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“Sherlock?”
His flatmate hummed, not looking up from where he was repeatedly poking a chopstick into the toaster.
“That night when you were high.”
“Mm? Which one?”
John chose to ignore the implications there. “The one after we broke up the illegal drugs ring. You told me, er, that you wouldn’t know what sex was like.”
Sherlock turned around. “Did I?”
“You were saying that you don’t normally care for... physical intimacy.” John couldn’t tell if they were making eye contact or if Sherlock was looking straight through his head. “Anyway,” he prodded, “I wondered... what about Victor?”
The chopstick twirled contemplatively in Sherlock’s fingers.
“Deleted it.”
“Oh.” John furrowed his brow in spite of himself. “But... so... you have had sex before.”
The toaster made an oddly loud clanking sound as Sherlock rattled it vigorously next to his ear. John could practically see him partitioning off one quarter of his attention to the conversation at hand so that the other three-quarters could return to the pressing case of what-happens-when-you-put-an-antique-pocketwatch-into-a-toaster.
“I assume I have,” said Sherlock absently. “It’s the sort of thing people do in relationships, isn’t it?”
One of John’s eyes went squinty, telegraphing skepticism that was totally lost on Sherlock. “Can you really delete something like that?”
“Of course.” Clank. “I’ve deleted everything except what is strictly necessary to catalogue Mycroft’s thinly veiled comments about what he calls my ‘impulsive tendencies.’” The detective introduced a second chopstick. “And so that I react appropriately in the unlikely event of a chance encounter with Victor himself.”
“Oh.” John turned back to his toast, realizing it would probably be a long time before he would be able to make any more. “Right.”
They spent the bulk of the day poring over photographs of the fourth-floor flat Martin de Vries was supposed to have been thrown to his death from. At some point, John retreated to the kitchen to scrape together a bit of dinner, and by the time he returned to the other room, Sherlock and his coat were both gone.
Where are you off to? JW
Bart’s. Autopsy. Must compare bruising patterns. SH
A few hours of quiet followed, in which John tried to read a little. Mostly, though, he spent the time staring at the skull and wondering who the hell it had been before it was Sherlock’s prop. A text broke into his thoughts around eight o’clock.
Get dressed in the clothes I selected yesterday. Leaving soon. SH
“Oh, for all the,” John said mildly. He thought for a moment. “Normal people don’t just obey when a great big idiot tells them to put on stupid pants and go undercover at clubs they’re ten years too old to be seen at,” he told the skull. The skull grinned knowingly. “Going to do it anyway,” John conceded.
Are you dressing? SH
Yes, working on it. JW
Don’t complain about the pants being tight. SH
They’re tight because the trousers are tight. SH
--
At Bart’s, Sherlock was quite certain that he had perfect control of the procedure (an experiment on the side, not to do with the case, but a fine way to pass the time between texts bullying John into getting dressed for the next phase of the investigation), and so when the flashing lights and trilling alarms interrupted him, he looked affronted rather than startled or frightened. Molly, on the other hand, looked both startled and frightened. More so than her normal expression already looked that way.
“What’s wrong?” Molly queried urgently. “That’s the biohazard alarm system; did you spill something?”
Sherlock wrinkled every one of his features and silently stared back.
“Right. No, you wouldn’t, of course,” Molly muttered, backing toward the lab door. “I’ll just... see... over here.” She directed her attention at a panel of buttons near the door.
--
John eyed the mirror suspiciously. He had started with the top, feeling that was part he was least worried about. The pale red shirt fit close to his skin and tapered to his waist, which made him grimace a bit. Had he really gotten so thin? Being invalided home had really whittled away at his muscle mass. Still, though, the shirt hugged the contours of what muscle he had left in his shoulders and his back, making them as visible as they could be without him simply being naked.
The yellow pants were startlingly satisfying to pull on, the fabric cool and elastic. He startled a little at a loop stitched into the front, apparently designed to heft his cock heavenward in a disconcertingly pronounced bundle. He avoided looking into the mirror at that juncture.
The trousers were next. They felt several sizes smaller than anything he’d worn in years; the soft, utterly unfamiliar fabric clung gently to his calves and narrowed at his ankles. He spent several minutes fruitlessly trying to tug the waistband up on his hips before finally giving up and picking up his phone.
