Chapter Text
They arrived at the Tottenham Court Station at ten minutes to five, and the place was already teeming with surly, unobservant people jostling in every direction. After a moment's reconnoiter, Sherlock picked a spot just above the top of the escalators. They had no view of the tracks, but they would see everyone who came off a train as they funneled by in search of a way out.
They stood together by the wall, shoulder to shoulder, letting the rush-hour traffic flow and break around them as they scanned the people exiting the arches of the tunnels. Several caps made John's breath catch in his throat, but each time the person underneath was the wrong gender, or had hair too fair, or skin too dark, and he forced himself to relax again.
All of a sudden, he felt Sherlock tense beside him, and at the same time said, "Sherlock, there -- I see him."
"Yes," said the detective, scanning the rest of the crowd, reading lines of influence invisible to anyone else, like a chess master scanning the board of a game already in progress. He swore under his breath. "We're almost too late -- he's chosen a victim already, he's moving in. We don't have time!" He raised his cell, speed dial already calling out, and snapped, "Lestrade, we've got him. I have to intercept. Get here now. Tottenham Court Station." He pressed a few buttons, slid the phone into his shirt pocket, spun and grabbed John by the shoulders. "John, listen, this is vital," he hissed, voice low enough that it wouldn't carry, lips close to John's ear. "For the next five minutes, I need you to forget all your training and follow my lead. When I give the signal, I need you to panic. Got it? You are not a doctor. Understand?"
"I -- fine, okay. But what --"
"Good, follow me." Sherlock turned and strode rapidly into the crowd, towing John along by one sleeve. Not having Sherlock's height advantage, it took John a minute to realize that he was aiming for a point in front of their quarry -- no, between their quarry and his intended quarry, a woman in her early seventies with a large flowered handbag who looked a little like Mrs. Hudson's sister.
As soon as Sherlock had inserted them into the proper stream of traffic, he released John's sleeve and slowed, letting people pass them, allowing Jonathon Smith's dark leather jacket to draw a few ranks nearer. When Sherlock was satisfied, he darted a glance left, then right, gave John a swift wink, and then stumbled sideways, bumping into two commuters at once. When they protested, he stuttered an apology, then reeled away to ram into someone else. People were noticing now, turning to look at him, drawing away. He spun back to John, hands outstretched, and John caught him as his legs folded, easing him down to the floor.
He was pale as a sheet, and actually sweating. His breath came in shallow, tortured gasps, and he generally was giving an excellent performance of a man in some kind of cardiac crisis -- so good a performance, in fact, that John felt a spike of genuine concern. Was it even physically possible to fake a cold sweat, or was something really wrong with him?
"Help," Sherlock wheezed, clutching weakly at his lapels, eyes frantically scanning the crowd. "Need help -- my heart -- "
Sherlock's heart is fine, John told himself firmly, before he remembered that staying calm was exactly what he'd been ordered not to do. He diverted the hand that had automatically reached out to take a pulse, changing the movement to smoothing the curls back from Sherlock's damp face. Not a doctor's gesture.
He looked up at the gathering throng, allowing worry and desperation to flood his face, hoping he did not look too grotesque. "Is anyone here a doctor? Please, can anyone help?"
"Let me through, please, I'm a paramedic," ordered a firm voice, and the crowd parted to reveal Jon Culverton Smith: young, jacketed, capped, with his bag over one shoulder. Just the man they were looking for. Over his shoulder, John caught a last glimpse of a flowered handbag as his elderly intended victim disappeared around a corner, safe and sound.
Smith crouched on the other side of Sherlock where John had laid him on the cold station floor and smiled reassuringly. Except that John could see a familiar shrouded light in his eyes: just a little too much enjoyment, a little more eagerness than the situation called for. It was the same expression Sherlock wore at a particularly interesting crime scene, that look of yes yes YES this is what I live for that the wearer knew was indecent, but it shone through any attempt to mask it despite his best efforts.
"What seems to be the trouble?"
