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John Watson is not of an age, anymore, where love is romantic.
Of course everyone reads the articles in the Daily Express about how a ninety-year-old man bought a whole shopful of flowers for his equally old wife, and how they have sixteen kids and fifty-two grandchildren and how they’re as in love now as they were when they met aged fifteen in the grocer’s, or something like that. Everyone watches the films where Hugh Grant - forty playing a twenty-five year old - seduces someone like Kiera Knightley, or Emma Thompson, and they fall in love to swelling violins and declarations of love as someone strips through an airport.
Of course John wants to settle down. Two kids, a friendly dog, a lab or a collie or a spaniel, a house in the countryside and a nice, middle-of-the-road Hyundai or a Ford. Black car, doesn’t get washed as often as it should, kids in the school play being angels in the choir, community raffles, adoring wife, etcetera, etcetera. He likes the idea of love, but romance no longer really appeals to him. Never did, if he’s honest, but even less so now that his legs ache on cold mornings and he’s started finding brown hairs among the silver, not the other way around.
“John? John!”
He’s getting old, that’s the problem. Maudlin in his old age.
“You’re forty-six,” says that same voice, “John, you have to stay awake - John!”
“Fuck off, Sherlock,” John murmurs, and tries to slap the hand that’s touching his face away. When his arm refuses to listen to him, he decides he’s just about had enough of today, and he goes to sleep.
“John!”
Greg Lestrade has never been of an age where love is romantic. He was briefly married, and now he isn’t, but that never really bothered him, not even when Jeanine had said she wanted a divorce. He’s a chinese-takeaway-legs-up sort of man, and when he was in his early twenties and doing drugs and clubbing he always got a little uncomfortable taking girls home. He’s a three-dates sort of man.
“Sherlock,” he hears himself saying, like he’s from very far away. “Sherlock - they said it wasn’t serious. Stop pacing.”
“They always say that,” Sherlock says condescendingly, like it’s Greg who looks three seconds from falling apart and Sherlock who’s being the rational adult here.
“They always say that because it’s always true,” Greg says. “Sit down. It was a minor sedative, not a bloody punctured lung - sit down. Please.”
With a sigh, like he’s doing Greg a huge favour, Sherlock folds his coat around himself and sits down, a fussy lady perching on a church pew. More than one of the nurses hovering around the workstation shoot Greg grateful looks, and he realises how irritating Sherlock can be to people who aren’t used to him, who haven’t built up a tolerance. “John will be fine,” he says softer. “Just - stop - worrying.”
Sherlock sniffs. “I’m not worrying.”
Greg just about fights down the retort that jumps up to that, because that’s the cherry on the cake with Sherlock and John. Sherlock really does think he isn’t worried, and by the time John comes out of that room, the man will have his pacing done and his leg-bouncing under control, and John will think he wasn’t worried either. They’ll go back to that flat on Baker Street and Sherlock will ask John for a tea and John will make it and both of them will go on thinking Sherlock couldn’t give a singular fuck about John, and the whole thing is so ridiculous and sad it makes Greg twitchy. They’re all men of advanced-ish age. This is stupid.
“You’re worrying,” Sherlock says, in a hah-i’ve-got-you voice. “Leg bouncing. Chewing on your lip. Checking the clock.”
Greg makes a noise. “Of course I’m worrying, Sh- the man’s a good friend of mine and we just found him in the back of a van connected to a string of brutal serial murders! Of course I’m worrying!”
“Oh.” Sherlock deflates. Must have forgotten that worrying isn’t an embarrassing thing to do about a friend.
In seven and a half minutes, the door to the check-up room swings open, and John Watson himself comes through the door, smiling sheepishly and calling a thank-you to the white-coated woman who holds the door open for him. He looks a little worse for the wear, but mostly on his clothes, from the muck smeared on his padded jacket to the tears around his knees and elbows, to the little smear of blood high on his cheek where he mustn’t have ducked for a punch in time. His shoes are covered in the same muck, but Greg’s hung around with Sherlock enough to notice it’s the mud near Baker Street, and therefore useless to Sherlock when he’ll try and deduce where and how and who nabbed John. “Hey, guys,” John says, hands in his pockets. His face is still quite pale. “All in one piece - really, Greg, you needn’t have stayed.”
“I might as well have,” Greg says gruffly. Tall, dark, and dorky still hasn’t spoken a word. “I’ll give you both a lift back on my way to the Yard - if you’ve got the all-clear, that is.”
“All-clear,” John gives them both a thumbs up, leaning against the wall beside the door, right beside a little sanitiser dispenser. “I feel like I’ve been fucking run over, but everything’s grand. Apparently I just need to sleep it off.”
Sherlock sniffs quietly. “Good. We can’t have you holding back the investigation.”
Really. It’s enough to make Greg want to bang his head against the wall and give up, and move to someplace quiet in Wales and raise sheep. John smiles like Sherlock doesn’t annoy him, and Sherlock huffs like he wasn’t so terribly anxious only ten minutes ago that he couldn’t control his limbs. Sheep aren’t romantic.
“Come on,” Greg says tiredly, and dangles his car keys from his thumb. “I’ll drop you home. John, d'you want my shoulder?”
John says he can walk on his own, but by unspoken agreement both Greg and Sherlock walk a lot slower than their usual pace, and take the lift instead of the three sets of stairs. Greg, thankfully, isn’t parked too far away from the hospital entrance, and despite John’s protests he opens the car door for him.
Sherlock buries his head in his phone. Greg looks in the rearview mirror, and makes eyes at John, who gives him a wry little smile and looks out the window at the dark multicolours of London at sunset.
