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“The kid’s in shock.” The people in the hospital truck whisper to the policeman. “Ask him your questions later.” But John can hear them and he pouts. He opens his mouth to contradict them, but stops short when Harry touches his arm and shakes her head. It won't be for a couple more days that John will find out he should have been in shock, that killing his own father was supposed to be traumatic, and scary.
The cops ask him so many questions he doesn't think he can possibly recount all of them. Harry maintains that their father was abusive and had been actively attacking John with vehemence when Harry had stabbed him. John, being only six, doesn't understand why he and Harry are lying to the police so much, but defers to his older sister’s wisdom at her glare.
The reality was far less fantastical. The reality was that while their father was never really as present as either of them would have liked, he hadn’t ever been outright abusive. John stabbed him because he was bored. Because he could. Because the knife screamed for him. He doesn't really know.
Harry is cleared of any charges shortly after the incident takes place, and she and John are placed with their Aunt Abigail. Aunt Abigail dotes on them unendingly, disbelieving of the idea that her brother could have raised a hand to his children. But, clearly apologetic to the children she takes in.
She dies on John’s sixteenth birthday. The precise and certain stab wounds in her chest are never found under the charcoal and ash of his aunt’s corpse. Even the fire Harry sets to hide her brother’s work is declared an accident.
By then, however, Harry is 21 and she adopts her brother. The genius that had gotten them both through life thus far is used to build up an empire of background noise, disguised by seeming accidents, blackmail, and careful manipulation.
By the time John turns 18, the empire they build up encompasses all of Europe and Australia, and is working its tendrils through Asia and the Americas. John heads himself off to University, and only allows himself to be distracted with the occasional hit for his big sister.
John finishes a masters degree in biochemistry in two short years. Another degree in general language studies follows a year and a half later, this time it's a doctorate. By the time he's 26 years old he's gained a fourth, this time Medicine,
He takes a year to help his sister run her empire and find a suitable and trustworthy bodyguard. He finds a woman named Clara Oswald. She's plenty capable and knows John's dedication to his sister is unending. She scout's honors her way through the negotiations. She gets paid better than several leading businessmen.
His birthday cake escorts him to the nearest recruitment office. Four degrees in seven years impress the office and he gets offered an officer's position. He, instead, heads for group barracks to earn his own quarters.
His tour ends and he reenlists. This time he asks for a gun in place of his bandages. They hand him both and send him everywhere. The sand cools him and the snow burns. His mind and soul constantly running to the next great adventure.
He's in a country he wasn't told the name of when a bullet turns everything to red hot pain. Everything burns and freezes and stops and rushes all at once as the last of his blood drains away from his brain and heart.
The Army gives him a promotion, a couple of medals, and a rubbish bedsit. The tremor in his hand takes away his chances to work in surgery. Harry gives John a call or six that he ignores. The psychosomatic limp takes away his chances to do very much of anything mildly exciting. Mike Stamford gives John a flatmate full of character, excitement, and cheekbones. His new flatmate takes away his breath.
Sherlock Holmes' strange need for an assistant he could do without leads to a strange start for flatmates, but then John has never been one for boring. A dead woman in pink is nothing to the howling children in his trigger finger's restless slumber. She died peacefully, why should he pity her? The obnoxious cop feeds him her terrors and John doesn't blink. He doesn't want to. He can't.
The phone booth's shrill tones give him pause. The pizza shop smells lovely, but the ringing phone distracts. The next booth's phone cries out for him. As he picks up the receiver, a posh voice grates over his ears, and a lack of answers threaten the peace of the night. The open door warns him away, but he only steps closer. The woman inside lies through her gentle smile and he knows who she is.
The warehouse they stop in practically bathes in melancholy danger. The man in the three piece suit exudes mental prowess, but physical weakness. The man mentions numbers as his PA types endlessly into her phone. John ignores the numbers. They bore him.
The man mentions John's irritating therapist. John simply can't believe that the man could be so well versed in manners and polite conversation, but be so rude. The man mistakes John’s irritation at his lapse in polite conversation for apprehension. The man is right that John misses the war. The tidy three piece suit in front of him threatens more than can be delivered but John isn't so arrogant as to dismiss the threats.