"I don't know, he just collapsed!" John allowed stress to force his voice high and wavering, suppressing years of training. The 'paramedic' gave his shoulder a quick squeeze (John forced himself not to flinch away) and opened his bag to pull out a stethoscope. Sherlock's breathing immediately worsened, and he transferred one hand to Smith's shirt front, holding on for dear life, effectively tangling the stethoscope in his fingers. John's anxiety evaporated. There was no reason to prevent having his heart checked unless there was nothing wrong; Sherlock might be able to fabricate distress on a surface level to an impressive degree, but if someone put their ear to his chest, his perfectly healthy heartbeat would betray the ruse in seconds. He was fine, it was all an act, and now John could focus again.
"It's all right," Smith soothed, stroking Sherlock's hand reassuringly as he tried to free his stethoscope from the clutching fingers. "Just try and breathe easy. What's your name?"
"Sh-Sherlock," was the breathless reply, and John tried not to start with surprise. So they weren't going to have false identities, then?
"Sherlock? Interesting name. You can call me Jack." He glanced at John, indicating the trapped stethoscope with an air of help me out here, will you? "And you are?"
John looked to Sherlock, who blinked in encouragement as he appeared to struggle for air. Apparently he wanted Smith to know who they were. "I'm John. I'm his friend."
"Nice to meet you both," said Smith, finally managing to free his equipment, although Sherlock's hand stayed locked on his shirt. He settled the buds in his ears, and then a thought seemed to strike him. "Wait, Sherlock and John? Like Sherlock Holmes, the detective?" He looked down, then up at John with dawning suspicion. "So you'd be John Watson, then, right? Aren't you a doctor?" The last word was almost vitriolic under the veil of curiosity.
"Oh well," sighed Sherlock in his normal tone of voice, his breathing abruptly regular again. "I suppose that's the price of fame, eh, John?"
Smith gaped at him. He slipped the stethescope into the open neck of Sherlock's shirt and listened for a few seconds. Sherlock made no effort now to stop him, smiling disdainfully. Smith sat back. "There's nothing wrong with your heart," he accused.
"No, I just needed to get your attention," Sherlock agreed, and then his face darkened abruptly. "Nor was there anything wrong with Peter, or Rachel, or Desmond, until you came along."
"Who?" Smith did a very good imitation of puzzled innocence, but John noticed he was trying just a little too hard to surreptitiously pull back from Sherlock's death-grip on his shirt. "I don't know what you -- "
"All those people you 'saved,' Jonathon Culverton Smith -- did you not even try to remember their names? Poor Peter Stark, who almost fell under a train. Did he really have a funny turn? Was he secretly suicidal? Was it just coincidence? Or was he your first try? And then dear old Rachel Howell. Did you actually have to push her down the stairs, or did the chloroform do that for you?" Sherlock's voice was deceptively smooth, but it was carrying; the ring of onlookers, now unsure whether they were witnessing a medical emergency or watching a play, began muttering amongst themselves. Smith, who had blanched at the mention of his own name, was steadily growing redder and redder, although his expression managed to remain steadfastly polite and curious.
"Desmond Farleigh was the best, though, wasn't he?" Sherlock continued, eyes boring into his target. Although he was lying on the dirty tile of a tube station, only John's arm under his shoulder keeping his hair out of the scum on the ground, he was magnetic, clearly in the position of power. "Oh, that must have been magnificent -- you stopped his heart, right there in the station, and managed to start it again, all by yourself. Who needs doctors? You can do it all alone. Your greatest triumph. You just had to do that again."
"Listen, mate," Smith said to John with a valiant attempt at a smile, "I dunno what's wrong with your friend here, but he's clearly -- "
"And then there was Victor Friesland," Sherlock overrode him in a voice like steel, and Smith froze. "Poor Victor, who you couldn't save. You had no way of knowing he was already taking digitalis for his heart, did you? You didn't know you were giving him a massive overdose from which he had no possible chance of recovery."
Smith made an angry gesture, dropping the stethoscope. "It's not my fault the idiots at the hospital gave him the wrong treatment! If they'd given him lidocaine like I told them --"
There was a short silence as John and Smith locked eyes, realising in the same split second that he had fatally revealed himself. Sherlock showed all his teeth in a grin, dark and savage in his victory.