Sherlock Holmes knows, somewhere in the bit of his brain where deleted things go, that love is meant to be romantic. Flowers and Valentines Day and red wine and bistros, and marriage and a dog and two children and a house with an online security system and faux-leather sofas. Throws bought in TK Maxx and Ikea furniture, which the man puts together while the woman makes tea. Nails are usually better-kept, on people in committed romantic relationships. People tend towards the round, but don’t buy new clothes, so buttons strain and jeans are left unbuttoned.
“If you’re in the kitchen, put the kettle on,” he says in monotone.
By the door, John is taking his shoes off, first the left and then the right. There’s a pause, and an inhalation. “I’m going to bed, Sherlock. Make your own bloody tea.”
“You need to eat before you sleep,” Sherlock says. He’s still checking his phone - he can multitask. Message from Mycroft, message from Greg, a few comments on his forum, a few notifications from the BBC. “You need to eat and drink. You’re a doctor, John, you should know that.”
John hesitates again, and if Sherlock looks up - which he doesn’t - he would theoretically see John’s reflection in the window, the eyes tracing back and forwards as he tries to get a grip on this new Sherlock. “I do know that.”
“So I say again: if you’re in the kitchen, put the kettle on.”
There is a pause, a three-second beat, and then John’s socks shuffle into the kitchen, presumably carrying the rest of John with them. Sherlock doesn’t smile at his phone screen, but he doesn’t scowl, either.
Go and help with the bloody sandwiches. - MH.
Sherlock scowls about the room, looking and failing to immediately see where Mycroft could have hidden a micro-camera, or a little microphone. That’s tomorrow’s agenda sorted, at least.
“What do you want on your toast?” John calls, and with a childish huff at his phone, Sherlock stands, dumps coat and scarf on the sofa where he sat, and seeks out the source of the noise. John’s leaning against the kitchen island, his face still pale and pasty, the blood on his cheek livid now it’s starting to scab. He’s still wearing the coat.
“Butter,” Sherlock says, and gets it out. “Take your coat off, John, it’s covered in mud. It could be useful to the crime scene and you’re contaminating it.”
“I was conscious for the first part, you know,” John says wryly, but he takes the coat off. Sherlock holds his hand out for it, and John gives it and he takes it and folds it primly over his bent arm, to be hung up and sorted with the rest of their jackets. Neither of them think about their actions.
“Yes, but you could have come into contact with other mud,” Sherlock explains. John, for all his usefulness, is still very stupid.
“I was in a van,” John says. Takes the butter, fishes a knife-shaped thing out of the drawer, and starts spreading it on Sherlock’s toast - he likes it lighter than John does, no more than warm bread, whereas John likes to basically char his and then call it a day. “No mud in the van.”
“Still a crime scene,” Sherlock sniffs, and ducks around the corner for a second to hang the coat up. There are four pegs, and Sherlock takes up three of them with almost-identical coats, the long ones he prefers to get made for him in a cosy little family-secret sort of place, in a little corner tucked away from the Savile Row. His scarves are hung over the collars of the coats. John’s peg is closest to the door, and layered with puffa coats and padded jackets and a wax coat and a grey fleece, because John is one of those people who spreads when he enters a place, and never bothers to bring oft-used clothes up the stairs to his room.
Sherlock hangs the coat up. In anyone else the habit would be irritating, but it’s John.
It’s tolerable.
The kettle clicks smartly to the boil just as Sherlock’s coming back into the kitchen, and before John can push himself off the island Sherlock reaches the tea caddy and the two mugs, hooking them on his fingers. “Don’t be stupid, John. Stop moving unnecessarily.”
He can hear John breathing in to berate him, and then stopping, exhaling, deciding it isn’t worth it. Clearly the evening has taken it out of him, especially because when Sherlock and Lestrade had caught up to the van with John in the back, the doctor had been slurring about how old he was getting. You’re forty-six, Sherlock had said, shaking his shoulders to keep him awake. John always stresses how important consciousness is, but then it’s one rule for John and one for the rest of the world.
“No sugar,” John reminds him, and the plate of sliced-squared toast materialises at Sherlock’s elbow. “A dash of milk.”
“I know,” Sherlock says irritably.
John laughs. “Thought you said you’d deleted it.”
“The information might be necessary.”
“Yeah, to your continued survival, maybe.”
Sherlock pushes John’s mug along the counter, and then heaps sugar into his own, with a little splash of milk. For a second he holds the mug in his hands, and experiences that odd feeling of not knowing you’re cold until you touch something warm. “How do you feel?”
“The same,” there’s a slurping sound from John, “Shattered. Achy. I’ll be fine after I sleep.”
Sherlock waits a little too long to say, “Good,” and they drink their tea in silence, crunch their toast in relative silence, until John yawns theatrically and declares he’s going to bed.
Sherlock sits on the couch until he sees the sun rising blue and pale behind the skyline, thinking about white vans and murderers and people who take John to get to him, and mild sedatives and Lestrade and the way John takes his toast.
He goes to bed before John can wake, but he lies with his ear to the door, so he can hear when John does.
“Anna Winsloe, assistant manager in Next, hobbyist actress, likes beer but doesn’t drink it on nights out in case men think she’s a lesbian. Joshua Fullerton, third-year nursing student, from Birmingham originally but in London to complete his course, part-timer in Pret because of course he is, struggles to pay the bills but won’t tell his family. Ashley King, delivery driver for Tim’s Fantimstic Pizzas, going to the Open University for graphic design, estranged from her single mother.” Over his steepled fingers, Sherlock’s eyes suddenly focus. “And John Watson, blogger and well-known private detective. What do all these have in common?”
