Chapter Text
The words flashed through Sherlock’s mind again: I owe you a fall.
He was falling again, arms and legs spiralling instinctively for purchase out to the sides… falling, falling.
But it wasn't the fall that hurt, it was—
And then he landed, face-first into something soft, which opened up beneath him and swallowed him whole. Gasping, the breath forced out of him even in the cushioned impact, he fought his way to the surface and raised his head above the cloth bags stamped with Soft Clean Express.
“John?” he called.
He managed to climb to his feet, slewing sideways on bulging bags that gave and rolled underneath his feet towards the edges of...
Metal box, open top, corrugated sides, laundry company.
The entire box accelerated, fast, making Sherlock fall backwards and forcing him to fight his way upwards again through the bags of laundry to avoid being suffocated.
“Stop the van!” he yelled, finding his feet again, wading forward. He hammered on the side with his fist and kept on hammering, using the side of the van to balance as the bags rolled beneath him. “JOHN!”
“I’m all right!” came a muffled voice from not too far away. “I landed in… bags of laundry?”
“STOP THE VAN!” repeated Sherlock, emphasising each word with a hammer of his fist on back of the cab. The last word echoed louder as the van pulled abruptly to a halt.
Ten seconds later, the tailgate opened, spilling out heaps of bags and a severely rumpled Sherlock.
“Hey!” yelled the cross looking man in a blue jumpsuit who was looking down at him. “What the bloody hell were you doing in there?”
Sherlock didn’t answer, looking up at the van behind, which had also stopped, its driver staring at him open-mouthed.
“My friend,” Sherlock gasped, waving his hand. He tried to get wobbly legs underneath him, and ended up sitting abruptly on top of one of the other bags. “Landed in the other one!”
He waited only long enough to see the other driver open his door and get out, looking baffled, before he tried to stand again. This time he made it upright, staggering towards the pavement.
“Mycroft!” he yelled. “Mrs Hudson?”
Two slightly smoked looking figures made their way around the side of the building, the taller one holding a shepherding arm around the other, who seemed to be repeatedly slapping at his chest with both hands in protest and berating him.
“We’re fine,” managed Mycroft between coughing and flinching from the weak, insistently aggravating blows. He turned to looked down his nose in bemusement at Mrs Hudson.
Sherlock let the assault pass without inquiry—it was more than likely well deserved—but breathed a sigh of relief as he made it to the kerb and looked along the side of the second van to see John, a little shaky but none the worse for the wear, extracting himself from the pile of spilt laundry on the road.
“What just happened?!” John demanded, wild-eyed. “That was way beyond lucky, Sherlock!”
“Are you all right?” Sherlock asked.
“Yeah, you?” John gave him a visual once-over to check, but accepted Sherlock’s confirming nod. He shook his head in disbelief, then headed over to check on Mrs Hudson and, with all due reluctance, Mycroft.
Sherlock whirled on the driver of the van—the first one—who’d started haphazardly tossing back the bags that had fallen out along with Sherlock.
Smoker, appeared written in his hand. Married, up along his ring finger. No children, on the smooth, unwrinkled skin beside his eye. Large dog, was along his hip. Doberman, beside the distinctively coloured strands of hair. Low on cash, appeared on the faded, threadbare collar of the shirt he wore beneath his company jumpsuit.
Nothing telling.
“Why were you parked there?” Sherlock demanded. “Right then and there? Tell me!”
“Couldn’t say, mate,” shrugged the driver, reloading the last few bags. “We drive along here every morning, round this time. Yesterday some bird at the hotel slipped us a fifty each to loiter a few minutes in line with those windows—” He swung the back closed and turned to point at the window of 221, eyes a little agog at the flames licking up out of it. “—round nine this morning. Said I’d know when it was time to move on. When that place went up, I knew all right! Oi, this wasn’t, like, a terrorist attack, was it? You’d never have known she was one of them, she wasn’t wearing no scarf or nothing!” He looked suddenly more frightened than amazed. “‘M I involved? I swear, I didn’t know! Only this load’s due at the Savoy by half past, and there’ll be hell to pay if they don’t have clean sheets come room service time.”
Two previous warnings for tardiness, appeared in the stress lines beside his left eye, and on the other side: Needs this job.
Sherlock glanced at Mycroft, sidelong, who gave a defeated wave with his free hand—he’d managed to extract himself from Mrs Hudson’s grip only for John to take charge of his arm and begin putting it through a complicatedly doctorly series of motions. At least his brother agreed: there was no point detaining the drivers further. If Eurus was as intelligent as Mycroft said, she wouldn’t have left them anything to go on with these poor fools. They’d just be wasting time when the only productive thing they could do would be to go straight to the source.