DING
John's phone goes off, and it's Harry texting him. What she's told him makes him grin like a madman, and all the more as he watches a well trimmed eyebrow raise. John speaks the man's name and almost starts chuckling when the man's face turns first to confusion than to horror than back to neutral. Mycroft Holmes, the man is called.
John's phone dings with another text, this time from Sherlock. John tells Mycroft that he has no interest in pointless spying and that he'll be off now. With silence as the sole reply, John steps out of the warehouse and pulls out his phone. He scrolls to the contact he has wanted to delete so very many times, but here and now, in this moment, he’s a little bit glad he hasn’t. “Harry.”
The car he asked his sister to procure for him arrives only seconds after he snaps shut the lines of conversation he’d considered allowing. What he doesn’t see coming, but really thinks he should have, is that when he takes his seat in the back, the criminal lord herself bares her teeth in an almost feral greeting.
John’s answering grin is usually enough to leave most men bereft, but Harry only giggles, her menacing facade vanishing for her little brother. He listens in considerate silence and nods occasionally when he thinks she suspects he’s ignoring her. He’s not, but he knows it’s hard for her to tell sometimes.
John receives the information Harry chooses to share. The man in the warehouse is Sherlock’s not-quite-so-clever-as-he-likes-to-think-he-is older brother. The man Sherlock’s chasing after is a pathetic and dying cabbie. The man behind the cabbie is the one that Harry is really interested in and she’s worried that Sherlock will become obsessed with this man. If he finds and takes that man out, there’s a chance that he might find the vast network that makes up the Watsons’ Empire. But what John’s really interested in is why Harry says “James Moriarty” with such scathing discontentment.
“If you dislike him so much, than why is he still breathing?” Harry smirks in reply. John grips the gun his sister hands him tightly, and steps gingerly out of the sleek black car and onto the filthy sidewalk of Baker Street. His searching eyes finding no one on the street, he tucks the gun safely into the back of his jeans and gently tugs his favorite striped jumper down over it.
He knocks roughly on the door that reads 221 as the car glides away silently. The landlady opens the door and greets John warmly as he searches for her name. Hudson, he thinks it was, but doesn’t test the waters further than a brief hello. He has to stop his legs from bounding up the steps to apartment B.
The door he comes to isn’t even closed, and he mentally berates the man lounging on the sofa for being so foolish. He pulls the door shut completely and locks it with a click. He pads silently over to the curly haired detective on the sofa. A text leads to a phone call and they bound out the door.
Dinner candles lead to an awkward conversation that's quickly lost in the haze of a taxi cab and an arduous chase leading the two boys through buildings and up staircases. The chase almost seems worth the effort but Sherlock ignores the cabbie in favor of a Californian. John leaves a GPS tracker in the frame of the door before it slams shut and they laugh about Sherlock’s lame greeting. Their adrenaline rush guides them home before they collapse into the wall. The doorbell rings and a cheap cane gets tossed in the umbrella stand.
221B greets them with the sound of rummaging and gossip. John hears the prejudiced gasps of the homicide division. Drugs. A dead child. A pink mobile with GPS. Sherlock vanishes with old dust. And John runs again. John runs faster and faster. He's never run so fast. The danger screams his name and the gun at his back itches his trigger finger. He darts up stairwells and when he reaches the top he's on the wrong side but he sees pills and knows reckless boredom when he sees it and squeezes the trigger before he even realizes it. Eyes blink and he's already gone. He knows to be quick.
John can't help but to giggle at the pointless shock blanket. He knows that even if Sherlock knows he shot the cabbie, Sherlock's tongue won't let anything slip. And if all else fails he has Harry. Laughing and Chinese food turns into John collapsing into the sofa and Sherlock into his own bed.
For the first time in months, John's leg screams with delectation instead of agony and a night's sleep ends with a greeting of sunlight instead of a pool of blood and sweat. He feels like the world could be his to shoulder again. This Sherlock Holmes is the salve his injuries have truly been craving.
Harry phones John sometime around noon, and John readily agrees to meet with her for a late lunch while Sherlock's away at the Yard. Briefly, John wonders what Sherlock will tell Lestrade. He hopes Sherlock will lie.