John gets stuck on the part where Sherlock actually calls him a private detective, and forgets to reply. His notebook, resting on his knee, bounces up and down with his leg. He feels bare without his favourite jacket, and so he’s wearing this lightly waxed brown creation, which his mother bought for him a long time ago on a trip to London back when neither of them lived in it and the city was still something fun and new.
“Not conventionally important in society,” Lestrade says, from where he stands leaning against the windowframe. They’re in NSY, which Sherlock is annoyed about, but Lestrade has all the case-relevant information and John thinks he might go mad when locked in Baker Street with an oddly grumpy Sherlock. He wouldn’t even let John stand at the window this morning, for God’s sake.
“Not conventionally important,” Sherlock repeats.
“Sorry, John,” Lestrade makes a face at him and John waves it away, “But you know what I mean. Working-class. I think John is probably an outlier to throw you off, Sherlock-”
“On the contrary,” Sherlock says. “I believe halfway through their journey they realised who John was, and that’s why we found him. John, if you would?”
John rolls his eyes. He’s repeated this to Greg, to Sherlock, and twice to uniformed police, and it hasn’t changed yet. “Walking home from Sainsbury’s, on the phone to this wanker because he wanted to know what milk I’d got, I say something really stupid to Sherlock-”
“You say I’m sorry I wasn’t raised in a fucking mansion, Sherlock, I got semi-skimmed like any normal kid,” Sherlock says in monotone. He raises his eyebrows when the other two look at him. “Continue.”
“Then I go off on one, because I’m tired-”
“About privilege and council flats in Surrey,” Sherlock says. “And semi-skimmed milk. And my being a toff. I remember it distinctly.”
Greg, the traitorous bastard, makes a noise that could be a laugh.
John closes his eyes. “And then I went - the alleyway between our place and the main street. And they got me there, and I got a deck in the face and gave out a few and then I woke up in the van.”
“Council flats in Surrey,” Sherlock repeats. “The fact that you are connected with me was pure coincidence - these men aren’t looking into their victims before they take them. They want members of the working class because it will take far longer for us to both connect the dots and to catch up on the murders in the first place. They must have presumed you fit their profile, and halfway through their journey one of them bothered to do their research.”
John barks a laugh. “So how the fuck do we get them? And why?”
“All four were taken from this area,” Sherlock stands and traces a large circle around the aerial map of London Greg has pinned to his wall. “Which is, presumably, a random spot of London unrelated to their home or homes - however, they benefit from choosing one hunting ground. They become familiar with the area and they throw the police off, as you naturally assume they must live around here, too. Now, we found John here,” his long fingers pluck a pin from the bottom corner of the map and shove it into a spot on the map, “Which we can assume is a place unrelated to the actual final resting place of Winsloe, Fullerton, and King.”
“Final resting place,” Greg says. “So you think they’re dead? Definitely?”
“Yes,” Sherlock says, staring at the map with his hands behind his back, holding one wrist pinched between two fingers of the other hand. John’s staring at the hand.
“Why so sure?”
“They would have been rougher with John if they intended to keep him alive,” Sherlock says. His fingers are twitching. “A show of strength to prevent him running - both John, Fullerton and King are well-built. Fullerton and King were members of their gyms, and we can see both of them are plenty strong enough to be motivated to try and escape. This lot are doing something different. It’s unlikely they ever woke up after sedation in the van.”
Greg exhales shakily, and John feels sorry for him - they never seem to get the guy before there’s a trail of bodies a mile long. “Right. Okay. Dead, then.”
Sherlock shrugs. “We had already assumed so.”
“Yeah. Right. Okay.”
John frowns. “This gets us no nearer to finding out how to stop them. And - yeah. And what are they actually doing? I didn’t know any of the victims, and none of them knew each other. We know they were chosen randomly. Why risk it?”
“I don’t know,” Sherlock says, and his voice sounds only minutely different to the moment before, but at this point John practically has a degree in interpreting Holmeses. Sherlock is frustrated, deeply so, but not in the same way Greg is. Sherlock is frustrated because these men have so clearly stumbled and fallen, have so obviously made mistakes, and still he can’t fight his way through the jumble of uselessness to get to the facts that really matter. “I do not know.”
“Okay, well, you’ve been very helpful,” Greg says in his Inspector Lestrade voice, in his thanks for the help boys now go get some ice-cream. “Now please piss off.”
Mostly to annoy Sherlock, John stops the cab a few streets away, and stands on the pavement tapping his foot until Sherlock has paid for the journey and come out, looking bewildered. “This isn’t Baker Street.”
“Yeah,” John says, turning around. “I’m hungry and we haven’t got any food and I’m not going shopping. You’re paying.” He walks into the nearest warm-lit building, which appears to be gentrified Asian fusion, hanging baskets on the ceiling and filament lightbulbs bare dangling from ropes and cacti where cacti shouldn’t be and the smell of seared salmon and spring onion in the air. There are three people, two women and a man, behind a bar at the back doing complicated things with frying pans and pointed implements and other such devices.
He’s half-expecting Sherlock to turn around, hail the cab again, and go home, but he doesn’t.
John orders teriyaki, and Sherlock a series of small starter dishes - crisped green beans, squid in chilli, and small dumplings swimming in a musky prawn sauce. Cider for John. Sparkling water for Sherlock.
“Chosen randomly,” John says, because he knows Sherlock is just itching to use him as a sounding board, “And we don’t know why, so think about it.”
