Work Text:
“Let’s go, John.”
It’s the middle of the night. Baker Street is quiet, half-deserted. Must be due to the rain; didn’t notice it at the time—much more important things to focus on—but there are standing pools along the road, reflecting yellowish street lights, and that ever-present London fog lingers, creeping along. He’ll bring John’s gloves, just in case. John always forgets them when he doesn’t expect it to be cold.
“What is it?” John groans. He’d fallen asleep sitting up on the sofa, listening to Sherlock talk through some evidence Lestrade left with them. Nothing pressing, nothing interesting—he solved the case earlier that day. Just something to do with his brain while he waited for something real and worth his time.
“Case.”
“I’m sleeping.” John checks his watch. Tedious.
“There will be time for that later.” Time for you and time for me. “Time for murder now; come along. Mycroft has served up a plate of questions.”
“Mycroft?” John squints. Disbelief? Suspicion?
“Yes, Mycroft.” Don’t be slow, John, he lets those words go unvoiced.
“You don’t take cases from Mycroft. Not without threats and coercion.”
“I do when he admits that he can’t solve them himself.”
John stretches. Indecision obvious—he’s looking longingly towards the kitchen, flicks his eyes towards his bedroom, glances back at Sherlock.
“No time, John; toast and tea later.” He sweeps his coat on, the scarf, slips through the door. Smiles (secretly—Do I dare? No.—he does not turn back) when he hears John descend the stair.
---
A dinner party, a murder. They’re all detained here—no one can leave until they’re cleared. Mycroft has that kind of power. He is the one who lets them in.
“A morning coat, Mycroft?”
“It was appropriate to my situation earlier today,” Mycroft sneers at the implication of impropriety.
“A wedding. Don’t tell me—” It’s written all over him. “Similarly ranked... ‘government official’; you’ve worked with him for some time, long enough to consider him a close friend. Father of the bride or the groom, whom you’ve met before in the past, otherwise you still may not have warranted an invitation. There was cake—”
Mycroft rolls his eyes. “Hardly a stretch of your deductive faculties to assume there was a cake at a wedding.”
He leans in close, sniffs and looks. “Unusual flavor, though. Champagne, with peaches?”
Mycroft frowns, checks the sleeves of his light grey jacket (nothing there), and he knows he’s got it right.
“The reception ended before sundown, but you met another old friend there, who coerced you to come to this party. Didn’t have a chance to stop off at home and change into something more suitable, which means that the wedding was well outside of London and the two of you shared a car into the city. Leading us to here. Why are you wearing that cheap tie pin?”
“Gift from the bride—she was one of my secretaries when she first finished university. She didn’t stay with me for very long.”
As evidenced by her lack of attention to Mycroft’s taste and class. “Of course.”
“Isn’t there a body we’re supposed to be looking at so that all these people can go home?” John interrupts. Cranky, hasn’t slept much over the past several nights. Sherlock’s fault.
“Just this way,” Mycroft says. He leads them through a room dense with people, some looking tense and fraught, but most going about their business as though they’re unaware that anything is amiss. There’s a crack of a cork, music playing from a farther room.
“Have you ever noticed that God in The Creation of Adam looks as though he’s reaching out from a human brain, granting consciousness...” the woman’s voice trails off as she walks past them, friend by her elbow nodding emphatically.
The voices die as they pass into a hall, then into another large room where it’s quieter still.
The corpse is there on the floor, lying on her back, hair—limp strands, red and brown—wreathed around her. Her eyes are open and glistening, though lifeless.
“She’s been drowned.”
Mycroft gives him a tight smile. “You can see my reticence to investigate the matter myself.” Legwork.
He crouches down for a closer look; John drops down on the opposite side.
Her hair and face are still wet. There are trickles of water into the collar of her dress, but the rest remains dry. No skin under her fingernails, no visible contusions, no signs of a struggle or of fighting against the slow, creeping agony as water replaced air within her lungs.
