Chapter Text
The rain was drumming against the window pane, and heavy droplets were moving across the glass, illuminated by the yellow street lights. Sherlock was on the sofa in the unlit sitting room, his eyes fixed on the laptop, watching the seemingly endless stream of cars a camera had captured on Belgrave Road almost a week ago. The soft *ping* of his phone interrupted the silence of the flat. But he ignored it. Like the seven previous ones. He knew it was Lestrade who was asking him to show up at a crime scene. Woman. 68. Possible serial murder. And several other details which Lestrade hoped would pique his interest, although he had told him he already had a case, and that he didn't like working on two cases simultaneously. But apparently, Lestrade wasn't going to take a 'no' for an answer.
The only thing Lestrade's texts made him aware of was that he was running out of time. By now, the DI had phoned John, who, instead of spending the cold, late evening with Mary, would come to 221B; so sooner or later he'd end up in one of London's expensive suburbs, investigating Lestrade's crime scene. And there it was, the faint sound of somebody turning the key in the lock of the front door and John's familiar steps on the stairs.
"Ten minutes." Sherlock said without his eyes leaving the screen, when he heard John open the door.
"Hello to you too." John sighed upon entering the dark room. He turned on the lights and the sudden brightness made Sherlock squint his eyes. But apart from that John didn't get a reaction.
"Ten minutes to what?"
After a double shift at the clinic he just wasn't up to working out the message behind Sherlock's cryptic words. Actually, he had been almost too tired to leave Mary on the sofa, where they had fallen asleep, and to answer his phone. But in the end he hadn't been able to say no to Lestrade. And, if he was completely honest with himself, there had been the not so small mystery of what could have kept Sherlock possibly away from investigating a serial murder. Lestrade offered him the perfect homecoming gift and yet the world's only consulting detective didn't seem interested.
"To a cab ride to wherever somebody stumbled across a body," came his answer while he was still focusing on the screen in front of him. "Lestrade obviously phoned you and now you are here to tell me to join him in looking at a dead woman in a smug bedroom. And although I still have more than six hours of CCTV footage to analyse, you won't stop distracting me before I agree to help with that murder victim. I'm just trying to save time by skipping an unnecessary conversation. Give me ten more minutes with this footage and we'll be off doing Lestrade a favour."
"We? What makes you this sure that I'll come along?" John said with a small huff, but he didn't care to hide the smile in his voice.
"That you came all the way to Baker Street." Sherlock answered and looked up to see John's smirk before his friend disappeared in the kitchen.
John knew without getting some caffeine he wouldn't be of much use that night, so he opened the fridge to see if there was any milk, and not to check if Sherlock had been eating properly, or so he told himself. After having inspected the shelves, he wasn't sure why he had thought to find milk in the first place. Still, the content of the fridge did not fail to take him by surprise. He hadn't expected real food instead of petri dishes, test tubes and severed body parts. The lack of 'experiments', or the absurdities Sherlock used to inflict upon organs and extremities in the name of science, told him Sherlock was indeed on a case which was why he hadn't been nagging Molly hard enough to get his usual supply. If she was still willing to participate in those strictly speaking illegal activities. Not as if Sherlock had ever worried about her losing her license, he thought, remembering the favour he must have asked her about two years ago. He closed the door with more force than would have been necessary, even though it couldn’t shut those memories away, and settled for coffee.
A few minutes later, he re-entered the sitting room with two mugs of coffee in his hands and set Sherlock's - black, two sugar- down on the table next to a map in which Sherlock had put some pins covering an area between Baker Street and Lupus Street, as he could just about read through the multicoloured forest. He took a seat in his old chair and for a minute both of them were drinking coffee in silence. Or rather John drank coffee and watched Sherlock watching the footage and ignoring the mug next to him.
Somehow the scenery felt comfortingly familiar: his chair, the aromatic scent of freshly brewed coffee filling the flat, and the promise of a new case in the air. He would have never admitted it, but he had missed these evenings.
One part of his mind wanted to know why that footage could not wait. But time and experience had taught him he wouldn't have got a satisfying answer. However, as the caffeine started doing its job, he realised why Lupus Street rang a bell. Lupus Street was not far off St James the Less - the bonfire. And all of a sudden he didn't only know the date in the corner of the screen without having ever laid eyes on it, or why Sherlock had been trying to turn Lestrade's more than just promising case down, but also that Sherlock had spent every minute since he had got hold of the video material analysing it. Whenever that might have been.
On the one hand, those almost two years, or one and a half as Sherlock kept pointing out, hadn't made him forget how frustrated Sherlock could be without a case. Nevertheless, he would have rather had Sherlock looking for a serial killer than for whoever had sorted out his Guy Fawkes Night plans. Instead of listening to Sherlock's story of how he had saved their lives two years ago, he had spent the night being saved once more.
Obviously, they had aimed to hurt Sherlock, not him. He knew they could have killed him if they had wanted to. The reason he was still alive was because someone out there had found more pleasure in making Sherlock save him, than - what? having Sherlock lose his best friend?
It had been a power game. A game somebody had set up. One John didn't want Sherlock to play. They knew he would be trying to catch them and John wasn't keen on repeating the swimming pool incident. Or Bart's and everything which had come in its wake. Stuff he mostly didn't know about, maybe never really will.
Sherlock was right. Caring was not an advantage and John didn't want him to care about a case ever again. Yet, right now, that's what he did.
He was tired of being Sherlock's leverage. He was tired of being drugged by people who didn't pay attention to the dosage. Not as if he had enjoyed being drugged by people who did, but Sherlock at least wasn't trying to kill him on purpose. But most importantly, he was tired of Sherlock playing against unknown powers in an attempt to keep them save. And yet he knew none of his possible and impossible arguments would have changed Sherlock's mind. Besides, he was certainly not having that conversation with his mind barely running on something most people wouldn't call coffee.
Just then Sherlock paused the video to jot another license plate down.
"Those ten minutes are up." John said and grabbed his coat, knowing Sherlock would follow right behind. It was mostly the caffeine keeping him awake and he wanted to get moving before it would lose its effect.