told you, there is no medical evidence that securing a reduced limb actually reaps any measurable benefits.”

“Yeah, well,” she retorts, meeting his gaze defiantly, “you’re not the only one in this partnership who doesn’t feel like taking risks.”

He’s both frustrated and touched. (It is, he fears, a constant consequence of Watson’s presence.)

“I’ll call my father and request that he deliver a sling this morning,” he grumbles at long last.

The smile that blooms on Watson’s drawn features steals his breath.

Sherlock can’t sleep.

From the moment he slides his weary limbs between foreign sheets, from the moment his aching head hits the cool cotton of the pillowcase, from the moment he makes the painful decision to leave a lamp illuminated because he is terrified of what (or who) could find them in the dark, Sherlock’s brain attic is alight with energy.

He tries to sleep. He closes his eyes and attempts the age-old practice of triangle breathing, in through his nose and out through his mouth. He tugs tired appendages into some form of horizontal yoga in his struggle to find peace enough to dream.

No matter what he tries, his mind wanders to Watson.

He inhales and sees Watson, curled up against the window in the backseat of Marcus’s sedan.

He holds his breath and sees Watson, standing mere inches in front of him as she nabs a cell phone from their captor’s pocket.

He exhales and sees Watson, swaying atop the nylon sleep sac and struggling to find purchase along the plastic walls of a small water bottle.

Watson, crumpling to the floor in a room filled with heat and dust and exhaustion as some detestable group watches our demise through tiny cameras—and when she falls, I fall. When she falls, we all fall, and we cannot let Slovenik and his henchmen go free because what if it happens again, what if they find us here at the hotel and drag us back or worse take only Watson and leave me here and what if I can’t find her what if I’m not good enough this time there is no Mycroft there is no Le Milieu there is no bargaining chip there is only one flawed, insignificant addict-turned-consulting-detective and…

A car’s horn honks in the distance (Honda, perhaps a sports utility vehicle), and his eyes snap open as every muscle fiber clenches in rigid attention.

He focuses on the ceiling, where a tiny black spot attracts his gaze.

It may be a bug, he thinks. He wonders if this is an appropriate excuse to rouse Watson.

(They have a deal: he gets rid of all of the flying insects—sometimes with a tissue, sometimes with a jar and forceps—if she will kill the spiders. Sherlock is fascinated by most of the phylum arthropoda, but arachnids terrify him unless they are dead and trapped within a glass slide. One April Fools’ Day, Watson dropped a preserved tarantula next to his cup of coffee. He told her it was fine—“good joke, yes, happy holiday”—but he didn’t eat at the kitchen table for a week afterward.)

He studies the black spot with growing apprehension. It seems too large, oblong, and immobile to be a spider, but it would be helpful to retrieve Watson and make sure.

(In a surprising twist of fate, Watson had actually apologized for the prank. As a schoolboy who often served as the butt of his classmates’ jokes, Sherlock was profoundly moved by her remorse.)

He peels back the blankets and scratches his growing beard.

(He wakes her all the time, at odd hours and for even stranger reasons. Requesting that she rid his suite of bugs is good sense, really.)

He glances up again, and his eyes widen as he realizes that the black spot could be an entirely different kind of bug.

Within seconds, Sherlock has illuminated every lamp in the suite. He grabs a handful of tissues and mounts the bed, his veins singing with the heady rush of adrenaline. His heart thumps painfully against his sternum, and dinner churns in his stomach as he scrutinizes the square foot of ceiling in question.

He has never been so glad to see a beetle (a calosoma sayi, known colloquially as the Black Caterpillar Hunter).

He tucks it inside the tissue and crushes the exoskeleton between his thumb and forefinger, lamenting for a brief moment the lack of microscope and the waste of a good specimen. He is protecting Watson, though; fulfilling his promise to dispose of any insecta that may take flight.

You were supposed to protect her from other bugs, too, but you bollocksed that up quite nicely, didn’t you?

He flushes the remains of the Black Caterpillar Hunter, just in case he has, in his exhaustion, misclassified the creature or been tricked by a clever taxidermist partnering with their captors.

(It seems unlikely, but so does the vast majority of their current predicament.)

Sherlock washes his hands methodically, scrubbing invisible germs away as he waits for the tide of epinephrine to wane.

It doesn’t.

His knees ache, and there is a relentless pressure at his temples as his heart thuds ceaselessly against the walls of his ribcage. Every time his eyelids dare to descend, tempering what is quickly becoming a migraine, his brain attic mounts another image of Watson in distress on its worn wooden walls.

She’s fine. She’s most certainly asleep, safely tucked beneath the synthetic down comforter on her suite’s king-sized bed. The lamp would’ve broken if the barrier had been breached.

The mental recitation of logical deductions has absolutely no effect on his rapid breathing.

Just go check, then. Pop your head in as though it’s any other day and verify that she is, in fact, safe.

He stumbles toward her suite in exhausted panic, peering around corners and flicking the light switches along the way. When their entire corner of the hotel—save Watson’s room, of course—is brighter than Christmas itself, Sherlock nudges Watson’s door open and peers inside.

(He’s just minutely alarmed to see that she, too, is sleeping with a lamp on.)

“Watson!” he whispers.

Nothing happens.

He steps more boldly into the room, tilting his head to study the spray of ebony strands across the white cotton pillowcases.

He lifts his voice barely above a whisper. “Watson?”

Despite a razor-sharp stare, he fails to discern any movement from the form on the bed. With a tentative inhalation, he takes another step forward and reaches splayed fingers and a trembling palm toward her spine, just between her scapulae.

Before he can make contact, a muted snore escapes Watson’s prone form, and tension leaks from Sherlock like air from a balloon. His hand falls to her latissimus dorsi, and his eyelids close as she exhales beneath his touch. The inhalation that follows fills her lungs and his.

She stirs ever so slightly, brown eyes creaking open to slits. “Sherlock?”

The terrified vibrato in her voice is a switchblade through his intercostal muscles.

“Here,” he murmurs. His hand sinks as relief drags her further into the mattress.

“Mm,” she hums, reaching around to clumsily pat his arm. “Good.”

Sherlock inhales sharply as her fingers drift away from his forearm and settle on the duvet.

Good. Yes. See? Now you can sleep.

(He doesn’t want to let go.)

He watches as her breathing deepens and tries to convince himself to rise, to return to his own suite and allow his body the rest it so desperately needs. He thinks about muscle reparation, about digestion and neural processing and how bloody painful it is to be walking away from Watson.

(He has asthma. He is sure of it. He must, because there is absolutely no way that Sherlock bloody Holmes has allowed himself to be so emotionally taken that oxygen eludes him without the brush of Watson’s skin against his.)