--
The doors of the lab locked immediately, standard procedure for a biohazard event (though, as Sherlock would not stop yelling into the security cameras, there had been no biohazard event in the first place). Sherlock was pacing, brushing threateningly against Molly’s lab coat with each pass. Molly quailed a little each time. “It was only a system malfunction,” she said every few minutes.
Eventually, she got a phone call and spent some time stuttering into her phone while Sherlock loomed directly in front of her. After hanging up, she ventured, “They’re sending someone along to disable the automatic lock on the doors. We’ll be out in a few minutes, I’m sure.”
Sherlock released a frustrated growl and looked about to say something biting when his phone buzzed in his pocket. Offering Molly a glare instead, he checked his messages. Like a switch, his expression flipped right over and he laughed out loud.
Trousers are wrong. Won’t button right. JW
They’re meant to button like that. SH
Am literally trapped by idiots in the lab by the way, biohazard false alarm. SH
Finally, a mousy slight man popped into view outside the lab doors and waved eagerly at the two trapped inside. Sherlock immediately deleted his face from memory. “When he calls your phone to tell you why he can’t override the locking mechanism, tell him I will find his desk and have an actual biohazard incident right on it if he doesn’t have us out in fifteen minutes.”
He turned back to his phone, waiting for John’s next text. The man took ages to type a damned thing.
Molly’s phone rang within a few minutes. “Yes, hello,” she said into it, moving toward the window in the lab door, where the nondescript man stood, phone in hand. “I see. Is there a way to override the locking mechanism?” She glanced at Sherlock, who was glowering in her direction over his own phone. “I see,” she said worriedly.
--
John resignedly buttoned the trousers and stared into the mirror again. They sat low, impossibly low, on his hips. There were miles between his navel and the button of his trousers and frankly, he couldn’t find a way to stand so that it didn’t feel like the cleft of his arse was half a second away from being visible to all and sundry. He grabbed a belt and tightened it as much as it was physically possible to do.
I hope they play Britney Spears on the speaker system and keep you in there until your ears burn off. JW
You’re overreacting. SH
The incompetents are unable to release me. You will have to go by yourself. SH
Absolutely not. JW
You must follow my instructions exactly. SH
No. JW
If this is a misguided attempt to bolster your own masculinity by refusing to obey my orders, it’s a petty reason to let someone’s death go unpunished. SH
Fuck you, I’ll go. Even though I know you’re only pretending it’s more about justice than your compulsion to know everything. JW
--
John threw on his coat and grumbled his way toward the door, holding his phone to his ear. The skull smiled behind him.
Sherlock answered on the second ring. “I could have given you sufficient instructions by text, John.”
“Yes, I know that, Sherlock, but I can’t very well text and walk, can I?”
“A shortcoming you would do well to remedy if we’re going to continue to work together.” Sherlock sighed. John could hear the murmur of a familiar tremulous voice in the background, pressing his phone between his shoulder and his ear to pat his pockets and verify that he was in possession of his keys.
“Is Molly locked in there with you?”
Another sigh, this one more forceful. “Of course. She’s on the phone with the IT idiot who’s trying to override the locking mechanism.”
“Oh, please be polite to her, Sherlock. She’s working late on a weekend to help you.”
Sherlock scoffed. “As though it was polite of her to hover in the lab while I was focusing on my experiments. As though it’s polite of her to disrupt everyone else’s work by incessantly flipping her hair and jangling her earrings.”
John felt a rush of pity for Molly, poor woman, standing right there while Sherlock completely failed to see her attempts at flirtation as anything more than annoying personal quirks. He hoped she was too absorbed in her own conversation to hear.
“She isn’t doing all that to just to be impolite—you do know that, right?”
“Yes, of course, completely transparent, I might add, and I pity whichever poor human it is whose libido she’s trying to catch in the orbit of those irritating ornaments.”
John muffled a laugh with the back of his free hand. Sherlock Holmes was impervious to being fancied. Of course he was. John wondered how many poor souls had tried, like Molly, and found their efforts about as effective as trying to romance a window pane.