“No, no,” Sherlock told the man, shaking his head. “It was just an accident. My flatmate there got careless with the gas burner.” John looked up from where he was manipulating the bones in Mycroft’s wrist to shoot him a dark look, but didn’t protest. “Lucky thing for us you were here. Have a good day.”
Sherlock stalked over to the other three, ignoring the drivers exchanging a look of mutually terrified agreement, half-running to their cabs and speeding away.
“Well,” he told them. “It seemed likely given the fact that her explosive didn’t detonate immediately, but now it's unmistakable that she doesn’t want us dead.”
“Nor either of you, at least, seriously injured,” put in Mycroft, wincing under John’s ministrations.
“Not yet, anyway,” added John grimly, then dropped from cynicism into his brisk doctor’s tone. “Nothing broken, minor strain on that elbow,” he said. “It should come good within a few days. I can strap it if that would make you more comfortable, but mostly you should just take it easy and try not to do anything that hurts, all right?”
“Thank you, Doctor Watson,” he said noncommittally, reclaiming his arm and standing up straight.
He eyed the minor rumples in his suit with the disappointed air of one who lived in every expectation that even clothes would fall into neatly pressed line if he simply looked at them enough.
“Well, if it’s my attention she wants," he added, "she now has it in full. If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, Mrs Hudson." He nodded to each of them in turn. "I’ll leave you in the capable hands of emergency services. I’m sure you understand that I have some urgent phone calls to make, and some new holes to rip.”
A sleek black car pulled up at the kerb beside them, just as two fire engines and an ambulance did the same further down the street, outside 221. Mrs Hudson, apparently quite recovered, gave Mycroft's retreating back a final glare and hurried down to see about the state of her home.
Sherlock exchanged a quick mutual glance with John: raised eyebrows, a tiny nod. He hurried over to grab the door of Mycroft's car before it could close.
“Come on, Mycroft,” he said. "It's not your attention she wants, clearly. If you try to go anywhere without us, there'll probably be more explosions."
Sherlock looked at his brother for a long moment, until he got a sideways tilt of the head in concession. He opened the door wider to let John in ahead of him—it was always a good idea to have some kind of a buffer zone between himself and Mycroft—but before following he looked up at the window once more… and then down at the road where the laundry vans had parked.
“Wait,” he said, then looked back to the window—to the road—to the window.
In his mind, the image of a man formed, arms and legs windmilling as he jumped out and arced—kinematic equations spilling out behind him to inscribe a perfect parabolic curve in the air—gracefully falling towards the waiting van…
… d = vi t + ½ a t 2, wrote its way down the wall of 221B from the railing of the balcony towards the paving stones below, a = 9.8 m/s 2, vi = 0, d = 3.5 m, t = ….
There was a brief pause as the number filled itself in.
… 0.85 seconds.
The equations started arraying themselves horizontally this time, starting back inside a cutaway section of 221B's wall where a second figure was running, leaping from the chair to the windowsill and then pausing as its foot left the ground to hurdle over the rail.
… vi ~= 5m/s, appeared hanging over the figure's head, and then out into the air continued, a = 0, t = 0.85s, d = …
Sherlock frowned as the latest number appeared, and then rewrote itself on the paving stones three metres from the wall, well short of the kerb. The parabolic curve readjusted itself to match, and on the street, several metres further away, a ghostly laundry van revved its engine and drove away, completely empty of anything but its ordinary load.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, this doesn’t work. The angle’s too stee—”
... Sherlock!!! See, this is the problem with you as a narrator. You never cooperate. You see a loose thread in a perfectly good story, and you just have to pull on it, and keep pulling.
Look, all right, okay. If you insist, I’ll check the footage.
Rewind. Play. Blah blah blah, ‘good luck boys’, countdown, running jumping exploding….
Bugger.
Hubby? Can you double check some intuitive physics for me? Yes, I know I beat you in the race to second place in high school physics, but I didn't exactly top the year, did I? Besides, I can’t catch a ball to save my life, will you just look? Yeah. They’ll land right there, won’t they, near the edge of the pavement. Blank, featureless concrete tiles. No laundry vans. No air bags. No Speedy's awning. No troupe of French mime artists holding up a sheet of tissue paper over a humorously oversized tub of custard.
We can see. Exactly. Where. They’ll. Land. In shot. On the concrete. Right there.
Bugger.
Why, Moftiss, why do you make this so hard.
Okay. Back it up, let’s try again. No more narration from you though, Sherlock; I’m not risking that happening again.
No! I don’t want to hear it! No more physics! You're not the only one with traumatic memories from your childhood! Some of us don't get to delete those things, we just have to live with the memory of having come in... second. Ugh. There's a reason I'm a writer, not a rocket scientist like bloody first-in-class Hung Wang turned out to be. Just… just do as you’re told this time, and no one has to get hurt. All right?
Right. Everybody ready?
And… action!