Panic wells in his chest as he moves farther from the room. Exhaustion has begun to blur his vision at the edges, but his limbs are throbbing with frenetic energy. Blood sings in his veins, a nauseating rendition of Beethoven’s scherzo from Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Molto vivace, at warp speed. The ascending staccato notes shove him forward, past the assault of LED illumination and into his suite, where he grips his bottom lip between his teeth and tugs the giant duvet from the bed in a fit of frustration. He tucks two synthetic down pillows beneath his uninjured arm, stalks back to Watson’s room, and drapes the comforter across the floor as the groan of a timpani’s syncopated triplet rattles his brain attic. He reclines just to the right of the doorway, rolling himself in the duvet to ward off the early morning’s chill.

The floor is impossibly hard, and his shoulder protests relentlessly. And yet, from the corner of his eye, he can see Watson’s hand hanging off the edge of the bed. The strings in his mind bow a defiant descending octave, and he listens for the steady rush of air that indicates that his partner is, in fact, alive.

Her breath is the white noise he needs to quiet his racing mind. Her fingertips twitch ever so slightly, and his diaphragm expands.

He synchronizes their inhalations until sleep rushes to greet him.

Sherlock circles the hole in the ground like a caged lion, his steps measured and languid.

“It’s a trap,” she tells him. The conviction of the statement flows like steel through her veins. Everything aches and thrums and beats and vibrates with the fear that this is it, that there is no exit and no happy ending.

“I prefer to think of it as an adventure,” he demurs with a sly smirk. “Care to follow me down, Watson?”

Anticipation is a spiked balloon in her chest, poking holes in her sternum and lancing her lungs. Her skin feels too tight for her bones. He holds his hand out, and she threads her fingers solidly through his callused ones, pulling him closer to her and away from the edge.

“The only way out is through,” he tells her—not in his familiar, percussive clip, but in the slurred speech she remembers from the days after Olivia was found. Then, he falls.

His outstretched fingers yank her heart from her chest and a scream from her throat as his thinning limbs disappear into the darkness below. She pitches forward, throwing her arms out to grab him before he lands, but the edge of the precipice holds her like a lover.

“SHERLOCK!”

She wakes with a gasp, gripping the sheets with white knuckles as her esophagus spasms and her stomach lurches.

She stumbles into the bathroom, skidding to a stop in front of the toilet mere seconds before her stomach empties its contents.

Hot, stinging tears leak from her eyes in lazy rivers as she leans back against the wall. She wipes them away with trembling fingers.

She closes her eyes and sees Sherlock splayed against a dirt floor with long, muscular limbs at painful angles. Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” plays in the corner of her memory in a wet, haunting minor.

When she opens her eyes, she is sick again.

Her fingers leave stains on the wall as she struggles to stand. She flushes the toilet and brushes her teeth, vibrating like a tuning fork all the while. The intense mint of the toothpaste makes her gag, but it’s clear that her stomach has nothing left to relinquish.

She washes her face and re-braids her hair and tries like hell to ignore the voice inside of her that is still screaming for her partner.

He’s fine. If he wasn’t fine, you would know. You fucking booby-trapped both hotel suites like you’re starring in Home Alone.

She’s making her way toward his room when she trips over a mass of blankets and lands in an ungraceful heap against the doorframe.

“What the…?”

A familiar, callused hand paws at a familiar, scruffy face as large, indigo eyes blink into the lamplight. “W’son?” The blinking increases in pace. “All right?”

She rubs her aching clavicle and heaves a sigh of relief. “Sherlock? Why’re you on the floor?”

For the second time this evening, she sees him blush. “I, um…”

(He is on the floor for the same reason she spent the nights after Olivia’s death and Oscar’s pummeling in a chair by his bed—because sometimes, one cannot be sure enough.)

She rolls her eyes. “Get in bed.”

His eyes widen. Astonishment bleaches his lips white amidst the brownish-grey tufts of beard. “I was in my bed,” he admits, sounding fearful. “I had trouble sl—”

“Get in my bed,” she clarifies, and he stops breathing.

“Watson…”

“Sherlock,” she counters, and he knows he has already lost whatever argument they are about to have. “This is stupid, okay? We’re adults. We slept in the same bed last night AND the night before that.”

“Technically,” he points out, “last night’s accommodations had no bed.”

Her deep brown eyes are daggers. “That is SO not the point,” she hisses.

“Perhaps not,” Sherlock concedes, slurring the words slightly, “but…”

“There are two perfectly good, king-sized beds available to us right now,” Watson snaps. “You’re not sleeping on the floor. That’s just stupid—and it’s bad for your shoulder. Just…get in bed, okay?”

He glances apprehensively at the dislodged duvet. “Watson,” he begins lowly. His voice is both stern and soft. “We can’t keep doing this.”

She folds her arms and narrows her eyes. “Why not?”

(Because if you allow me to hold you now, I may never be able to sleep on my own again.)

(Because this is a rule I must not learn to break.)

(Because I have asthma.)

He swallows what feels like an impossibly large lump in his throat.

She sits upright and tugs her knees to her chest.

“You died,” she says. The profound sense of loss in her tone is a vice around his heart. “In my nightmare, I mean. I had a nightmare. Three, actually.” She reaches out to trace an invisible circle on the carpet. “Look, you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. I’m not trying to pressure you. It’s just…” She trails off and meets his eye with an expression of apprehension that guts him. “The asshole who kidnapped us is still out there. I don’t know about you, but I can’t sleep. Not if I think there’s a chance you could be taken without me knowing it.” She arches a single, lethal eyebrow. “That’s why you’re in here, right? To keep me safe?”

He can’t decide if this is a trick question akin to “Why do you need to wake me up at 4 in the morning?” or “What did you do with the milk?” or “Were you watching me sleep?”

He swallows again. The lump grows larger.

“You have a…” His fingers twitch, as though they can conjure the right words. “A thing,” he murmurs finally, “about privacy.”

“You have a thing about touching,” she retorts, and something gnarled inside of him begins to relax. Defensive Watson is familiar territory.

Her eyes narrow suspiciously. “Is that why you’re on the floor?”

“No,” he admits. “I too felt sleep would come more easily if I could be more certain you were safe. I just didn’t want to overstep.” He twists his comforter between his fingers to curb the urge to touch her, to obtain concrete proof of life. “I may tease, Watson, but I do have the utmost respect for your…”

“Puritanical prudishness?” she supplies wryly.

“Boundaries,” he amends pointedly.

Something softens in her onyx orbs, something he remembers from her hushed confession that “I think what you do is amazing.” It warms him to his core.

“Come to bed, Sherlock.”