Back to the issue at hand, he reminded himself. “So,” he said. “To sum up. You’re trapped in a mortuary with a number of dead people, one of whom is probably going to start haunting you, since you’ve just dropped their earthly remains unceremoniously onto the ground from a great height. Your only company otherwise is a woman who won’t stop clanging about—hm, sounds a bit like someone I had breakfast with this morning—and you haven’t got any more nicotine patches to fill the time.” He continued the rest of the way down the stairs and locked the front door behind him. “I’m about to go undercover as an idiot who spends too much money on trousers that are far too small, probably in a club too loud and posh to think properly in, and no matter how closely I follow your instructions you will probably nonetheless tell me I’ve done it all wrong.”
He was rewarded with a deep chuckle. “Yes,” said Sherlock. The annoyance that had been simmering in his voice since he answered the phone let up somewhat. “I’ve texted you the address while we’ve been talking.”
“Right.” John fumbled to check his messages without hanging up. “What do you want me to do once I’m there?”
“Blend in. Act like everyone else there, not like yourself. Move to the bar straight away, and loiter there with a drink in your hand, but don’t drink too much too fast, obviously.”
John switched his phone to the other hand, shoving the cold one deep into a pocket to warm up. “Okay. And what do I do while I’m loitering?”
“Two tasks. One, strike up a conversation with someone behind the bar. The de Vries murder has been in the papers; say you read the story and thought you might’ve seen the victim at this club before. If the barman agrees, pretend a morbid curiosity and ask as many questions as you can about his behavior, whether he was a regular patron, et cetera.”
“Okay, and the second task?”
“Watch the crowd for a man, ginger, small upturned nose, square jaw. Your age, tall, a bit on the fatter side...”
“That sounds like a description of Martin de Vries. He’s already dead, remember?” John stepped around a slow-moving jumble of tourists struggling to decide on a place to eat dinner.
Sherlock huffed impatiently. “It is also a description of his twin brother, Christopher de Vries.”
“I imagine he’ll be making funeral arrangements for his murdered brother, don’t you?”
“His estranged murdered brother. No, I imagine he’ll be keeping up appearances, trying to act as though everything is normal.”
“That’s a bit heartless; I hope you’re wrong.” John paused to allow for Sherlock’s inevitable snort of derision. Sherlock did not disappoint. “Anyway, if they are estranged, what makes you think they frequent the same club?”
“A hunch,” Sherlock supplied vaguely. “Not enough data to be sure. He’ll have features similar to the victim’s—identical twins, remember—but they probably take great pains to differentiate themselves, a response to their falling-out. Likely strategies will be facial hair, obvious piercings, clothing choices.”
“And if I see him?”
“Make a note of every person he speaks with, especially any person he seems nervous around. Make a note of how he manifests nervousness: typical signs are fidgeting with one’s hands, touching one’s face or clothing, making too much or too little eye contact—”
“Yes, thanks, got it,” John interrupted, sensing Sherlock might go on indefinitely if he allowed it. “Shall I speak to him?”
Sherlock hummed, a nice-of-you-to-offer sort of sound you might grant a four-year-old who offered to make you crème brulée. “No,” he said. “If I were able to go myself, I would, of course, try to ascertain the reasons for his brother’s recent attempts to re-establish contact, but given your disproportionate reaction to the disguise I recommended, you will be far too ill at ease to carry off a role more conspicuous than that of a casual bystander.”
John welled up with indignation. “Ill at ease! Easy for you to say; you’re not the one with his bollocks strapped to his body like they’ve threatened to flee the country!”
Completely unruffled, Sherlock responded in an even tone. “My bollocks feel fine, and they’re in quite the same state as yours, John. I don’t see why new clothing causes you such distress.”
John stomped along the street, trying to break in his stiff new shoes. “I think,” he said, “you may’ve just told me we’re wearing matching pants. And if that’s the case, I’m adding it to the list of things we will never speak of again.”
Sherlock chuckled. Which never failed to get John laughing as well.
“Anyway, of course you don’t see why I’m distressed,” said John around his laughter. “You’d look like a galloping gazelle in all this, you great tall git.”
“Lovely turn of phrase, John.” Sherlock was laughing harder now, though apparently he still couldn’t keep himself from arguing. “Incorrect, though. You’ve failed to take into account my coloring and the narrowness of my shoulders. I’d look rather faint and undernourished in those clothes, whereas they quite suit you.”