“Some lividity in the head and neck, but she wasn’t under the water for very long,” John supplies.
He nods his thanks, stands. “I’ll need to see them all.”
---
This. He loves this: eyes fixed on a person, mentally taking them apart until all he needs to know is pinned and wriggling, minuten pressed into plastazote (delicate work, but he’s done this since he was a child), before his eyes. They’re sprawled there now, and it’s easy, so easy.
“The sister. She’s not been drinking, appears to not have indulged in any of those tarts that everyone else has been into. A velvet dress like that wouldn’t give up crumbs so easily.” From the corner of his eye he sees John check himself, brush off his shirt front, and smiles, just a little twitch. “She’s diabetic—they both were. Familiar with each other’s tolerances and limits. Perfect opportunity to induce a severe hypoglycemic state, after which she was unable to struggle when her head was submerged. Was it the sink or the bath?”
The sister begins to protest, but with all eyes trained on her, she folds. “It was the bath. Easier to keep myself from getting wet.”
“And there you have it.” He looks to Mycroft, smirks. Incredibly simple.
Mycroft gives him one of those long-suffering looks that he’s perfected over the years, and moves in to take care of matters.
---
The hostess has found them. “Stay, have something to drink while we wait for the police?”
He would rather have bamboo slivers shoved under his fingernails. There are more important places to go and things to do.
“Love to,” John says, and that’s that.
He knows them all, thinks he knows—evenings, morning, afternoons, measured out in cups of tea, coffee spoons of sugar stirred in by John just so. John knows that about Sherlock, how he likes his tea, his coffee, his marmalade spread on toast on every third Wednesday (has he noticed that pattern?). This is not something that they usually do together, an untested variable. Does John know how many functions like this Sherlock has been to in his life, how many conversations he’s stumbled through, how many nights he’s spent like this, wanting to be anywhere but here? Victor knows; he was there.
From across the room, with a woman who won’t stop sliding her bracelet up and down her arm while she talks (until she reaches out to touch John instead, that is), does John care?
They’re all the same here, these people. Women in expensive dresses, arms bare and shivering, clutching at shawls, as the chill October air sweeps in through the open windows where there are men leaning out smoking cigarettes, cooped up in this house too long. He’s known them all before. Left that world behind.
Leaves it again, now. John gives his apologies before he follows after.
---
Home. John sleeps, so peacefully, and he can’t help himself.
Long fingers, smoothed over John’s hair. His legs are stretched on the floor, by John’s bed, and he watches himself reach up, touch. John doesn’t stir. He knows he won’t—he’s done this before.
You’re the most... fucking reckless idiot I’ve ever known, John had shouted at him once, when he went running off on his own and John only just made it in time. They’d laughed about it later; John apologized, said he didn’t mean it.
John was right to recant; it’s not true. He is not reckless, he does not dive forth into each unknown—in short, he is afraid.
Would it be worth it?
To sit here, when John wakes, to say I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all—
Sherlock? We don’t talk about that.
I shall tell you all. One more miracle, to let everything spill forth and when he’s done...
John will prop his head up on his pillow and say That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.
He is still wondering, when John does wake up and turns to find him.
“You’re here.” John says. Sherlock knows people, knows them so well, so why can’t he read the meaning in John’s tone?
“I—”
“Something wrong?”
“No.”
“But you’re in my room.”
“Well spotted.” It is impossible to just say what I mean!
John smiles, teases. “Sentiment, then?”
After the cases and the Met and running together in the streets. After blog posts, after the teacups, and after experiments left, undisturbed, sitting on the kitchen floor. Would it be worthwhile?
He shrugs. “Hardly.”
John sighs, long-suffering. “All right, I’ll make breakfast. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how long it’s been since you ate. For a man of your age, you can hardly take care of yourself.” John tosses aside the duvet, sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes. “Pass me my dressing gown.”
He does, and slips out and down the stairs before John shrugs it on.
That’s good enough, for now.