This time, he doesn’t argue. He stumbles gracelessly, exhaustedly to his feet and follows her to the king-sized bed in the center of the room. He waits while she crawls gingerly beneath the duvet, then rounds the bed and makes his own cautious ascent.

“Even my toes are sore,” Watson grumbles as she fluffs her pillow.

“Seconded,” he groans, sliding between the sheets amidst vehement protests from his aching limbs. When he finally rests his head on the pillow, a sigh sinks his battered frame into the mattress.

“Sherlock?”

He opens his eyes and tilts his head until Watson’s messy braid comes into focus. “Watson?”

She inhales shakily. “I’m really glad you didn’t die.”

Her fingers find his, interlacing beneath the covers, and he can barely breathe for the hole that forms in his chest.

You almost lost this. Could still if Slovenik is not found.

Despite his best judgment, he releases her hand and reaches for her waist instead, guiding her entire frame toward him until she is flush against his side, breasts brushing against his ribcage and hair tickling the hollow of his jaw. He wraps his good arm firmly around her shoulders and squeezes.

“Are you hugging me?” she asks incredulously. “In bed?”

“No rules in captivity,” he murmurs. In his exhaustion, he finds the consonants run together like London rain. “This is, of course, the most practical way for one of us to be sure upon waking that the other is safe.” For the briefest of moments, his bravado slips. “Is this…okay?”

Her thin arm slides across his chest, filling his empty spaces. “Perfect.”

He finds the word disturbingly apt.

Against his oblique muscles, her breathing slows and deepens. The traces of lilac and honey are gone, but beneath the onslaught of tea tree oil and cherry almond is a scent that is entirely, uniquely Watson. It lulls him into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

The unmistakable sound of shattering ceramic wakes Sherlock immediately.

His heart pounds as he blinks wide eyes into the offending brightness.

Too much illumination for an unattended lamp—the shades are glowing with the last vestiges of sunlight. Afternoon, perhaps early evening.

Too much beige and burnt orange—hotel room. Courtyard Marriott in Poughkeepsie. Lamp cord wound about the doorknob and a table pushed against the second point of entry.

“Did you hear that?”

A whisper. Watson.

Her heart beats a petrified staccato against his ribcage. As the din in the entryway persists, his grip tightens around the comforting weight of her, warm and breathing and alive in his arms.

A door hits the wall with a muted thud, and additional glass shrieks into shards as voices echo through the suite.

“What the hell?!”

Slovenik, he thinks, terror-stricken, but the timbre is wrong.

“Sherlock?”

Watson’s intimate breath of air warms the cotton t-shirt, pulled tightly against the taut skin of his pectoral.

He inhales sharply, his chest ballooning between the valley of her breasts.

“Rather resourceful when you think about it. They had to know they weren’t the only ones who could successfully pick a hotel room’s deadbolt.”

The earth tilts on its axis as Sherlock struggles to process the familiar voices. He knows Watson’s hair is peeking out of the blanket, mussed by the rustling of sheets during sleep. A tug with his free hand—ow, shoulder—reveals that the duvet is not sufficient in length to cover their heads. Given the rate at which the voices are increasing in volume and proximity, they don’t have time to escape. Their best hope is to pretend to be dead already.

He pulls the duvet higher and sidles toward the foot of the bed anyway, tugging his partner with him.

“Anyone on the force asks, we didn’t pick a deadbolt. This room is in my name. Besides, if they’d answered any of the times we fucking knocked…”

“They’re probably exhausted. Five days in a concrete room with minimal amounts of food and water? That would take a toll on anyone’s body.”

“Is that Ms. Hudson?” Watson muses incredulously. “It sounds like Ms. Hudson.”

“Quiet,” he hisses in return. “We’re in danger, Watson.”

He clutches her more closely to him, burying white knuckles in her hair, because his hearing is impeccable, but his vision is blurred and his head is swimming and he does not trust that anything is as it seems.

“Joan? Sherlock?” The high note in the cheery alto—Ms. Hudson?—quivers with the slightest hint of hysteria.

“We should get up, right?” Watson persists. “Go out and greet them before they think…”

The hinges squeak as the door to the bedroom creeps toward the wall. He hears the muted click of heels against the carpet and winces as pale pink nails fold the duvet down until his wide eyes are visible.

“Oh, thank God,” Ms. Hudson gasps, pressing a palm to the soft silk of her chemise. “Marcus, they were just sleeping! Come look!”

Sherlock’s indigo orbs narrow suspiciously as he registers the delight on Ms. Hudson’s perfectly painted features. Beside him, Watson buries her face in the crook of his neck and groans aloud. Her open mouth is warm and wet against his clavicle.

“Don’t look…” she whines into the sheets.

He hears the familiar cadence of Marcus’s gait—the measured, businesslike beat that serves as testament to the man’s capable professionalism. He also hears the exact moment the footsteps stop.

“See?” Marcus mutters, sounding at once irritated and impossibly smug. “I told you these fools were treating this like a vacation.” If possible, his voice gets louder. “Are you two still gonna try and tell me you’re huddling together for warmth?”

(One day, Joan thinks, we will wake up in the same bed on our own time, without an audience or a kidnapper at large, and we’ll actually get to enjoy this aspect of a seemingly platonic partnership.)

With a heavy sigh, she buries her face in her palms. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

Marcus purses his lips and shrugs. “Honestly? It doesn’t look all that weird. I’m just trying to remember which date I had in the precinct pool.”

“There’s a pool?” she shrieks incredulously.

Sherlock’s eyes shrink to navy slits as he glares at his fellow detective. “Watson and I are, as ever, friends,” he snaps. “Very close, very tired friends.”

“You don’t have to hide from us, dear,” Ms. Hudson trills warmly. “I’ve been rooting for you two for years.”

With a heavy sigh, Sherlock gives Watson one last (completely unintentional) caress and pushes himself into a seated position. “Give me a modicum of credit,” he grumbles, watching his partner bury her head under the remaining pillows. “Even if anything untoward were to happen, this would be terrible timing.” He casts a pointed look at Marcus. “And nothing untoward has happened.”

Marcus meets his gaze with uncharacteristic defiance. “You know that thing I told you not to do?” he returns pointedly. “As long as you don’t do that thing, I’ve got no complaints.”

The words sound strangely like a blessing. Sherlock is at once touched and terrified.

“What thing?” Watson asks, emerging at last from her cocoon.

(She is warm and rumpled, with a crease on her cheek and rebellious strands of hair sticking out in all directions, and he wants nothing more than for everyone to leave them the hell alone so he can take her back to bed. In a completely platonic, uncompromising sense, of course.)