Sherlock taps his wooden chopsticks against his mouth, two little depressions in the full of his bottom lip. “I will know why. I already know why, I just don’t know how I know yet. I’m not a circus pony.”
“Yes you are,” John says, fishing in his teriyaki for one of the crunchy peppers. “You love to do your little trick.”
Sherlock makes a face at him, but makes no more comment. The music in this place is funny, sort of quiet and yet not Muzak, not quite. Twenties. John keeps feeling like some moustachioed waiter should be popping up and showing them the wine list, and every other dining table is a table of two, and the lights are low and orange and it’s warm, but not unpleasantly so. His head, which had started to throb entering hour two of sitting in NSY with no further lead, is beginning to calm down again. And the teriyaki is excellent, not too dry, not too flavourless. He catches a sesame seed in the sticky sauce on his chopstick and licks it off, feeling childish.
They don’t talk about the case, which is odd, but neither do they talk about nothing at all. Mycroft has been texting both Sherlock and John, which is an amusing few minutes discussion - “He’s bored,” Sherlock says, a bowl of edamame half-eaten in front of him. “I think he’s in Brussels, trying to fix Brexit.”
“You think?”
Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Slip of the tongue, John, slip of the tongue. I know he’s in Brussels, trying to fix Brexit, but of course he’s bored out of his skull. Can’t you tell?”
“Your jacket needs rewaxing,” John reads aloud from his text conversations with Mycroft. “Hardly a cry for help.”
Sherlock neatly halves a length of squid and eats it. “He’s showing off. He’s probably been hacking into traffic cameras and police observations all day looking for someone to badger. Did you reply?”
“I said I’d tried to wax it with a candle and it hadn’t gone too well,” John says, and Sherlock laughs and he feels quite proud of himself. “Has he said anything to you?”
Sherlock looks on his phone, and whatever he sees must be not-for-the-ears-of-John. “No,” he says shortly, and John doesn’t feel annoyed because he’s forty-six and sensible. “Not a peep from brother dear.”
Moving on from that, John tries to get Sherlock to admit that the whole human head in the fridge is a step too far and is, in fact, the reason they’ve eaten out or gotten delivery for almost all their meals the last few weeks. Although he knows Sherlock knows John is right, he also knows Sherlock will never admit it; he picks the oddest hills to die on, but once he does there’s no moving him from it. Still, it’s fun to have a bicker.
“Have some,” John shoves his dish towards Sherlock. “Can I steal a dumpling?”
Sherlock gestures, and John hooks the dumpling plate on his chopstick and pulls it towards him. “Not bad.”
“Not bad at all,” Sherlock says.
They stay for dessert, and Sherlock, in one of his fits of ancient chivalry, doesn’t let John see the bill before he pays. John leaves a handful of pocket change in the dish for tips, and smiles at the waiter on their way out; the waiter, a man significantly younger than John, gives him a wink and bright beam.
Sherlock has already called over a cab.
When John was young, he got Valentines in primary school, but he attended the sort of primary school where even Valentines Day aged seven was turned into some sort of bloody political event. John received a few, and gave a few in turn, and there was exchanging of sugary heart-shaped sweets in the playground and promises to tell the respective mums about homework done at each other’s houses, and then kissing on the lips, which was quite intense to have done before ten, and French kissing, which was some sort of dirty word until John moved up into his comprehensive.
John stands with his hands tucked into his armpits, shivering. It is an absolutely biting night, and despite wearing his warmest coat and having stolen one of Sherlock’s silly scarves, he feels the wind right down to his bones. His toes are going numb.
It had been his idea, actually, because Sherlock seemed oddly reluctant to have either of them out in the danger zone. Which is new. John almost texts Mycroft, in case there’s some fragile anniversary or something he has to step around, but he doesn’t; it’s almost definitely just one of Sherlock’s moods, and John won’t complain if it (theoretically) stops him from getting shot.
But this made sense. Even Greg had unwillingly approved.
(“We know they’re amateur, we know they’re easily spooked. John stands around looking lost for a few nights in their confirmed hunting ground, keeps an eye out for any groups that seem to recognise him. He sounds the alarm, we come and get them, Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.” Lestrade folds his arms, grimly proud. “Sherlock, don’t sulk just because you didn’t think of it.”
“I’m not sulking,” Sherlock says stiffly. “I think this puts John in unwarranted danger. They will smell something rotten.”
“We’re rather hoping that, yes,” John says. “For fucks sake, Sherlock, I was in Afghanistan, I was an A&E doctor. I’ll be fine.”)
He’s cold. But he is fine. He’s got an unregistered handgun he pilfered from a veterinary clinic last time a case dragged them out of London, and it’s neatly tucked into his inner pocket, where it can do no harm. Most importantly, he has two crack-and-boil hand warmers, one in each pocket, the only things currently standing between him and hypothermia.
10 minute check-in. - SH
Lestrade’s orders. - SH
I’m fine, not dead yet, John types out with difficulty, and then stows hand, phone, and warmer back into the depths of his pockets. He doesn’t really know why Sherlock has to make it clear Greg is the one who wants to check in; Sherlock doesn’t believe in stuff like that, really.
John shivers. Fucking cold tho, he types, and sends, feeling bored. Sherlock despises shortened text-talk, and bitches about it in the wee hours when John is trying to get some sleep - just another perk of living with the man.
To his surprise, his phone buzzes less than a minute later.