Smith gave an inarticulate shout of rage. His hand came up, holding something that glinted in the fluorescent lighting. "Look out," Sherlock barked, shoving hard with the hand still braced on John's chest, and John jerked his head back, feeling the hiss of air as a naked needle barely missed his jaw. Before he could recover his balance, Smith had lashed out, landing a vicious left-handed punch to Sherlock's nose, and the detective lost his hold on Smith's shirt as his head cracked back against the tiled floor. Smith's other hand came down, syringe at the ready, but John grabbed his arm and wrestled him up and away. They struggled roughly, devoid of grace or strategy, Smith attempting to force the needle into John's neck, his eyes wild and his teeth bared, while John fought to gain enough traction on the slick floor to pin the taller, heavier man down.
Suddenly John felt a hand clamp down over his nose and mouth, and Sherlock's arm shoved something over his shoulder into Smith's face -- something small and silver that made a pssht noise several times in rapid succession. Smith threw his head back with a gasp, and John felt his opponent's arm abruptly weakening. He let Sherlock pull him away from Smith, who staggered and collapsed, eyes fluttering shut.
John yanked Sherlock's hand from his face and sucked in air, turning to look at his friend. "What did you just -- "
"A dose of his own medicine," grinned Sherlock, holding up a little breath-spray canister. "Chloroform. Nice and fast-acting, must be quite concentrated. I nicked it out of his shirt pocket." Sherlock's nose was bleeding, but in the glow of victory he did not seem to have noticed; certainly he looked surprised when John handed him a tissue.
The crowd around them had drawn back to give them room to tussle, and now they seemed to feel that the show was over; several of them started, tentatively, to clap, and within seconds most of them were applauding. The approbation only increased in volume when Sgts. Harris and Morrison, Lestrade in their wake, cut through the crowd to lead the rapidly-recovering Smith away in handcuffs, and everyone realized they had witnessed the real thing.
Sherlock and John were nearly swamped by admiring fans; the entire crowd seemed to feel the need to shake their hands and congratulate them. Sherlock, who accepted praise so readily from John, seemed to shrink under the public's attention, until John almost suspected Sherlock was trying to hide behind him -- ridiculous, given the disparity in their heights.
"Pinch the bridge of your nose harder," John muttered to Sherlock during a brief pause, passing him another tissue. "If you do it right-handed, they'll stop trying to shake your hand." Sherlock shot him a look of such naked gratitude that John was hard-pressed to keep a straight face as the crowds advanced again. John handed out the new business cards until his pockets were empty, and when the two police sergeants returned to collect witness statements, he turned and shepherded the Consulting Detective -- none too unwilling to leave -- out towards the turnstiles.
"That was tedious," Sherlock grumbled in his ear, crowding up close behind him on the stairs.
"That's what you get for making a scene in public," John returned over his shoulder, still riding the adrenaline high from the fight, and secretly pleased that Sherlock had behaved as well as he had; he hadn't actually fled, and he had refrained from deducing (out loud, at least) that anyone in the crowd was having an affair, so John was inclined to call it a win. "I told you those cards were a good idea. You'll have loads more traffic on your blog when this gets out."
"All of it inane, no doubt." Sherlock sniffed and probed at his face. The blood was still running sluggishly, so he refolded the tissue and pinched it over his nose again.
Lestrade met them as they came out onto the dusky pavement.
"Nicely done, gentlemen," he congratulated, holding out an evidence baggie for Sherlock to drop the chloroform cannister into. "You both okay?"
"Fine, thanks," replied John. Sherlock made a noise of protest, and he added, "Don't be such a baby, you won't bleed to death."
Sherlock harrumphed at him. "You have an email waiting for you," he informed the snickering Lestrade, waving his phone at him. "Put the audio together with the CCTV from the station, and you'll have a pretty iron-clad confession."