Marcus dips his chin meaningfully, and Sherlock gives him the smallest, most imperceptible of nods to ensure that they do, in fact, have an agreement. He hears the echo of his own voice in his ears.

“I would leave the work before I would ever leave Watson again.”

“Seriously, what thing?” Watson demands, glaring at Marcus and Sherlock in turn. Sherlock studiously avoids her probing gaze by rubbing his tired eyes—ow, shoulder.

“I knew it!” a third voice exclaims proudly. “What did I tell you? A guy living with a girl as attractive as her? No way he doesn’t tap that. Even a guy as weird as Mr. Holmes.”

“You’re calling me weird?” Sherlock retorts incredulously.

“Boys…” Ms. Hudson warns.

“You are weird,” Mason insists. “Why are you so offended? Clearly, Miss Watson doesn’t mind.”

Sherlock hears the sharp intake of breath as Watson guides her legs over the side of the bed and levels Mason with a lethal glare.

“Mason,” she begins in a withering tone, “We appreciate your help.”

He beams. “Anything for old friends!”

“BUT,” Joan interjects sharply, “just so we’re clear, I resent every implication in your string of statements.”

Framed by the doorway, Mason looks genuinely confused. “But…I just called you ‘attractive.’”

Sherlock presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and contemplates a prayer to a God in whom he doesn’t entirely believe.

“Mason,” he grinds out, “there is a laptop in the second bedroom. Kindly locate it and make yourself somewhat useful.”

Mercifully, Mason takes his leave, grumbling in the foreign language of American youth about the impossible sensitivity of his adult acquaintances. As soon as the door slams behind him, Ms. Hudson turns a maternal gaze on her weary friends.

“Oh,” she gasps, tears glittering in her bright blue eyes, “and you’re even wearing matching pajamas…”

Sherlock decides, in this most unfortunate of moments, that he hates his father.

“We didn’t sleep together,” Watson insists. He hears the curious waver in her voice and turns to face her swaying figure.

Food, he thinks absently. She needs food.

“I mean, technically, we did sleep together, but we didn’t…do…” She trails off and threads frustrated fingers into her fraying braid. “You know what? Why don’t you just tell us what you found at the farm?”

Marcus arches an eyebrow, attempting in vain to conceal his amusement. “You want us to brief you while you’re all sleep-rumpled and match-y?”

Joan’s eyes narrow. Marcus grins.

“We almost died,” Joan deadpans.

Marcus shoves his hands impishly into his pockets. “And now no one gets to crack any jokes…ever?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Ms. Hudson…”

Ms. Hudson grabs the doorknob and offers a conciliatory smile. “We’ll just go make sure Mason doesn’t do anything traceably illegal…” She trails off and arches her eyebrow pointedly at her shorter companion. “Won’t we, Detective Bell?”

Marcus glances suspiciously at Sherlock and Joan in turn. When Ms. Hudson lays a firm hand on his shoulder, he deflates like a balloon.

“Fine,” he grumbles. “But if you don’t come out soon, I’m gonna assume something untoward is going on, and I’m gonna start figuring out how many cops owe me money.”

Once the bedroom door slams shut behind them, Sherlock turns a furrowed brow toward Watson.

“Am I to understand he’s been casting bets about the nature of our relationship?”

“Apparently, Mason thinks we’ve been having sex this entire time,” Joan retorts, folding her arms across her chest—partly in protest and partly to fend off the cold air. “Is it too late to hire Everyone?”

“As he will surely explain, Mason is more discreet and expeditious,” Sherlock laments. “Besides, I lack the energy for another Disney medley.”

“We could shave your head again,” Joan offers hopefully. “They liked that.”

“Yes, but the beard provides good cover,” Sherlock counters, “and the hair on my crown is hardly a sufficient sacrifice at this stage of growth.”

“I have enough hair to sacrifice,” Joan mumbles petulantly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. “I can take one for the team.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” Sherlock finds himself admitting, voice grave and honest as his fingers reach out of their own accord to trace her mussed braid. “I quite like your hair.”

She turns so that her cheek fills his palm, and their eyes meet. As he stares into the black void of her pupils, framed by the gold-flecked chocolate of her irises, he is struck by the feeling that he holds the entire world in his palm.

What are you doing you cannot caress her like this her friendship is the most sacred and precious thing in the whole of your wretched life you cannot compromise it not even for a moment it is the only buoy in the entire mundane ocean of humanity on bad days and on good days she is

She takes a preparatory breath, and he is paralyzed by the fear of what she might deduce aloud.

“Does this mean you’ll stop letting Mason sniff it?”

Relief is a warm river that melts the ice in his veins.

“We have to compensate the boy somehow,” he insists, stifling the sudden urge to smile.

“You could just write him a check,” Watson murmurs wryly.

“And risk contributing to the growing epidemic of fiscal irresponsibility among American millennials?” he scoffs. “I think not.”

“Consider it a down payment on the return of our collective dignity,” she volleys, and his heart leaps at the wit-laced syllables.

Sherlock tilts his chin toward the ceiling and feigns a moment of consideration. “I suppose we could inquire as to what pedestrian video game his teenaged heart desires…”

“My hero,” is her dry retort.

She scrubs her face, combs her hair, and brushes her teeth. Instead of squatting awkwardly between destroyed walls, she goes to the bathroom in a real toilet with real toilet paper and washes her hands thoroughly with scented soap. The swirl of clean water and bright white bubbles in the glistening basin of the bathroom sink is a scene worthy of Cézanne’s brush, but when she closes her eyes, she can still taste drywall on her tongue.

She dries her hands on a plush towel that hangs from a ring of brushed nickel and forces herself to swallow the bile that fear threatens to expel.

With uncharacteristic alacrity, she trades her pajamas for the change of clothes provided—black leggings and a maroon cable-knit sweater. The leggings are too long, and the sweater is far too big, but the extra fabric conceals her in a way that feels surprisingly comforting.

It’s okay, though, because you’re going to walk in there, and Marcus is going to tell you that they got that bastard and everyone can go home.

She exits the bathroom with a brush in her hair and a determined jut to her jaw. Her eyes find Sherlock immediately, and she breathes a small sigh of relief before an amused snort escapes.

“Are those blue jeans?” she sputters.

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Quite the detective, Watson.”

“And plaid?!”

“My father is an insufferable human being,” Sherlock grumbles, folding his arms petulantly across his chest.

“He might’ve done you a favor,” Marcus remarks dryly. “Put on a trucker hat in that get-up, and you’ll probably get mistaken for one of the locals.”

(Sherlock studies the way the neck of the sweater slides off Joan’s shoulder, sees the porcelain collarbone it exposes, and decides that his father most definitely did him a favor.)

