Chapter Text
"That’s odd."
Sherlock and John peered curiously at the plaque planted outside an apartment door.
Said plaque was framed with intricate gold details, the apartment number embossed in cursive gold. The door itself looked far too grand to be where it was, in a street that didn't exactly share its grandeur.
The two men stood there, contemplating.
Peering over Sherlock’s shoulder, John looked down at the small piece of yellow parchment paper that had led them there.
'177A Bleecker Street' it said in cursive black ink, the paper wedged between Sherlock's fingers.
"This could be some sort of a prank," John supplemented in an attempt to make something of their dubious situation, “Maybe someone just taking the new tourists for a spin.”
John looked up at Sherlock who was silently deducing the large door; he probably knew the very tree it was made from and the carpenter who affixed it there, going by the way his bright blue eyes were whizzing across its surface.
The said detective made a noise of wonderment. "John, something's odd about this."
"Yes, you mentioned that."
"Do you feel that?" Sherlock sniffed.
John looked at him skeptically; his eccentric companion was doing that thing again, where he'd talk out loud more to himself than to John, and the patient doctor was left to his own devices to judge who exactly was the recipient of his stream of thoughts.
John shrugged, clueless.
"All I feel is my time being wasted; we could be out and about in the city like normal tourists rather than explore an ambiguous address on a small piece of paper that happened to sit on your luggage. For all we know, it could have flown in from the window, you hardly ever close it, Sherlock.” John noticed that his friend wasn’t even paying attention.
“Sherlock??"
The detective wasn’t even looking at him.
"John," Sherlock studied the gold detailing on the door and made to knock on the wood, "I hardly think the paper had fingers to open my suitcase and seat itself inside. It was placed, to be found by us. Particularly by me."
"Right," John mumbled back. He could almost feel Sherlock's eyes roll in his sockets.
This was John’s life now; Mycroft sending them to New York on a covert case which they solved quite in the nick of time, a case worthy of a blog entry really, and celebrating with drinks aplenty, only to be awoken mildly hungover at the arse crack of the next morning by a wild, equally hungover Sherlock gesticulating as he strung on about a piece of paper and the odd properties of it that he deduced probably by sniffing it ten ways. John had protested by going back to sleep, and following a hasty but late breakfast to ease their headaches, they were out searching for one 'Bleecker Street' in Greenwich Village, and there they were, on a case they didn't know a smidge about at all, from a client they haven’t even met or spoken to.
John didn’t even know if it should be called a 'case' in the first place. He decided that a more appropriate phrase would be an 'American treasure hunt'.
Has somebody actually sent them on a treasure hunt? Wouldn't be the first time, honestly.
A sharp knock sounded, making John look up from the expensive-looking plaque; Sherlock's hand was steadily rapping on the wood of the door.
There was no answer.
A small shove later and without a moment’s hesitation, Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes was stepping through the threshold in a flurry of long coat, his companion Doctor John Watson at his heel.
"Whoever it is, they better have the kettle boiled," John groaned, rubbing his face, tired and a little out of sorts. He could have sworn he felt an odd buzzing in his navel just as he stepped over the door.
Once they crossed the threshold, John knew something was immediately wrong.
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