"You were recording us the whole time?" John demanded, and Sherlock shot him the look that meant please, don't be so dense. Its ferocity was a little dimmed by the reddened tissue. Sherlock seemed to realize this, and he pitched it into the nearest bin with a scowl. John fished out a clean one and offered it, but it was waved away.
"You know," Lestrade mused, his face exaggeratedly innocent, "I think I'll accidentally forward that email to the Chief Superintendant."
"Good idea," agreed Sherlock in an equally bland voice, but he was grinning almost as much as John was. Vindication was a heady feeling.
Lestrade thanked them again and climbed into the squad car that pulled up at the curb; John could see him consider offering a ride, and deciding against it. He waved at them as the car drew away; John nodded in return, and Sherlock ignored him.
As they waited for a cab to appear, Sherlock turned to him. "I must say," he remarked with a penetrating look, "for a man as scrupulously honest as you are, you give a very good imitation of a frantic civillian concerned for his friend. Your performance was most impressive. I'm touched."
"Not as impressive as yours," John replied frankly, ignoring the personal dig. "How on earth did you learn to fake a heart attack like that? You almost gave me one, I thought there was actually something wrong with you!"
Sherlock smiled at the compliment. "Years of practice."
"You practice having heart attacks?" John shook his head. "Of course you do."
"Not heart attacks specifically, but playing sick, yes. I was a champion malingerer at school: class was boring, the teachers were dull, and the library seemed a better use of my time. I had fainting spells regularly all over the grounds, until Mycroft made me stop. It's all mind over matter, John; the transport will obey the intelligence, if you exercise it enough." He sniffed away a small threatening trickle of blood, and John pretended not to see.
"I notice you didn't let him get the stethescope on you, though. Not even the great Sherlock Holmes can force his own heart to skip a beat, eh?"
"No," admitted Sherlock with a moue of irritation, and John laughed at him. "The radial pulse is easy enough to suppress," he continued, and John's smile died as his own heart faltered at the memory, "but the heart itself is an organ over which I have little or no control. Unfortunately."
There was silence as the cab drew up at Sherlock's imperious wave. The only words spoken were the destination, and John's quiet, "Here," as he handed over the tissue again when the surreptitious sniffing grew more and more frequent.
When they got to the flat, Sherlock immediately disappeared into the bathroom, emerging in his dressing gown with a clean face ten minutes later. He was met with an ice pack wrapped in a wet towel, at which he raised an aristocratic eyebrow. "Really, John? I'm fine."
"Do you want a black eye in the morning?" John demanded. "Your nose isn't broken, but it's already swelling up, and I can tell it hasn't actually stopped bleeding. Now sit down."
Sherlock dropped into his customary armchair with bad grace, slumping rebelliously, but he put the cold pack to his nose. He jerked away when John's hand brushed his hair. "Stop that. I'll concede the ice is a good idea, but I refuse to submit to mollycoddling."
"I'm not petting you, you berk -- you hit your head on the floor, remember?" John reminded him, amused. "Lean your head forwards." Sherlock tucked his chin into his chest, and John probed with gentle fingers over the back of his skull. His hair was surprisingly soft (must be that expensive shampoo he used) and, more importantly, there was no sign of swelling. "Nary a bump. You'll be fine. But just in case -- " Sherlock yelped as John pressed a second ice pack to the back of his head. "Sorry. Bit sore?"
"No," Sherlock groused, "bit cold. How am I supposed to think with frostbite on both ends of my brain?"
"I guess you're not," replied John complacently. "For the next twenty minutes, at least, you'll just have to sit still and wait." Seeing as Sherlock made no move to hold the compress to the back of his own head, John perched himself on the arm of the chair and leaned over to snag the remote from the table, settling in to hold it for him. Sherlock grumbled into his towel as John flicked through channels, deciding on a nature programme that they could both enjoy for the stunning visuals without objecting to the science or deducing the animals' motivations.
John drew his hand away as Sherlock shifted position; he tucked his feet under him, folding his long legs into an impossibly small space, so that he could balance the ice on his knees and simply rest his face against it. He hugged his shins and settled in, a sulking gargoyle. He sighed morosely but did not offer further protest when John returned the cold pack to the back of his head.