He clears his throat and gestures toward his youngest Irregular. “Watson, Mason has something to say to you.”

Joan’s gaze drifts suspiciously to Mason, who bites his lip in contrition. “I’m sorry I offended you by making c-comments of a s-sexual nature.” He stumbles awkwardly over the words. “Please don’t…cut your hair?”

He casts an unsure, sidelong glance at Sherlock, who tilts his chin upward and gives the boy a pleased nod.

“I’m not cutting my hair,” Joan tells Sherlock. As if to illustrate the point, she reaches up and begins twisting her long locks into a bun. “But if I really wanted to, a coerced apology from Mason wouldn’t stop me.” She turns expectant eyes toward Marcus. “Speaking of locals…did you find Slovenik?”

He takes a preparatory breath, and Joan has to fight the urge to go back to squabbling with Mason about whether his “compliments” can be construed as sexual harassment. She much prefers Mason’s fumbling to the apology on Marcus’s features.

“According to the receptionist, he took the day off unexpectedly.”

Sherlock snorts loudly. “To destroy evidence, I’m sure.” His fingers twitch at his sides as he begins to pace. “We should’ve gone back immediately upon your arrival, taken the Millbrook PD with us, and retraced our steps. God only knows how much he’s destroyed by now…”

“You really think we could’ve talked the Millbrook PD into helping us illegally raid one of the oldest, biggest businesses in town?” Marcus snaps. “Did you see the looks on their faces when you accused Slovenik of the kidnapping? They weren’t exactly eager to help you out.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrow menacingly at Marcus, deducing. At long last, his upper lip curls in recognition. “I take it they weren’t exactly eager to offer their assistance today, either.”

Marcus looks for a moment like he might take Sherlock on. Then, he thinks the better of it and collapses into the nearest armchair, folding himself so that his elbows are resting on his knees. “We can’t get a warrant until we have concrete, irrefutable proof that the two of you were being held there.”

“You couldn’t get a warrant?” Joan parrots incredulously. “Then what the hell have you been doing all day?!”

“Improvising.”

Joan’s gaze drifts skeptically toward Ms. Hudson. “Define ‘improvising,’” she murmurs.

Sherlock is far less subtle in his confrontation. He whips his expectant gaze to Marcus and glares. “What happened to doing everything by the book?” he sneers. “I thought your plan was to ensure that no one could question the validity of Slovenik’s conviction.”

“We didn’t do anything illegal,” Ms. Hudson demurred. “We just went back to the farm and did a bit of…investigating.”

Sherlock sees his own cynicism mirrored in Watson’s doubtful expression.

“Look, I’m more than happy to walk you through it, because I know how you get about details,” Marcus grumbles, “but I’m gonna need some coffee first. I’ve been up for almost 40 hours straight, and I’m not twenty anymore.”

From the second suite, Mason appears, looking eager. “Are we ordering coffee?” he pipes up, “because I could so go for a grande caramel macchiato right now…”

Sherlock rolls his eyes skyward and prays for patience.

A soft soprano drags him gently from the brink of insanity. “We should probably eat something. I’m…pretty hungry.” She lowers her voice to a near whisper. “Aren’t you?”

“Probably somewhere, underneath a massive determination to catch our abductor so we can go home,” Sherlock hisses. “But, then again, I didn’t empty the contents of my stomach at approximately seven o’clock after a particularly vicious nightmare.”

He can see Watson pale in his peripheral vision.

“Oh. You, um…you heard that?”

He dips his chin incredulously, and she rolls her eyes. “What am I saying? Of course you heard that. You hear everything.”

“Coffee,” Marcus groans from his perch. “Sometime today.”

Watson inhales sharply. “Look,” she murmurs, sotto voce, “let’s just…order room service and regroup. Mason can transfer the data, Marcus and Ms. Hudson can tell us what the hell they’ve been up to, and we can use whatever information we find to figure out how to nail Slovenik to the wall—regardless of how pivotal that farm may be for Millbrook.”

He closes his eyes and lets her voice wash over him like the tide, laving his most jagged edges.

“You have salmon salad in the fridge,” he reminds her—one last-ditch effort to maintain some semblance of control.

“I’m actually craving an omelet.”

He arches an eyebrow at her profile. “It won’t be as good as mine.”

She turns and smiles at him, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m sure it won’t be.”

(For a more thorough and detailed rendering of Ms. Hudson's undercover adventures with Marcus at Slo-N-Smooth Farms, check out La Belle et La Bête.)

The coffee table becomes a buffet table with remarkably little effort. Marcus’s brief call to room service yields a fresh pot of coffee, an egg white frittata, a bistro burger, a plate of avocado toast, an order of chicken wings, and a basket of fries.

Joan shakes her head incredulously. “I can’t believe the receptionist—”

“Mindy,” Sherlock interjects, like a reflex.

“Mindy,” Joan corrects with a roll of her eyes, “gave you a private tour just because she thought you were Georgia dairy farm royalty.”

“I can’t believe it either,” Marcus volleys, “and I was there.”

“Well, I can’t believe room service doesn’t have caramel macchiatos,” Mason grumbles around a chicken wing. He plucks another curious electronic device from his box of toys and continues to assemble a makeshift workstation on the hotel desk, chewing noisily.

Joan grimaces. “I still can’t believe you think a caramel macchiato would go well with hot honey garlic wings.”

“I can’t believe we’re continuing to delay the most important aspect of this conversation,” Sherlock snaps. He’d refused to impede progress any further by ordering from room service, choosing instead to re-heat the previous evening’s eggs Florentine. Joan watches in a combination of amusement and disdain as he slices the concoction at a glacial pace and nibbles bitterly at his spinach.

“Do you think Mindy knows?”

“That you two were abducted and kept at her precious farm?” Ms. Hudson clarifies. When Sherlock gives a solemn nod, she holds her avocado toast aloft and shrugs. “If she does, she’s got a very loquacious, circuitous obfuscation technique. She offered quite a bit of access and unsolicited information for someone who’s trying to hide something.”

Sherlock liberates a grape tomato from Joan’s plate and levels Marcus with an expectant look. “What do you think?”

“I’m with Ms. Hudson on this one,” Marcus admits. “She’s the kind of chatty that usually gets people in trouble.” He takes a swig of coffee and leans forward, resting his knees on his elbows. “I mean, you were right about the tunnel. It was obvious the second we saw the drain that the hole had been filled in with fresh soil. I don’t know how deep the patch job goes, because I didn’t have the time or the warrant to do the necessary digging, but…she didn’t try to hide the patch.”

“Quite the contrary,” Ms. Hudson continues, “she actually commented on the stench of the soil.”