There followed a moment in which John realized two things simultaneously: first, that he was allowing himself to feel flattered, and second, that Sherlock Holmes and flattery were incompatible concepts. And—hang on—“You haven’t even seen me in them!” John protested.
“I don’t need to,” Sherlock replied. “I have a very powerful visual memory.”
“You don’t mean that you can picture exactly what I look like in clothes you’ve never seen me wear.”
“I do and I can. Though of course I can’t picture you in just anything. Not a bikini, for instance—” John spluttered, “—as I haven’t seen enough of you unclothed to generate an accurate mental picture.”
“This conversation is over,” John said authoritatively.
The club was, as John predicted, stupidly upscale. Ambient light issued from various surfaces for no discernible reason: sections of the bar, panels on the walls, some of the tables, and (possibly? Or was he imagining it?) some of the waitstaff. To his relief, there was a high concentration of men in clothes indistinguishable from his own body-hugging attire, so he blended in without too much trouble.
As per Sherlock’s instructions, John made his way directly to the bar and took up a position from which he had a clear view of both the bar area and the dance floor.
Am at the club. JW
Now seemed as good a time as any to practice a skill he’d been working on since the second day at 221B: texting without taking his phone from his pocket. Sherlock had been bored, naturally, in the wake of the pink woman’s case, and John had still been reeling with admiration. It hadn’t taken much to convince John to spend an afternoon letting Sherlock show off some of his more useful sleights of hand.
Purely for the sake of practicing, John shot off a few more texts.
Club looks like imside of am aliem. JW
Blue purple and glowing JW
I do fit in tho, gkod on yku JW
He spared a glance away from the clumps of club patrons to check his accuracy. Not perfect, but John was pleased with the results all the same. He nursed a whiskey while he took stock of each of the dance floor. Nobody yet looked especially similar to the victim from earlier, so he settled in, comfortably leaning an elbow on the bar.
--
Sherlock hunched over an autopsy table, heels of his hands firmly planted against his eye sockets. He was considering removing his own body parts, just to have something to experiment on.
Molly had been standing at the door, speaking with the ineffectual man on the other side, for over an hour. Dark curls shivered as Sherlock growled again, even louder than the last seven or eight times.
“Hang on a minute,” Molly said into the phone. She flitted over to Sherlock and stood for a moment. Sherlock didn’t move. He was just about to snap at her about vacantly staring when a hesitant pressure materialized at his spine, between his shoulder blades. It disappeared and then returned, once, then twice, then a third time. On the fourth time, he realized he was being petted.
Sherlock frowned, but tolerated the contact. “You’re attempting to soothe me.”
“Is it... is it all right?” The touch on his back continued tentatively, marking out a slightly longer swath down his spine.
Sherlock reflected. “It’s not especially soothing to me, no. But you appear to like it, given the intensity with which you’re watching your hand’s movement and the way you lengthen your stroke each time.”
Molly’s hand stuttered but didn’t quite stop.
“If it’s calming to you, please do continue,” said Sherlock. “Might render you less jumpy and shrill.”
“Erm,” said Molly. “Thanks.”
“Perhaps you ought to get a cat.”
The back stroking kept on for a quarter of an hour, and then Molly tentatively curled her forefinger into a strand of Sherlock’s hair, still on the phone with the man outside the door. There were long silences while he presumably fiddled with his laptop or the door itself, and then brief spurts of conversation, completely pointless, things like “So where did you go to university?” and “Do you visit your parents in Florida quite a lot?” Sherlock could hear Molly’s brain generating new inane questions to ask.
Light tugs started landing around his head as Molly grew bolder, twisting one strand of his hair and then another around her fingers. It felt as though a fleet of birds had arrived and thought his hair was edible, and it might have been annoying, but Sherlock couldn’t really be arsed to care about it one way or another. The boredom was enervating. He could see so many things—someone had dropped their laptop on the table in the last week, hard enough to damage it permanently—but none of them relevant, all of them only wasting space on his hard drive.
A text broke into the blank buzzing in his head, and he blew out a sigh of thanks.
Am at the club. JW
Sherlock watched the screen as John’s sluggish messages demonstrated that he was practicing texting from his pocket, that he was half enjoying being at the club after all, though he’d never admit it, and that he hadn’t yet properly observed anything at all about his surroundings. Sherlock waited, more amused and less bored than he had been before.
