Work Text:
“This isn’t really my area,” the detective says as he picks the lock easily with a bobby pin and dispatches the metal door with a solid click.
“You seem to be doing fine to me,” Jim remarks from his position against the brick wall, where he reclines with his arms crossed. “I’m surprised. Do your investigations usually involve breaking-and-entering?” It’s not an entirely unpleasant prospect, sounds even better out loud.
Sherlock doesn’t answer immediately; preoccupied as he is with peering through the crack he’s made, around the corner to where the warehouse is. It’s a great sprawl of concrete and barbed wire; the lot mostly deserted save for a worker briskly passing by from time to time. The building is innocuous; they wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that it currently houses a certain chemical of interest – not the kind you’d find in a chemistry classroom, Sherlock had written. It just so happened that Sherlock needed it for one of his side experiments, the kind that John usually addressed with strings of explicatives. It was terribly convenient when Sherlock found out that security had lapsed, if only for a few hours.
“When necessary, yes,” he finally responds curtly. “Although I don’t exactly make a habit of it.”
“No,” Jim agrees, tilting his head to observe the plane of Sherlock’s back, those dark curls. He sighs. “It’s a shame. You’d be a killer in a suit.”
Sherlock tosses Jim a white coat that mirrors those of the other employees, his stoic demeanor devolving into disbelief. “And con people for a living?” Jim eyes the garment momentarily before shrugging into it with a smirk, adds, “Well, among other things. There was a lovely one with… aconite; I think it was, not too long ago.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sherlock said, feigning an increased interest in the courtyard. They were losing time, their opening was limited. The security cameras would be rebooting sooner than they’d like. The pair aligned themselves with the entrance and Sherlock glanced over at Jim, who was shifting and rolling his shoulders. He glanced at Sherlock and then took a double take as if he were surprised at being observed. The only thing that Sherlock could glean was that he could glean absolutely nothing. “You ready to go?” Jim asked innocently, as if they weren’t about to break into a high-security warehouse.
They enter together on an invisible cue and then split cleanly in two, each moving in a different direction, specters gliding across the pavement.
~
The extraction goes almost perfectly, until a stitch unaccounted for at the end – a guard walking in at precisely the wrong moment, catching Sherlock palming bottles with gloved hands, Jim by the door. His shout for them to freeze reverberates throughout the room.
They do. The man’s an amateur, couldn’t be more than twenty-five, new at the building, absolutely not supposed to be here, probably breaking a slew of rules himself. The realization that this makes him dangerous has Sherlock fumbling in his pocket for the gun. Suddenly there’s a lunge from across the room and blur of motion, Jim’s eyes flutter wider for a split second and Sherlock’s isn’t the only gun now, there’s another one being held to the criminal’s head. A loud bang fills the room, echoes, and now it’s the guard that’s freezing, dropping, hole in his chest. It’s sloppy. It takes thirty seconds for him to die, twenty for Sherlock to realize that the barrel of his gun is warm to the touch.
The room is silent. He crosses the room methodically to meet Jim and they both move to observe the dead body, not saying a word for a few moments. Sherlock’s heartbeat is only just beginning to slow.
“You didn’t really think I came here without my own men?” Jim broke the silence with a comment, raising his eyebrows at Sherlock. “If people were talking before, you’ve left them very little room for doubt.”
Jim’s expression changes when he sees that Sherlock’s eyes have gone dark and piercing, and his heart drops for a moment. There’s a dizzying look about the man that he’s seen before, and again on repeat, replicated in a series of crystalline moments, punctuated with sharp gasps. But never so pure as it is now, written all across the equal parts maddening and mad grin that’s gracing his features.
“Breaking and entering… murder.” Sherlock’s baritone seems to drop another octave on this word and Jim is acutely aware of just how imposing a presence the taller man can hold if he so chooses. He seems to fill up so much of this echoing room, all of it, even. Jim has the sinking suspicion that Sherlock could take as much of his space as he’d like and he would never once mind. The sensation of such a weight is enthralling.
“You can organize crime,” Sherlock drawls at alarming proximity, “but I think I’d prefer to hold the gun.”
~
“Keep it loaded, won’t you darling?” the criminal later says in the car while composing a text. Sherlock is lazily taking up most of the leather seat, his head on Jim’s shoulder, fingers spinning a vial of chemical. They had left the body behind for Jim’s men to dispose of. Sherlock’s mind is softly drifting, riding the wave of catharsis. For once, he muses, it doesn’t matter where they’re going.