Chapter Text
Really though, John thought despondently as he floated along the corridors of Bart’s, I survived Afghanistan. I couldn’t survive being invalided home, and now this is my punishment? Stuck wandering uselessly, no point, no purpose? No one can see me…
John let that thought trail off. He had learned, relatively quickly, that anger made lights flicker and smashed things. No wonder all the stories were about vengeful spirits tormenting people. John had only been dead a week and he was sick of it. Give him another month, tops, and he’d no doubt be haunting people just for the hell of it.
He had been tired, so bloody tired, of the monotony that was his life post-war. He was used to action, adrenalin, and instead he was faced with the same boring routine for every boring day for the rest of his boring life. His therapist seemed to think he was having trouble coping with being a civilian, which was true, but she seemed to think he was frightened by the war. She was an idiot. He missed the war, adventure in general. Nothing exciting happened to John Watson, not since he was wounded and invalided home.
It makes a perverse kind of sense that, when he tried to escape the monotony of life, he ended up “living” it still. Maybe it was a form of punishment. Suicide was supposed to be a sin, right?
John shook his head, pulling himself out of his circular thoughts and looking around. He realized that he was in the morgue, and he could hear muffled thumps coming from the other side of the door. Intrigued, he floated through the door, bypassing the woman near the window and floating straight into the morgue. He was confronted with possibly the last thing he had expected to see.
A man, with a wrench, beating a corpse. What the hell?
The man straightened, setting the wrench on the table beside the body and barely glancing in the direction of the woman John had passed.
“I’ll need to know what bruises form in the next hour, a woman’s alibi depends on it,” he said, moving over to where his jacket lay and shrugging it on, picking up a coat and gloves next, along with a newspaper. Then, he turned around, coming face to face with John, which shouldn’t have been a problem. Except the man was looking at him, actually looking at him, and seemed to be able to see him.
“Can you see me?” John asked, not expecting an answer. The man couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t…
“Of course I can,” he said briskly, stepping around John and leaving the lab, ignoring the woman’s flirting.
John gaped for a moment. Whoever he was, that man could see him. John floated out of the morgue, frustrated when he didn’t spy the mystery man anywhere. Where would he go? At a loss, John floated vaguely down the hallway, heading back upstairs, and stopped when he reached one of the labs. He entered, surprised to find the man he was looking for was sitting at a microscope.
“Can you really see me?” John couldn’t help but ask. The woman in the morgue could have asked him a question which John hadn’t heard, which was why he had answered…
“Obviously,” the other man drawled, looking up with a brief flash of irritation. “If I couldn’t see or hear you, how would I be talking to you?”
“Fair point,” John conceded, causing the man to smirk as he went back to the microscope. “Who are you?”
“Sherlock Holmes,” he replied, not taking his eyes off of the microscope. “And you’re John Watson.”
“How did you know that?” John asked, confused and a little irritated. Would it kill him to at least pretend to be polite?
“You were in the paper last week,” Sherlock said disinterestedly, still looking at the microscope. “You fit the profile they assigned, although I was able to deduce more than they actually knew. Apparently my deductions were correct.”
“Oh?” John asked, trying not to sound interested and failing. He hadn’t known that he was in the paper, but he was curious about what Sherlock had ‘deduced’. Also, it was nice talking to someone who actually could see and hear him. Being a ghost sucked.
“You didn’t kill yourself because you were haunted by your memories of the war,” Sherlock said, finally deigning to take his eyes off of whatever he was doing with that bloody microscope and fixing him with a piercing stare. “You more than likely did have PTSD and nightmares, but you didn’t kill yourself because of them. You missed the war; you missed the adventure.”
“That’s…brilliant,” John said, looking at Sherlock in amazement. His therapist hadn’t even got that, and he had done everything but spell it out for her.
“Really?” Sherlock asked, looking equal parts shocked and pleased.
“Really,” John affirmed. “How’d you know? Not even my therapist knew that.”
“I deduced it, as I said,” Sherlock said, “I simply observe what most people miss. I’m a consulting detective, the only one in the world.”
“Consulting detective?” John asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“As I said, I am the only one in the world,” Sherlock said absently, making a note about his experiment on a notepad. “I invented the job. When the police are out of their depth, which is always, they come to me. I can see what they miss.”
“Why can you see me?” John asked, more intrigued with each passing minute. Sherlock was interesting, and he hadn’t had anything interest him since he was shot.
Sherlock frowned, looking pensive. “I don’t know,” he said, which seemed to irritate him.
“Have you ever seen any other ghosts?” John asked, wondering if he was the only one hanging around or if there were others.