When John checked his watch at the end of the programme and decided the ice could come off, he realized the room had been very quiet for at least ten minutes. Upon closer inspection, Sherlock appeared to be snoring gently into his knees, hands lax around his ankles. The towel under his nose was no more than cool to the touch, so John elected not to disturb him by removing it. God only knew when the next sleep would come for Sherlock; as soon as he found another case, he would be off at a run, regardless of the hour.
John stood, stiffly, and bit back a groan as he stretched. Between carrying shopping, impromptu arm-wrestling matches with large angry men, and sitting in a twisted position for twenty-five minutes, his shoulder was beginning to complain. He worked it through a series of his old range-of-motion exercises as he quietly took his laptop into the kitchen to type up his notes on the case.
After half an hour of staring at the screen while the cursor blinked at him attentively, he had nothing useful. How had this worked, all those years ago? How had he once started these blog entries? Perhaps he should start from the end and work his way back --
But starting from the end meant remembering Sherlock collapsing limply into his arms, blood dripping down his pale face and into his staring eyes -- wait, no, the nosebleed had come later -- and all of a sudden, John was kneeling on the pavement in front of Bart's, and it was three years ago, and Sherlock was falling --
"Jesus!" John thrust himself away from the table with a gasp as Sherlock appeared in the doorway, soggy towel in one hand and a crust of dried red around one nostril. It took him a couple of blinking seconds to realize that the blood covering the rest of Sherlock's face was a memory, not a fact.
Sherlock frowned at him. "John?"
"Sorry, I -- you startled me."
The detective's gaze sharpened. "No, that's not it. Something else is wrong. Your respiratory rate is so elevated I could hear it from the other room. You were -- " His eyes flicked from John's clenched fists to the open laptop on the table, where the empty text box sat next to other more painful completed blog entries, and his face fell open. "Oh. Flashback?"
John laughed, pressing shaking hands to his face. He should know better, by now, than to think he could hide anything. "Yeah. You'd think they'd stop happening, wouldn't you? Now that I know it wasn't real."
"Hmm," responded Sherlock, but John was not ready to look at him again yet, so he could not tell what, if anything, that meant.
After a long moment, Sherlock drew a careful breath. "I am sorry, you know," he said quietly, "that I had to go to such lengths to convince you. If I could have spared you this, I would have."
John dropped his hands and stared at him. Sherlock looked distinctly uncomfortable, the vulnerability twice as noticeable in a man normally so self-assured. It made John want to cross the kitchen and embrace him -- hell, he wanted to on his own account right now anyway -- but Sherlock Holmes did not hug.
So he settled for a smile (which, judging from the answering flicker of expression that crossed Sherlock's face, was not an entirely successful smile, but it was the best he could do) and said, "I know."
Sherlock studied him for a long minute, plainly unconvinced.
"Seriously, it's okay," John insisted, wondering a little which one of them he was trying to reassure. "You're just going to have to be a little patient with me, all right? This isn't something you can fix for me. I need time to readjust. It's great having you back, really, and going on cases again is fantastic, I just -- it's bringing up a lot of things I thought I had buried."
"Like me?" suggested Sherlock with an uncertain grin, and John snorted with bitter laughter. It was a good thing he enjoyed gallows humour, he thought, shaking his head to clear it of the shining black of Sherlock's empty gravestone, because anyone else would have slugged the man by now.
"Let's go get dinner," he blurted, suddenly ravenous, not to mention in need of fresh air.
Sherlock's smile relaxed into something more natural. "Angelo's?"
"Yes," answered John firmly, "but only if Angelo already knows you're alive. I don't have the fortitude to sit through another tearful reunion tonight."
"You're safe," Sherlock assured him, steering him out of the kitchen and passing him his jacket. "I saw him weeks ago. He may be more surprised to learn that you are still alive, in fact."
John laughed, a real laugh this time, and followed him down the stairs.
And if Sherlock noticed that he was limping, just a little, he had the sense not to mention it.