“She even let me take a sample, and she didn’t have any problem with me snapping photos while she led us around,” Marcus adds. “She also mentioned that Mr. Slovenik has been doing repairs on the walk-in. Apparently, he renovated the whole thing six months ago.”

Joan turns expectantly to Sherlock. “Is that roughly the same time you started finding bugs in the apartment?”

“Yes.” He narrows his eyes suspiciously at the sharp edge of her tone. “You’re still mad about that.”

“Let’s pretend I am,” Joan muses sarcastically. “Would that be so difficult to understand?”

Sherlock pokes sheepishly at one of his microwaved eggs before turning wide, hopeful eyes toward Marcus. “So you agree, then, that Slovenik is our likely culprit?”

“I agree that everything you said about the dairy farm checks out,” Marcus counters. “There’s definitely a tunnel in the walk-in drain, and the operation is small enough that it could be masking a kidnapping operation. It’s too flat an investigation to make a call right now, though. Beyond the boot print at the bottom of the drain, I don’t have any forensic evidence tying you two or Slovenik to the tunnel. Without the tunnel, I don’t have a crime scene, and with no crime scene, it’s hard to guess at a motive.”

“But you said there were others,” Joan prompts.

“No, we said there were others,” Sherlock argues, “based on the evidence at the crime scene Marcus can’t find.”

“We suspect that there were others,” Ms. Hudson clarifies. “Whoever abducted you—”

“Slovenik,” Sherlock corrects.

“—left a note suggesting that you two had decided to take a vacation of indeterminate length,” she finishes pointedly. “I felt that the rhetoric of the missive was…inconsistent with your normal style of communication, so I began searching for some of the more uncharacteristic phrases online. As it turns out, a similar letter was left at the disappearance of another couple: Christine Jacks and Allen Paul.”

She takes the last bite of avocado toast and reaches for her purse, from which she plucks a thick manila folder. After a bit of shuffling, she produces two sheets of bright white printer paper and lays them side-by-side amidst the smorgasbord.

“As you can see, I’ve highlighted the phrases that appear in both letters.”

Marcus’s eyes widen incredulously. “You removed and underlined evidence?!”

“Give me a modicum of credit,” Ms. Hudson counters, rolling her eyes. “The first was printed from the internet, and I made a photocopy of the missive from the brownstone.”

Marcus’s shoulders sag slightly in relief as he begins a closer inspection of the replications. “Is there a reason you highlighted the punctuation?”

“Syntax can be as telling as word choice in linguistic analysis,” Sherlock answers, paying rapt attention to the documents at hand. “Excellent work, Ms. Hudson.”

Joan scans the text with a grimace. “It’s like this guy has a template letter.”

“The notion would be consistent with our belief that we weren’t the first pair he’s taken.” He glances up expectantly. “What else do we know about Allen Paul and Christine Jacks? They also appear to be business partners…”

Joan abandons her frittata and reaches across the table with a sharp inhale. “They were more than that,” she murmurs. “Apparently, they were engaged.”

“According to Christine’s sister, Sarah, they were very much in love with each other and with their work,” Ms. Hudson offers, retrieving another packet from the file. “She seemed to think that ‘an extended leave of absence’ was entirely out of character and immediately suspected foul play.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows climb appreciatively. “You’ve already interviewed the sister?”

Ms. Hudson gives her platinum curls a reluctant shake. “My knowledge of the couple is limited to the details found in a Reddit thread Sarah began. She believed Christine and Allen were being held captive.”

“And she thought the internet trolls on Reddit would help her locate them?” Mason quips. “Clearly she hasn’t spent much time on those message boards.”

Joan looks hopefully at Sherlock. “Do you think he could’ve been holding them at the same time?”

“In tearing down the walls, we discovered a total of four rooms. It’s certainly possible that there were more.” Sherlock rakes through his growing beard with thoughtful fingers and turns to Ms. Hudson with sharp eyes. “When were they taken?”

“Four years ago.”

The words land ominously amidst their feast.

Joan remembers the bloodstains on the oak slats of the trapdoor and the Pollock-esque scratches on the floor and feels a malicious churning in her stomach. She looks at Sherlock, but he is studying the half-finished Florentine on his plate with disproportionate interest.

The soft clearing of his throat resonates like the first rumble of thunder before a terrible storm.

“Provided,” he begins hoarsely, “that the…challenges were the same…”

She closes her eyes for the briefest of moments and feels the kiss of steel against her wrists as concrete cools her temple. She remembers the ache of hunger and the slick of sweat on her skin as the temperature shifts from cold to hot and back again. She thinks of Sherlock, chalky from drywall and shivering violently beneath her.

“It was a test.” The words come in a voice she barely recognizes as her own. “It was a timed test. Resources were limited.”

“And you don’t think they passed,” Marcus finishes expectantly.

She meets his eyes and sees the cool, calculating cop, gathering evidence and putting the pieces together. The lack of emotion in his gaze makes her feel safer somehow.

There were no bloodstains on the underside of the trapdoor. There were no footprints but ours and his, she wants to tell him. We almost didn’t pass.

What she says instead is, “I think we should download what we can from the phone and see where—if anywhere—that evidence leads.”

Sherlock stands quickly and stalks toward the bedroom.

Marcus drops a handful of fries back onto his plate and narrows his eyes. “Where’s he going?”

“To get the SIM card, I’m sure.” Despite the rapid thump of her heart against her sternum, her words are steady. “I don’t think he knows that I moved it. I’ll be right back.”

“You want help?”

She looks back and sees her friend Marcus, forehead knit in concern, on his knees in a wrinkled suit, wearing every minute of the forty-plus hours he’s been awake on their behalf.

“Why don’t you see what you can find about Christine and Allen online?” she offers. “This’ll just take a second.”

He picks up his phone, but his gaze doesn’t waver. “I’ll see if they had a social media presence,” he agrees, “but if you need me…”

She nods gratefully. “I’ll let you know.”

She hears the clatter of toiletries against the floor like rain on a tin roof and knows that the mirror is next. She finds Sherlock gripping the edge of the vanity with his fist reared back.

“Don’t do that,” she warns sharply. “The hotel is already going to charge us for that broken lamp.”

His eyes are wide, cobalt marbles against the pale skin of his sallow face. Beneath the studded pockets of his wrinkled plaid shirt, his chest heaves. His labored breaths are audible.

“How can you joke about this?!”

She glances pointedly at the mirror. “I’m not joking. They will charge us.”

He shakes his head incredulously and clutches the counter’s edge with both hands. “That couple died, Watson.”

“I know.”

He lifts his head skyward. “He took them—the same way he took us—and they died.”

She inhales sharply, trying to evade the needle of his voice as it threatens to penetrate the protective layer of dermis. “We knew there were others.”