You should have worn more layers. - SH
John barks a shocked laugh at his phone screen, his eyes darting up every half-second to watch for anyone suspicious on the streets. Nothing yet, just old ladies with tartan bags and women pushing prams and gangs of kids holding Red Bull and looking self-conscious about it. I’m wearing three. Not my fault murderers come out in the winter.
Inverse flowers. - SH
John tucks his phone away, smiling, but Greg would kill him if he fumbled the guys now, if he paid less than his full attention to it. And it isn’t like John wants to hear about yet another missing-presumed-dead on the news, sliced in on BBC Breakfast in between Naga and Dan like it’s just another case. This is Captain John Watson, reporting for duty. This is Captain John Watson with sand in his mouth. This is Captain John Watson, bored out of his mind, playing spot-the-rock in the desert through the scope of his rifle.
Check-in again. - SH
John looks up at the second-floor Costa above the Tesco Express opposite him, where he can see two people outlined in the murky glass. Sherlock is the taller one, and by the look of the shadow he’s still looking on his phone. You know you can see me up there.
Lestrade’s orders. - SH
John rolls his eyes, but his thumb flies over the keyboard anyway. This is the kidnappers of JW. Pay me in cups of tea or I will return you to him harmed.
Ha Ha. - SH
John puts his phone away again. When he exhales, his breath crystallises in the air in front of him, like kids pretending to be dragons on December mornings. Old ladies, tartan bags, single mothers, a gang of kids, three girls in sixth form uniforms, two men talking low to each other in Mandarin, a brightly-wrapped woman gently reprimanding someone down her phone in Urdu. The sounds of the city during in-breaths.
Still not dead, John types, after nine minutes and fifty-four seconds. Through the translucent window in the Costa, he sees Sherlock check his phone, and then begin to type, while Lestrade’s shadow leans forward over the table.
Ha Ha. Lestrade asks if there’s anyone familiar. - SH
John is about to type a no, but then he looks up and sees, in the thin little almost-street between a laundrette and a Chinese takeaway called Blue Dragon Noodle, a white van with the plates removed. Grimy enough to pass as a delivery van, but unmarked. There are two men in the front seat, eyes down and chins illuminated by hidden phone screens, but John knows there was a third body. He turns.
Dials the first number on speed dial. In Costa, the taller shadow puts his phone to his ear.
“John?”
“They’re here,” John hisses, eyes darting left and right, wishing he could move without drawing attention to himself, “Between the laundrette and the chippy, down here - two guys in the van. One or two more must be out-”
“So the two in the van are the drivers, we can assume,” Sherlock says, and John sees the two figures disappearing from the window, “One or two more must be out getting someone. Has anyone recognised you?”
“No - oh, fuck me,” John swears, and starts running.
Because yes, of course someone’s recognised him. A man and a woman down the street, the man tall and well-built with a London 2012 cap pulled low over his face, the woman pretty and approachable and dressed quite sensibly, the sort of ripped-jeans-doc-martens ensemble favoured by a certain sort of student. Both of them were heading down the road, presumably to the van, and following them was a young man around the same age as the woman, maybe a bit younger; upon seeing John, though, both man and woman turned and sprinted. John, hindbrain responding instead of the bit of his mind that thinks before he acts, is on them before he can think about whether he should or not.
“John? John! Where are you going?”
“Man and a woman,” John says between breaths, tearing down the street, “Man in an Olympics cap, woman looks like a student, think I caught them bringing someone back to the van, recognised me, I know you have a GPS on this fucking phone so use it-”
He hangs up. He’s not exactly young, as Sherlock has taken pains to remind him recently, and he can’t really run when half his breath is taken up with telling the two upstairs where he’s gone. They’re smart. They’ll figure it out.
At a set of traffic lights at the other end of the street, both of them run the red during the little gap when nobody can go, and John is caught on the other side of the stream of coaches and cabs and little fussy Fiats and showoffy Mercs. After a brief pause, mostly to catch his breath, he runs through the stream of traffic anyway, half-bouncing off the bonnet of a black cab and yelling sorry! before he’s off again. He hates action sequences. That’s why he left the fucking service in the first place.
At a corner between another Pret and a little patch of green, they skid to the left, and John, cursing, does so too. His phone is ringing. He ignores it. Sherlock is smart.
If John were a group of people kidnapping the working class to kill them for reasons unknown, what would he do now?
Well, he would contact the van, and get them to meet him in a prechosen location, and get in and drive away and ditch the van and choose a new hunting-ground, that’s what he’d do.
John swears.
“Sherlock-”
“You weren’t answering your phone.”
“No, I fucking wasn’t, I’m running, you cockhead - listen, up at the top of-” John looks up to double-check the street name- “At the top of St Mary’s, drive there, wait, find the guy in the cap and the girl in the boots and get them, they’re our guys, there’ll be a white van with no plates ‘round in five minutes and that’s the rest of them. Greg, can you hear me? Do all that.”
“Doing,” Sherlock says tightly on the other end of the phone. “John, don’t do anything stupid.”
John laughs breathlessly. “Sherlock, that’s my whole fucking job.” He hangs up again before Sherlock can, and he’s running because he can just about see the back of the man, who’s lumbering a lot slower than the woman.
The woman he can’t, in fact, see.
“Oh, bugger,” John says out loud, the way they do in Midsomer Murders, and then he turns around and ducks on pure animal instinct, and a piece of slim, deadly lead piping goes singing through the air. “Oh, bugger.”
“You’re from the other night,” says the man. Olympic Hat. “You’re Sherlock Holmes. No - you’re his mate.”