No sign of twin brother? SH
--
John read Sherlock’s text. He was fairly certain the fact that Sherlock hadn’t commented snidely on his typing meant that he approved of the pocket-texting technique, so John stuck his hand back into his pocket to text back.
No sign of brother. JW
John wondered if the man he was waiting for was dangerous. Probably not, in a crowded place like this. And Sherlock could fuck right off; he didn’t feel especially ill at ease, now that he’d stopped thinking about his trousers. If he found the man, John thought he might go ahead and speak with him after all, find out what Sherlock wanted to know, and prove the tall bastard wrong for once.
my god I think they are actually playing Britney spears. JW
He was halfway through another visual sweep of the dance floor when a head of long, wavy hair blocked his view. His gaze stopped, completely arrested for a moment by the (very pretty) woman who had slipped in front of him to order a G and T. Picking up women probably frowned upon when one was undercover, he recited silently. The woman glanced up while she waited for her drink, though, and he couldn’t keep himself from smiling at her.
“All right?” he said.
He was surprised by the grin that broke over her face. Usually it took a while for very pretty women in clubs to warm up to conversation. “Hi,” she said over the music. “Having a nice night?”
John nodded and took a celebratory sip of whiskey. This was the easiest time he’d ever had with this; of course it would happen on a night when he was trying to stake out the estranged twin brother of a murder victim. But surely a few more minutes of distraction couldn’t hurt. It was part of his cover, he decided. Must blend in, Sherlock had said. “And you?”
“Yes, love it here,” she said over the pulsing bass of a new song, thankfully not Britney Spears. “My friends and I can dance all we want and not worry about creepy guys looking, you know?”
John had a brief feeling like he’d missed something crucial to the conversation at hand. He nodded again, more tentatively this time.
“Men can be such arseholes, can’t they?” The beautiful woman passed money to the bartender and took her drink in hand.
Something glimmered in John’s mind, about to be figured out.
“Now that I’ve found this place, I’ll never go to a straight club again!”
And with that, the woman was off, and clarity swept over John like one of the flashing lights combing the dance floor.
“As always, I see but I do not observe,” he muttered into his whiskey.
I’m an idiot JW
Yes. So I’ve said. SH
Wanker.
John had plenty of time to ruminate while he scanned the crowd. Really, he should have noticed the gay thing earlier; perhaps Sherlock was a bit right about his trousers diverting his attention. He sipped his drink as slowly as possible, but it did run out eventually, and he ordered another. “See anyone you like?” the bartender inquired amicably, tipping the bottle upside down with a flourish. American accent; interesting. He had closely cropped dark hair and smooth, brown skin. He moved with the kind of confidence that John could tell served him well behind the bar of a gay club.
“Not yet,” John replied with a smile. Might as well have the excuse of being on the pull while he went about scrutinizing every body and face in the place.
“Are you new to the scene?”
Crime scene? thought John. No. Gay scene, more likely, Jesus, where was his head these days. “Erm, yes, actually,” he answered honestly.
The bartender nodded, smiled. A rather nice smile, John noticed. A sincere, warm smile, which really shouldn’t have taken him aback in the way that it did. But the fact was, in the last week, having done three cases with Sherlock and not much else, he’d nearly grown used to the smiles of strangers being the calculated, cagey smiles of murderers, burglars, and accomplices. The weeks before that had been populated with blank, polite smiles from his therapist, and the years before that were all strained, tired smiles of the battlefield, brief flashes of relief shared between people to verify you were still living.
“I remember feeling shy when I first came to London clubs, too,” the man was saying around that bright smile. “When did you move to the area?”
John considered. The truth, or parts of it, seemed to be serving well so far, so he replied honestly again. “Ah, not new to London, actually, just new to the whole... gay bar... thing.”
It was the other man’s turn to be surprised. John detected a slight twitch upward in his eyebrows.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve got to tend to these others, but I’m coming back to you in a minute.” He aimed a finger at the middle of John’s chest and winked. John strongly suspected he was either being flirted with or being taken pity on. Either way, it was rather nice of the fellow. And potentially helpful to the investigation, of course.
Half an hour passed before the barman in the tight black top was able to make it back to where John was standing. John was checking the faces of a large group that had just walked in.