“We deduced there were others,” Sherlock corrects with a growl. “We didn’t know their names. We didn’t have concrete proof that their family was still searching for them.” He claws fiercely at his beard. “I traced bloodstains with my bare hands, but…it’s different, knowing whose blood that is, that it’s been there for four years.”

He lets out whuff of air that might be a laugh.

“We were prepared for this. I threw basketballs at your head, made you take self-defense classes, and trapped you in handcuffs. You had a series of lectures about the art of lock picking. We spar regularly—sometimes with the singlesticks, and sometimes without.” His lips curl ever so slightly in the distorted ghost of a smirk. “When I woke up in that room, handcuffed and fully dressed, I thought of it as a chance to beat personal records. The thought even occurred that—perhaps—you had gotten me a birthday present.”

Joan’s answering smile is at once rueful and sympathetic. “I thought you were conducting another one of your experiments.”

“Exactly!” Sherlock crows. His fist explodes in the air, a bomb that detonates into five twitching digits. “If he wanted to test someone, we were the logical subjects! Not two bloody doctors who’d just gotten bloody engaged. What kind of monster picks two people like that?”

She shuts the door behind her with a click and allows the counter to bear some of her weight. “The kind of monster for which we were prepared.”

He purses his lips and glares at the mirror.

She folds her arms defensively. “Look, I know this is difficult. What happened to us was…”

“What happened to us?” He cackles, short and furious, and it ricochets off the walls like shrapnel. “We made it out!”

She digs her nails into the cable-knit cotton and tries not to let the visions of smooth white walls and the whisper of a Whynter ARC-12S reduce her to anything less than the pragmatic consulting detective she has become.

“All we can do is find him.” Her voice is low and vehement. “That’s what we do, right? We study the victims of really terrible things, and then we chase down the bad guys. We find the people who do this shit so they don’t get a chance to do it again.” She sucks in a breath and feels at once awash in adrenaline and impossibly tired. “We find him, and all of this stops.”

“Right,” he chortles, “except that he’s already done this again, hasn’t he? He abducted those doctors four bloody years ago, Watson. If they were in the same position we were in, they likely died within a week. I began finding listening devices in the brownstone approximately six months ago, and I do a nightly sweep unless we’re away on business. That’s a gap of three years, five months, and three-and-a-half weeks. What was he doing then? Lying dormant? Waiting?”

“That’s what we need to find out!”

“Sure,” Sherlock agrees, nodding with wild eye, “but what were we doing then?” He wipes anxious hands on the hips of his jeans. “How did we let this happen more than once?”

“We didn’t let this happen,” she hisses. “We can’t stop crime if we don’t know it’s happening, Sherlock. This isn’t our fault.”

He scratches at the back of his neck and stares past her, over the shoulder that barely holds the collar of her sweater and into the offensively cheery paint on the walls.

“The formulaic letter suggests that he follows some sort of protocol,” he all but whispers, unable to keep the deductions to himself. “If he took someone every six months, that’s eight people over the course of four years. Six, if we were meant to be the seventh and eighth victims.”

For the briefest of moments, she allows herself to think of eight Sarahs, reaching out into the treacherous online terrain of Reddit in hopes of bringing a lost family member home.

It’s too much.

“That’s not a deduction,” she murmurs shakily. “That’s a hypothesis based on emotion and significantly limited data. Christine Jacks and Allen Paul could’ve survived for much longer than we’re giving them credit. They could’ve escaped and decided to stay away from home out of fear that they’d be taken again. It’s also possible that there’s a link between them and us that we’re missing. Maybe he has certain criteria for the people he takes. Maybe that criteria limits the amount of people he can take.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes angrily. “All of that is wild speculation, and optimistic speculation at that.”

Joan tilts her chin defiantly and meets his gaze with steely resolve. “Pessimism does not solve a case. You know what solves a case? Observation. Deduction. The systematic gathering of concrete evidence. You taught me that.”

He inhales sharply and closes his eyes. She watches his shoulders rise, watches his chest expand and deflate beneath the fabric of his shirt. She imagines the buttons trembling ever so slightly as his heart beats solidly beneath them.

“It should’ve been us,” he insists in a voice that scrapes the bottoms of his register. “We should’ve been first.”

“If we’re going to argue should,” Joan mutters, “then it should have been no one. The man owns a whole freaking dairy farm. That should’ve kept him busy.”

Sherlock opens devastated eyes. He meets her gaze, and her stomach plummets to her feet.

“We were prepared for this,” he reiterates in a low, measured voice, “and we almost failed that test. When that recorder started bleating my name in your voice, I was terrified.”

“WATSON!”

“Imagine what those doctors went through.”

She swallows the scream that creeps up her esophagus at the memory of Sherlock—hoarse, bleeding, and covered in plaster and poorly constructed bandages—wielding a large shard of glass in terror as she crashes through the vent.

She shoves the memory into a tiny box and contemplates creating a brain attic of her own.

“We don’t have time for that right now,” she says finally. “Right now, we’re going to go out there and download whatever we can from that SIM card so that this doesn’t happen to anyone, ever again.” She lays a hand on the doorknob and turns it, forcefully and pointedly. “Then, once this is all over and that asshole is in jail, we can imagine whatever you want.”

“Oh, good!” Mason exclaims, peering over the laptop screen with a bright, hot honey garlic-stained smile. “You’re back!”

Sherlock’s heart knocks painfully against his pectorals, and his body aches as though he’s just run a marathon. His teeth are clenched so tightly that his jaw is twitching, and despite his conversation with Watson, he still wants to tear the entire suite apart in frustration.

He wants to read the entire file on Christine Jacks and Allen Paul and begin interviewing their next of kin now.

(He wants to crawl back into the king-sized bed, crush his beloved Watson to his chest, and say a thousand prayers of gratitude that she survived—even if others did not—because he cannot even begin to imagine how difficult all of this would be without her.)

Instead, he swallows the last of his ire and tilts his head to the side in an attempt to summon his usual self-control. “Is the laptop suitable?”

“It needed a few adjustments, but nothing my bag of tricks couldn’t accomplish,” Mason grins. “All I need now is the phone and the SIM card, and we’ll be in business.”

Using a tissue to avoid destroying or obfuscating fingerprint data, Watson passes him both. Sherlock watches as Mason uses latex gloves to put the phone back together.

“If you have anything interesting to say about the case,” Mason warns, “you should do it in another room. It’s possible that this creep could use his phone as a recording device.”

“In that case,” Marcus remarks meaningfully, “let’s head to the bedroom. I have some information about Christine Jacks and Allen Paul.”

Sherlock looks expectantly at Mason. “You’ll keep us apprised of your findings?”