John’s always been terrible at thinking on his feet. “I’m not his fucking mate,” he says, like he’s Danny Dyer in an EastEnders Christmas special and not a doctor on a night off. The stolen gun in his pocket feels quite a bit heavier than it did when he thought he wouldn’t ever have to use it. John is a doctor, not - some bloody-double-oh agent. Sherlock is a detective. A good one, sure, but still a bona-fide nutter.
“Not his mate,” Olympic Hat says scornfully. “You’re the blogger. You live with him.”
“I don’t have to like him to do that,” John says. What the hell am I saying?
“You were on the phone,” says a low, female voice. It’s Doc Martens, and John twists his head frantically around to see her coming at him the other way, a gun in her hand, shaking ever-so-slightly. “Was it him? Was it the police?”
“It was him,” John says. He puts his hands up, level with his shoulders, and thinks about BBC special series that air on Sunday evenings, something the wife curls up with and a cup of tea and maybe a chippy, the paper all see-through with vinegar, and maybe that’s the sort of romance he should be engaging in, this far through his life. Not fucking - standoffs in alleys. He isn’t bloody Miss Marple.
Doc Martens raises perfectly-painted eyebrows. “Give me your phone. Did you tell him where you were?”
“No, I didn’t,” John says. The day he signed up for the Forces, he had turned down a blind date his friend Frank Corry had arranged with some Welsh specialist doing his fourth year in pharmaceuticals. He ditched the date and went and bought a beret. Should he have gone? “We’ve had a bit of a spat,” John says, in his perfect i am a stupid flatmate dont look at me voice. “I wasn’t going to go back to the flat.”
“Give me your phone,” Olympic Hat says gruffly, stretching out a hand. He curls his fingers.
John does. He isn’t really cold anymore, and spinning his mind back through his conversation with Sherlock, he can’t remember anymore what he told him - did he tell him where to go? Did he say where to send the cavalry, or whatever Lestrade has to do?
“Stay still,” Doc Martens tells him, although John hasn’t moved. “Bit of a spat? What?”
“He’s a dickhead,” John says, watching Olympic Hat point-and-peck at his phone screen. “I was gonna move - leave. My sister lives out this way. I was going to her.”
“Lover’s quarrel,” Olympic Hat says, pressing redial, and John can hear that crisp crunchy-electric noise as the phone connects. Sherlock never lets it ring more than once; if John calls him, he’ll either completely ignore it or pick up midway through the first ring.
“John? Where are you?”
Nobody in the little street says anything. The lead piping goes thunk-thunk into a little puddle of rain that’s collected in the divot between two cobbles. John wishes he could have pulled his gun out before she pulled out hers, but curse him for being an optimist.
“John? Are you coming back? Where the fuck did you go?”
John blinks. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Sherlock swear before, not even in the swimming pool or when Mycroft is being particularly pedantic and brotherly; the most he’s got to is a polite oh bollocks before they’re running (to catch the nearest cab) (to jump on a handy-passing bus). Sherlock swearing makes him sound a lot less other, a lot less like someone in a galaxy far-far away, a lot more like a flatmate pissed off at his mate for having a rant down the phone. Olympic Hat waggles the phone at John, and he clears his throat. “Clear my head, Sherlock. Not everything’s about you.”
To Sherlock’s eternal credit, he doesn’t pause. “Whatever I said I didn’t mean it. Come back and let’s talk about this like fucking adults - or are you off to Harry’s? I’ve texted her. She isn’t replying. Have you told her?”
“No,” John says. Then: “Not yet.”
Again Sherlock swears. In the background, tinny through John’s phone speakers, he thinks he can hear traffic, buses and cabs and miscellaneous cars risking London in the evening to head home. He can practically hear Greg holding his breath so as not to let himself go. “You’re being stupid, John.”
Again, Olympic Hat waggles the phone, his eyebrows raised. John looks over his shoulder, but the gun is still reassuringly pointed directly his way.
“I’m not coming back, so get used to it,” John says. “Just - leave me alone.”
Olympic Hat hangs up abruptly. “So nobody knows you’re here, then.”
“No,” John says, and tries to make it sound angry, scared. It probably reflects badly on either him or Sherlock that he’s begun to get bored of being held at gunpoint; not bored, exactly, but no longer panicked with the threat of something so new he can’t process it. The fear is still there, a sort of primal hindbrain reaction to having his cause-of-death so close to him, but the shock isn’t. He can still think. The first time he found himself at the wrong end of a gun, he was so startled he completely shut down, but now he can - yeah. Think. “Nobody knows.”
“Fuck it,” says the girl, “Fuck it - do this and go. We’ll - we were pushing it anyway. Fuck it.”
Olympic Hat looks over John’s shoulder at her, and John can see he’s considering it, really considering it. Whoever these guys are, whatever their motive, they weren’t expecting to garner this much attention from such high-profile hunters, and it’s stressing them out. This is the big leagues and they aren’t. “Move down that way,” he says, flapping John’s phone the way they came, “Just - shut up and move that way. Stick with him,” that directed to the girl, who pokes John in the shoulder with the butt of the gun.
So she doesn’t know how to use it, then. Nobody who’s comfortable firing a gun bothers using it as an encouragement beyond brandishing it; nobody who’s seen what they do to flesh and blood up close would do that. John, facing away from both of them, lets the look of mostly-false apprehension fall from his face, because at last there’s something that isn’t super-criminals and assassins and drug gangs and government coverups. At last there’s just two barely-competents who picked on the wrong guy not because he’s Sherlock Holmes’s friend, but because he’s ex-Forces.
Everyone always forgets that bit.
