Archive of Our Own

There's always more to learn. Sometimes, the sheer volume of it weighs Joan down: the intricacies of the New York penal code, the sizes and calibers of commonly available hand guns, the range of scents of different explosive residues... all the dry facts that will allow her to process the world around her and pull out the patterns that matter. Crime is not more complicated than the human body, but some days, it feels that way.

Other days, it's as dull as watching paint dry.

Joan glances down at the stopwatch again. She is sitting in the den on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, timing Sherlock as he attempts to pick his way out of a new set of handcuffs. They were marketed as unpickable; Sherlock is determined to prove them wrong.

So far, he hasn't had much luck. Joan cuffed his hands together behind the back of his chair almost – she checks the watch – six minutes ago.

“Giving up yet?”

Sherlock doesn't bother to reply. His eyes are closed in concentration, his head dropped forward to give his shoulders room to move. Joan would have thought that he had an image of the lock in his mind, except for the way his eyes move behind the lids. They slide to his left, back to center, then to the left again. Joan doubts if she would have noticed, if she weren't so bored.

“That doesn't actually work, you know.”

“Mm?”

“You're moving your eyes, trying to look behind you.” Joan lets her smile widen into a grin. “Even if you had your eyes open, you couldn't see your hands.”

Sherlock sighs and opens his eyes, but only to glare at her. “I am well aware of that fact, Watson. But it is a nearly instinctual reaction to look at something on which one is concentrating. It's more effort than it's worth to stop it.” He rolls his shoulders once, easing the tension there, and goes back to picking the lock. He continues speaking, but his voice lacks its usual snap, as if talking to her is also automatic and not worth the effort to stop. “I've had some luck preventing it while blindfolded in the past, but as my blindfolds are currently in the cupboard upstairs, you will simply have to suffer through my efforts.”

Joan doesn't stop to think about the impulse that has her crossing the room to stand beside him. She rests her free hand over his eyes firmly, blocking the light. For a moment, he freezes, and she almost pulls away. They don't touch often –

Then the tension goes out of him with a breath, and his fingers begin to move again in slow, careful fractions. From this angle, it's easier to see the way his shoulder blades strain under the thin t-shirt, allowing his wrists to flex enough to reach the locking mechanism. Frankly, it looks a lot more painful than picking regular cuffs, and if Sherlock weren't determined to prove his point, Joan might try to stop him.

But the soft skin of his eyelids is quiet under her palm, without even the faintest flicker of eyelashes. His eyes aren't moving.

Seventy-five seconds later, Sherlock finally pops the cuffs, and Joan drops her hand away before he bounds to his feet.

*****

Joan comes in from her morning run, sweaty and tired and riding the pleasant buzz from her soleus and gastrocnemius muscles, to find Sherlock curled up on the floor of the next room, wrists cuffed behind him around the leg of the sofa.

“Ah, you have excellent timing.” Sherlock shifts sideways to look at her, and Joan sees his phone behind him. “I was about to text you -”

“Don't you know better than to do this when no one else is here?” Joan pushes back a stray strand of hair and sighs. “Wait, what am I saying, of course you don't. What if the house caught fire?”

Sherlock grimaces and nudges the phone with his fingers. “I assure you, I had taken precautions. I made certain that my phone was in reach. In case of any emergency, I had no doubt that you would be more than capable of coming to my rescue.”

It's infuriating to Joan, how often he mixes flattery with utter bullshit. “You're an idiot.”

Sherlock drops his gaze apologetically. “In this case, I agree that I may have miscalculated. I'm afraid the angle of the handcuff bar around the base rail has caused some lowering of the circulation to my fingers, rendering them too dumb to accurately manipulate the phone.”

Ah. “Or the lockpick,” Joan concludes, and Sherlock's upper shoulder sags slightly.

“That too.” He rattles the cuffs against the sofa and adds helpfully, “The key is on the desk.”

“This is ridiculous.” Joan grabs the key and crouches down beside him, with every intention of unlocking the cuffs. She can't help but note the color of his fingers, which are dark with poor venous return. She touches them briefly, clinically, to check the temperature. They're cool. How long did it take, she wonders, and finds the question coming out automatically. “How long have you been at this?”