Mason snags a few more fries from the basket. “You know it, Mr. Holmes. A few hours at most, and that Slovenik dude is totally cancelled.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes dramatically at Watson and, for a moment, everything is painfully, beautifully normal.

“According to LinkedIn, Christine Jacks is a general surgeon and a Johns Hopkins graduate.”

“And Allen Paul?”

“ENT,” Ms. Hudson chimes in, scrolling down a similar page. “Did his initial training at Columbia.”

“Residency?”

“Mount Sinai in New York City,” Ms. Hudson replies.

“Same as Christine,” Joan murmurs. “Must’ve been where they met.” She makes a notation in Ms. Hudson’s growing file on the couple. “You said their relationship began in 2004?”

“According to Facebook,” Ms. Hudson affirms. “Of course, their accounts are private, so I can only see what they’ve made visible to the public.”

“You can add hacking their accounts to Mason’s to-do list,” Sherlock remarks dryly.

Joan glances up to study her partner. In the hour that they’ve been gathering information on the lost couple, he hasn’t moved from his thoughtful, cross-legged position at the foot of the bed. The stillness is disturbingly atypical.

She nudges his knee gently with the edge of her big toe. “Any luck finding other letters?”

He looks up in alarm. “Did you just kick me?”

“Think of it as more of a love-tap.”

He narrows his eyes skeptically, but his cheeks burn crimson. “The individual highlighted portions had no exact matches beyond what Ms. Hudson already found on Reddit. I began searching instead for additional means by which Sarah Jacks may have tried to find her sister.”

Joan’s eyebrows arch in interest. “And?”

“There’s an interesting thread on a site called Quora where she appears to have attempted to solicit the opinions of law enforcement in filing a missing persons report.” He turns the screen of their new, Morland-approved cell phone toward her. “The responses seem consistent with what we already know to be true: the note prevents Christine and Allen from being classified as ‘missing.’ The Poughkeepsie PD viewed the disappearance as a voluntary departure by adults with their full mental capacities. Sarah says they were both in their mid-forties when they disappeared, so they don’t fall into any special age categories.”

Joan scans the text of the thread. Her eyebrows continue to climb as the exchanges become heated. “Wow—she was pissed.”

“Can you blame her?” Sherlock scoffs. “She knew that her sister had been taken, and she couldn’t get anyone to help her do anything about it.”

We would’ve done something, he doesn’t say, but she hears it anyway. He’s not wrong; Sarah Jacks’s case is exactly the sort they would take—pro-bono, just because Sherlock would’ve found it interesting.

For the first time since waking, Joan takes the time to really, truly study her partner. Despite their lavish meals in the hours following their escape, his face is still thin and wan. The skin that surrounds his scraggly beard is pale and pinched, and his eyes are bloodshot.

She crawls over until she is sitting next to him and passes the phone back. “We’re going to get him, you know.”

“What have you learned?” he asks without looking up.

“The Reddit thread has a few more details about the timing of the abduction,” she explains, reaching for the printout Ms. Hudson had prepared. “Apparently, one of the reasons Sarah was so suspicious was because the couple had gone on vacation a few weeks before. She said they’d spent an ‘intimate weekend in the country.’” She underlines the phrase in question and passes him the printed thread.

“And the captain?” he persists, scanning the message board transcript with hungry eyes.

“Just got off the phone with him,” Marcus replies. “He agrees that the similarities in the letters should be enough to begin exploring their case as a kidnapping. Because the two of you were taken from the city, he’s trying to get the Poughkeepsie PD to let him transfer the Jacks & Allen disappearances to 11^th. He’s still getting some resistance on the warrant, though.”  

“Let’s hope the phone provides adequate justification,” Sherlock remarks dryly.

“If it does, the captain can fast-track the warrant and ensure that Major Cases gets the right to search the premises,” Marcus offers. “He seemed pretty confident that the risk of further damage to evidence would nudge the bureaucrats along.”

“Every minute without a warrant is a minute Slovenik could be destroying more evidence,” Sherlock grinds out.

“Sherlock.”

He meets Joan’s gaze petulantly, with rigid posture and a scowl.

Without a single thought to their audience, she reaches over and lays a gentle hand on his knee. “We’re going to get him,” she repeats firmly.

He deflates like a balloon. “I know,” he whispers, for her ears only, “but I want to get him now. I need to get him now.” His brow furrows above stormy grey eyes. “Don’t you?”

They have a case to solve and a new avenue by which to gather evidence. There is, even in the aftermath of great personal tragedy, important work to be done.

(She knows from her days as a sober companion that what Sherlock really needs right now is time to be broken. She cannot think about what she wants.)

“Download’s done!” Mason chirps from the common area.

Joan dips her chin meaningfully and pats him on the leg. “This could be our chance,” she murmurs, standing up to examine the data that Mason has collected. Sherlock accepts the hand she offers, allowing himself to be lifted to unsteady feet.

(He uses his third and fourth digits to find her pulse. He can hear her breathe, can see the vibrant blue of her veins beneath the pale skin of her forearm, but he still feels the rush of relief as her heart beats directly into the pads of his fingers.)

“This dude has a shit-ton of pictures of cows,” Mason observes in disdain.

“Mason,” Ms. Hudson admonishes. “Language!”

Before Mason can retort, Sherlock reaches over and begins scrolling through the pictures Mason has pulled from the phone. Mason is right, he thinks dully. There is a massive amount of bovines.

“Wait,” Watson all but whispers. “Go back up.”

He sees it at the same time she does; a grainy, split-screen capture of two confused faces, mouths agape. He doesn’t recognize the faces, but he recognizes the bright white of the sloping walls behind them.

With bile creeping dangerously up his esophagus, he clicks on the photo so that it swallows the screen. The confusion on the faces becomes more obvious, more distinct. He can make out the wrinkles in their brows; his lips remember the shape of their incredulity.

He sees the outstretched fingers in one screen and thinks, they must have made it past the handcuffs before they discovered the cameras.

“Oh my God,” Joan mutters. “Is that Christine and Allen? When was that photo taken?”

Before he can ask Mason to retrieve the photo’s metadata, Ms. Hudson clears her throat.

“That’s not Christine Jacks and Allen Paul,” she murmurs, sounding at once grave and apologetic. “Christine Jacks was Asian, and that woman is black.”

Sherlock leans forward to study the centralized features of the female in question. His stomach turns to lead when he realizes that Ms. Hudson is right: the woman on camera is certainly not Asian.

Watson’s fingers slide tentatively between his thumb and forefinger. Her usually steady hands are trembling as she holds on.

“You were right.” She sounds as devastated as he feels. “He did take others.”