At the mouth of the alley, John looks over the head of the traffic and sees what he was hoping; Lestrade’s plainclothes car, a silver Honda that’s seen better decades. Nobody in the front two seats, which means Greg and Sherlock are loose, which means the odds are even better - and they were good, even before that.
Because nobody who can’t fire a gun in private would dream of firing it in public.
John turns around, thumb tucked over his knuckles, and lands his fist just underneath Doc Martens’s armpit, beautifully exposed in the way she’s holding the gun. She yells and her arm flies down to protect her body - crucially, the arm connected to the hand holding the gun.
And he’s expecting the pipe that swings around, slamming into the corner wall right where John’s shoulder would have been had he not twisted away a half-second before. Olympic Hat swears loudly and angrily, but he’s slow and John’s fast, and although the second, slower swing bounces briefly off his shoulder, it doesn’t have the momentum to do anything but bruise.
(John’s phone crashes to the pavement at this point, screen-down, and he can hear the clatter, and he can feel the hundred-quid screen replacement leaking out of his bank account. So be it.)
“The van the van the van the van,” the girl says in an angry half-breath, still clutching her side, the gun dangling useless against her leg, “Come on, let’s go he isn’t worth it-”
The third swing of the pipe glances off the wall again, but not before it catches the back of John’s knee - not the bad one, but even so John isn’t without nerve endings, and like a puppet with cut strings he tumbles to the ground on hands and knees, wet mud splashing on his knuckles. The pins and needles sting all down his calf - try as he might he can’t wrangle his leg into listening to him. He rolls over onto his back, and where the fuck are Greg and Sherlock?
“The van Frankie the van!”
“Shut the fuck up,” the man all but snarls - Frankie, apparently - “Go to the van if you want, I’m staying here-”
The lead pipe rises, and John closes his eyes, because ex-Forces he may be and doctor he may be but he isn’t ballsy enough to watch the thing that’s going to smash his brains out on the way to do so.
“John, you idiot!”
Ah. That’s more like it.
His squeezed eyes open, and it isn’t much of a saving angel, Sherlock Holmes with his phone in his hand and a distinctly unimpressed look on his face, but it’s better than having smashed brains on the cobbles. Looking slightly over Sherlock’s shoulder, John can see two uniforms, hatted and jacketed, one to each of Olympic Hat’s arms. “I am not an idiot,” he says, a little bemused. “I am still alive and conscious and I have all of my limbs.”
“You’re an idiot,” Sherlock snaps.
John grabs the arm he outstretches. “I repeat: alive and whole. Where’s Gr- oh. Hello, Greg.”
Two constables have also disarmed and grabbed Doc Martens, who looks almost relieved to have had her gun taken away from her. Between two burly policemen she seems small and bony, and it isn’t hard to see who’ll get the harder deal when the whole thing comes to court. Between the piles of policemen, a middle-aged avenging angel with a paunch, Greg Lestrade storms with a face like the proverbial.
“Unsafe, unlawful, unauthorised, completely reckless, completely ridiculous, terrible behaviour I would expect from a rookie - no, no, not even that, but I wouldn’t expect it from a man old enough to know better!”
“I’m okay, Greg,” John says. His eyes meet with Olympic Hat’s, and skate away quickly; the man looks desperate, as though he’s just now realised how deep the hole that he’s dug is. John finds it quite hard to feel pity.
Greg looks from John to Sherlock, resting on the last. “Is he?”
“Apparently so,” Sherlock says tightly.
“He’s right here and he’s fine,” John says again. “Why am I in a better mood than both of you?”
“Take him away before I kill him, please,” Greg says, massaging his forehead. “John - I’ll text you when I want you in the Yard, or else one of the uniforms will give you a call. Go home and try not to be a hero on the way.”
Love, Sherlock Holmes realises with no small amount of irritation, is not always romantic. So far it's been stressful, annoying, and unproductive.
The TV has been left on, presumably since Sherlock left the flat a little ahead of John earlier in the day, a game show playing quietly in the corner. As is the norm every time Sherlock is the last to leave, the place is a complete mess; his coats have all been ripped off the hooks in search of the perfect one, or something, and there are cups of tea half-drunk on every flat surface. “Place is a tip,” John says mildly.
Sherlock looks around, and then shrugs. “So it is.”
“They were boring,” John says, as Sherlock moves further into the flat, discarding scarf, coat, and gloves on the comfier of the two sofa chairs. “They didn’t know what they were doing - they were interesting by accident, I think.”
“I think so too,” Sherlock says. “Which tells me you shouldn’t have gone tearing after them like an idiot. It was stupid. Lestrade lost his mind.”
Lestrade lost his mind. John’s eyebrows shoot up, and he pauses in the unbuttoning of his jumper, his thumb looped in the buttonhole. His shoulder is a little stiff, but not unmanageably so - all the same, he knows Sherlock will notice. He’s been limping from the cab to the door, but walking behind Sherlock, so maybe the knee will go escaped a while longer.
“There better be nothing wrong with that,” Sherlock says, an oddly emotive sentence - where’s the analysis of exactly how wide the bruise is, what shape it is, and how blood vessels crack under pressure?
“Bruised,” John shrugs awkwardly out of his jumper, left now in his collared shirt. The flat is comfortingly warm.
Sherlock holds his hand out for the coat and the jumper, and John hands them to him, watching long pale fingers curl around the fleecy sleeves, fold the jumper inside the coat and then tuck them together into his chest. “Bruised? I wouldn’t want A&E to pin us down as regulars.”
“Trust me, I would know,” John rolls the ball of his shoulder around testingly, and while it hurts like hell there’s no actual strain on anything inside him. “I’m fine. Why are you so worried?”