“Sometimes at a particularly gruesome murder the victim will linger,” Sherlock answered, still frowning. “I would usually be able to get them to follow me somewhere out of the way, and I would ask them questions based on what I observed. I don’t like doing that though, it ruins the puzzle.”
“That’s why you do your job? To solve puzzles?” John asked, still curious. Privately, he thought Sherlock was more than a little mad, but he also seemed to be frighteningly intelligent.
“Of course,” Sherlock said, shrugging as he finished his notes. “I don’t want to be bored. My mind races out of control, and I need some way of distracting it. Drugs are no longer an option…”
“Drugs?” John yelped. He was talking to a junkie?
“Ex-junkie,” Sherlock said, his scowl deepening. “I have been clean for a while now, but that means I need a new distraction.”
“Your cases are your new addiction,” John realized. “You get high on the adrenalin and the fact that you can prove you’re cleverer than anyone else.”
“I think you might be the only one who has understood that,” Sherlock mused, “But then, you would, wouldn’t you?”
John just nodded. He could understand that Sherlock needed something to distract him, something to keep him from being bored. Isn’t that what made him pull the trigger? Sherlock gave him little time to muse though.
“Sorry, got to dash,” Sherlock said, collecting his coat, gloves, and newspaper and heading for the door. “I need to check on those bruises and inform Scotland Yard that their suspect isn’t the murderer.”
He was half way out the door before John spoke. “Is that it?”
Sherlock half-turned. “Problem?”
“You’re the only one who can see or hear me,” John growled, frustrated, “What do you think that means?”
Sherlock shrugged. “That means you can continue to float around, bored out of your mind, or you can come with me.”
“Go with you?” John asked, surprised. Out of all the things he thought Sherlock would say, that was certainly not one of them.
“Genius needs an audience,” Sherlock pointed out with a smirk. “Apparently, talking to you is excellent for brain activity, as I made this connection at least three minutes faster than I would have otherwise. Talking to you may be more beneficial than talking to my skull.”
“Skull?” John asked, but he was talking to empty air. Shaking his head, he trailed after the thin genius, wondering what he had gotten himself into.
He followed Sherlock to the morgue, then out of Bart’s and into a cab, heading who knew where.
“Where are we going?” John asked, looking out the window.
“To catch the murderer, obviously. He lied about his alibi and the Yard arrested the wrong person. She was just a druggie looking for her next hit and was planning on doing a little burglary to get the money she needed. The victim was married to the murderer and had found out about his affair. She revealed that he wasn’t the only one who slept around, and he killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”
“And you’re going to confront him?” John asked incredulously. Definitely more than a little mad if he was chasing down murderers.
“Obviously,” Sherlock drawled, not looking up from his phone as he rapidly texted. “The Yard will take at least twenty minutes to get organized and set out, making it at least half an hour before they will get to the husband’s hideout, giving him plenty of time to run. He has tickets for a flight out of the country if I’m not mistaken, and he’ll have boarded the plane before they arrive at his home, and the plane will have already taken off by the time they reach the airport.”
“They can have airport security detain him at wherever he lands,” John pointed out.
“Boring,” Sherlock scoffed, “This is much simpler and has the added benefit of ensuring that the Yard doesn’t muck this up as they are occasionally wont to do.”
“If you say so,” John muttered. He still thought Sherlock was mental, but he couldn’t deny that this was more interesting than anything that had happened to him in a long time.
Things didn’t go exactly according to Sherlock’s plan. By the time the man was in official custody, Sherlock had taken a beating. The man was strong, but moreover he was desperate. Sherlock had nearly subdued him when the man got his hands around Sherlock’s throat and began to choke him. Sherlock writhed in his attacker’s grip, his struggles growing progressively weaker.
If Inspector Lestrade hadn’t shown up when he did, John mused, Sherlock would have joined me on the other side. That worried him more than he thought it should. He hovered beside Sherlock’s bed as the detective slept the sleep of the exhausted, frowning. He’s the sort that needs someone to watch over him, otherwise he’d get himself killed.
More than anything, John wished that could be him. After spending only a few hours with Sherlock, he realized that the man’s life was anything but boring. Following him around the city as he solved the crimes that puzzled the official police force would definitely be interesting, and the man himself despised boredom, so even without a case to occupy his time he would probably have some other intriguing and possibly life threatening activity to fall back upon.
However, John couldn’t possibly help Sherlock in the way he needed. The man needed someone who could directly be of use to him, someone living who would be able to help him. John couldn’t help him. How could he, when he was incorporeal and invisible to everyone but Sherlock? What if the man injured himself on another case and needed help? John couldn’t call for aide, nor speak with anyone other than Sherlock. He was really regretting that bullet now, more than he had previously.