“Approximately twenty-five minutes. I failed to set the stopwatch before I began -”

The data points don't line up. “Yesterday, you picked these in less than ten.”

Sherlock lets out an impatient breath. “That was in a chair, if you recall, which is quite a bit easier than maneuvering around the bulk of this sofa. Now, if you would?”

Joan isn't sure why she tucks the key into her pocket instead, but she's learning to trust her instincts.

“Try again,” she says. She runs her hands up to his shoulders and begins to massage the tension out of the trapezii and deltoids, easing the blood flow back from his fingers. His skin slowly warms under her hands, the color paling to normal. Sherlock is quiet for once, and Joan is glad he doesn't demand an explanation. This is just... something. Something to do with touch, perhaps.

Joan falls back on the brusqueness she learned as an intern and squeezes his fingers once when she's done.

"If you can't get out of these cuffs in ten minutes, you don't do this again without me here. Someone here, I mean." Joan stands from where she's been crouching, her quads protesting sharply. She should have paid more attention to her own blood flow. “The phone doesn't work as a back-up plan if you won't be able to use it."

“Hmm.”

It's the noise Sherlock makes when he doesn't want to agree or argue, and Joan doesn't bother calling him out on it yet. She'll have plenty of leverage to make him promise, assuming he doesn't get out of the cuffs. After all, she still has the key.

*****

After that, Joan starts a tally in her head. The number of times Sherlock touches her. The times she touches him. Those times when she has the impulse, but doesn't follow through on it. The rate is significantly higher than she originally imagined, which doesn't bode well for her vague preliminary hypothesis. But she can't shake the sense that there is something here she's missing. She needs more data.

*****

Joan sifts through the stacks of papers spread out in a half-circle around where she sits on the floor. It's an old file of Sherlock's, one he's decided to use to test her progress, and Joan is determined to find the solution in less than the hour he allotted. She has the stopwatch ticking quietly against the sole of her bare foot; she turned the face away twenty minutes ago when she realized she was looking at it as often as she was looking at the file.

Sherlock has wandered in and out of the room so many times that Joan has tuned him out completely until he speaks.

“Your hair has come loose again.”

“What?” Joan glances up at him briefly, and he makes a curving gesture at her ear.

“Your hair,” he says again. “You've pushed it behind your ear three times in the last two minutes.”

Joan doesn't hear more than the first two words before labeling his comment irrelevant and turning back to the file. There is something odd about the inventory of the victim's desk –

Someone is touching her head.

The fact is loud in her mind like physical noise, and she feels herself freeze in place as Sherlock carefully smooths her hair back. The movements are familiar; she has pulled her own hair up often enough just that way. But there is something about feeling it from someone else's fingers. Something soothing.

Sherlock ties back her hair and steps away. And it is better; she hadn't noticed how much of a distraction it was until it disappeared.

Joan starts to thank him, but her mind chooses that moment to finally piece the clues together, and her hands are flying to the papers again before she can lose the thread.

But she doesn't forget.

*****

The next day, Joan announces that she ought to learn to pick handcuffs herself, though she starts with the basic police double-locks instead of anything more challenging. She settles herself into the same chair that Sherlock had worked in, and is only slightly surprised when he sits on the floor at her feet.

Joan takes a deep breath and forces herself to concentrate on the cuffs. Shifting them into a position where she can reach the locking mechanism with the lock pick is difficult; moving the pick without moving her wrists, even more so. Every so often, she notices that she has rocked the chair, as if moving it would provide more room to maneuver. It's a ridiculous impulse, but one she can't focus on stopping without losing her place with the lock.

When Sherlock's fingers close softly around her ankle, she feels that same shock as when he touched her hair, almost as if there were a noise in the room. It's a vivid, tactile reminder that she is not alone, and after the first moment of distraction, something shifts again in her mind. The lock is clearer, the constraints less frustrating. Her shoulders are more relaxed. She pops the first lock, and it feels simple.

“It's easier to do, when you're here.” She didn't mean to say anything, but once the words are out, Joan finds that she doesn't mind having said them.

Sherlock takes a sharp breath, but he doesn't pull away. “It is. Better.”

Joan can't help the smile that crosses her face at that.

The stopwatch clicks once. “Four minutes,” Sherlock prompts, and Joan shifts around to find a better angle for the second lock.

There is always more to learn.