“I’m not,” Sherlock says shortly. Then: “Make some tea.”
John shuffles slowly into the kitchen, bone-tired suddenly but too stubborn to mention it. He makes the tea and Sherlock drinks it - the world, then, turns another day. “You’re acting worried.”
“I’m not,” Sherlock says again. He sounds a little like a child refusing to eat his greens, and although John can’t see his face - Sherlock is hanging up the coats, around by the door - he imagines it isn’t pleasant.
Teabags. Mugs. Sugar. Kettle. God.
“Why are you so tired?”
John leans against the counter, counting off on his fingers, aware of how intently Sherlock is watching him from the doorframe. “Sedative hasn’t passed entirely from the system, slept poorly last night due to sedative, spent several hours almost-still in the cold, got bonked twice, had a surge in adrenaline and subsequent crash, had to walk up two flights of stairs, had to get yelled at by Greg. It’s late. That’s why.”
“Bonked twice,” Sherlock quotes. “Leg? Which one?”
“The other one,” John taps the thigh of his good leg, wriggles his toes. “Never fear. John Watson lives to write up another day - what shall we call this one? Thug in the Alley with the Lead Piping?”
“That implies you died,” Sherlock says with that same strange tightness.
“And I didn’t,” John stresses. “For God’s sake - this is no worse than anything we’ve done before - I’ve done. Desert? Afghanistan? Ring any bells? Swimming pools, mortal enemies, your brother, the fucking - pink lady? No?”
Sherlock frowns, but doesn’t say anything, and John turns around to bob both teabags up and down in their mugs, steeping mostly so he doesn’t have to look at him.
The silence lingers. On the TV in the other room, the Beast playfully threatens to eat a contestant on the Chase, and the studio audience dutifully laughs, and normality really tries its best to descend.
“I was worried,” Sherlock says eventually, in the voice of someone having splinters removed from the fingertips. “About you. I was worried about you.”
So John turns around, and Sherlock is leaning against one of the kitchen chairs, looking disgruntled. “I won’t say it again, so don’t ask.”
“No, no, I didn’t quite hear you the first time,” John knows he’s grinning and doesn’t much care to fix it. “Once more?”
“No,” Sherlock folds his arms. “But it is a fact, and now you know it. Do with it what you will.”
John holds out the mug of tea for him, and Sherlock takes it, and it’s been done a hundred thousand times since they moved in, and like so many things in their relationship it no longer requires any more thought than breathing does. It would be foolish to think about the exchange of coats and the turning on of the kettle and the unlocking of the door and the offer of a shoulder and the hailing of a cab and the sounding of ideas, because nobody has to manually tell their lungs to breathe, their organs to be organic. It’s a state of the world. It just is.
“I’ve made a note of it,” John says, lips wrapped around the rim of his mug. “Thank you.”
In a very unsexy and unflattering way, John shrugs most of his shirt off so Sherlock can properly rub Deep Heat onto the bruise, the bits he can’t reach. The Chase has given way to an episode of Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire from the nineties, judging by Angela Rippon’s hairdo; Sherlock guesses almost every answer almost before the question has finished typing itself out, and the ones that are deemed ‘useless knowledge’ John gets to announce, feeling smugly proud of himself as he does every time he knows something Sherlock doesn’t. They get the million pounds, but Angela and her partner, some once-famous man called Tim, do not.
“I can do the leg,” Sherlock says. “If you want.”
“If you want,” John agrees, although they both know he’s perfectly capable of reaching his knee, bonked as it is with a lead pipe or not.
Sherlock, apparently, does want. He even makes the next cup of tea, and finds an uneaten packet of hobnobs in the back of the cupboard, and lets John eat the first one.
John Watson is not of an age, anymore, where love is romantic.
That’s a very different thing from being of an age where love has ceased to exist. But he finds now he appreciates tea and a sit-down a lot more than flowers and grand gestures, and really dates in Italian restaurants are overrated, and Venice isn’t a romantic city because of the amount of shit in the water, and neither is London for much the same reason. He’s far too old for miscommunication and dispute and the awkward half-dating period when you can’t hold hands in public.
Lestrade calls him, and he goes in and gives his statement (again) to two uniforms with a recorder, and then Sherlock goes into Lestrade’s office and deduces them all half to death. (Trainee assassins, apparently, cutting their teeth on people they thought nobody would miss but of course they were sloppy and they took John Watson, and as everyone knows there’s no better way to get onto the radar of some very important people. Idiots, really.)
“Idiots, really,” Sherlock says, without a hint of self-awareness.
“Incredible,” John murmurs, and he and Lestrade share a smile.
At home nothing has changed. Sherlock hangs up the coats, John makes the tea, Mycroft irritates them both with nosy and ill-mannered texts at inappropriate times. John falls asleep on the sofa the first night, in between two reruns of Top Gear on Dave, and when he wakes up again in the cold blue light of the morning he’s still pillowed on Sherlock’s shoulder, his bruises stinging, his spine complaining. “Sorry,” he says, and Sherlock waves it away.
“Come to bed,” he says, like it makes sense for John to do so, and so he does. From Sherlock, who does nothing unless it makes sense, it sounds reassuringly normal - all of it does.
John kisses Sherlock first, mostly to annoy the gaggle of NSY spectators, because he is at heart a child. Sherlock laughs, but when they go home he kisses John and in private there’s nobody to annoy but each other.
And Sherlock Holmes finds, to his great relief, that falling in love is completely mundane and commonplace and nothing changes at all.