“My name’s Keith,” he said, breaking into John’s thoughts.
“Keith.” John turned away from the door. “I’m John.”
“Explain something to me, John.” Keith leaned casually on the bar. He was a few inches taller than John, and quite well-muscled in the shoulders. A tight black tee shirt afforded one a very clear sense of exactly how well-muscled indeed.
“Okay,” said John.
“You seem very eager, looking as hard as you can at every guy who walks in that door. Yet you’ve been standing here for nearly two hours without speaking to a single person.”
“Not true,” John corrected. “I spoke to a woman with curly hair, just a little while ago.”
Keith looked skeptical. “And that’s all you came to do, is it? You came here purely to speak for five minutes to a straight woman?”
John actually giggled. You don’t know the half of it. “All right, maybe not,” he admitted, “But I’m really not looking for someone to take home tonight, if you believe that.”
Curiosity grew on Keith’s face and he leaned further forward. “What are you looking for, then?”
John shrugged. “I’m just... looking,” he said lamely.
Another giant smile. “You’re fucking cute, do you know?” John couldn’t think of a thing to say to that, but Keith saved him the trouble. “Listen, if you’re still here, I’m off at one. We could have a drink. No pressure, okay? Just a drink.”
Before John had time to react, Keith had pushed off of the bar and was turning toward another customer. His gaze lingered on John’s for an extra moment, though, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in amusement, from which John deduced that confusion was obvious on his face. Quickly, John turned back to the crowd.
This was awkward. John looked at his watch. One o’clock was still two hours away. With any luck, both Kit de Vries and Sherlock would have arrived by then. And Sherlock could do whatever it was he did that rendered him momentarily socially adept and then he could take care of questioning Keith.
Have you bullied them into letting you out yet? JW
Bullying has proved ineffectual. SH
Around eleven-thirty, a man with ginger hair entered the club and appeared to be looking for somebody. John added a closely-trimmed moustache and goatee to his mental picture of Martin de Vries, thought for a moment, and stuck his hand into his pocket.
think i found Kit de Vries. JW
Ginger. goatee, moustache. Seems nervous around this many people. JW
I need more. SH
John could practically see Sherlock’s glare of impatience. Fine. He looked harder.
The man made his way toward the bar, but about halfway there, a man with shaggy black hair and an obnoxiously bright striped tee shirt stopped him enthusiastically. John watched as the newcomer moved to embrace the victim’s twin. There was a moment before Kit was hugging back, landing the smallest of pecks on the other man’s cheek. They pulled out of the hug, but the fellow in the obnoxious t-shirt held Kit close, his hands gripping the other man’s biceps warmly.
In profile, the tension in the twin’s neck was evident, and John couldn’t quite classify the twitch that lay on the edges of his smile.
kit met a man. strained smile but standing v. close together JW
His fingers. SH
Perplexing, as usual, but John obeyed.
Jumpy. keeps moving them around. JW
More. SH
Did that mean he was on the right track or the wrong one? John was unable to suppress a grunt of frustration. He left his post at the bar and sidled nearer.
alternating touching his chin and other mans chest JW
short and thin, nails not clipped, no rings. JW
His cuticles, John. SH
his fucking cuticles? JW
No response to that. Fine. John could figure out a way to get close enough. He took stock of his resources. Not much to go on: a tight-fitting but apparently apt disguise, coupled with a total lack of familiarity with his surroundings. He briefly thought of moving past them as though he were going to the dance floor, but to his great relief, the twin appeared to excuse himself—waved goodbye with left hand, fingers spread, he texted to Sherlock, just to be thorough—and moved to the bar. John waited for the twin to reach the bar and then followed in his path.
Reaching his destination, John stepped in front of the man and casually made eye contact. He was glad of the two whiskeys he’d already finished; the light fuzz hugging his brain made this feel much less awkward than it could have been. “Hello,” he offered brightly.
“Hi,” said the twin, noncommittally.
What did people in clubs usually talk about? John thought back to his conversation with Keith. “I’ve never been to a gay bar before,” he babbled. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Er, yeah,” said the other man. He rubbed a hand over his chin.
“I’m John,” said John.
“M-my name is Kit.”
Nervous stutter? John texted from his pocket.
Then, an idea flashed in John’s head. He silently thanked Harry for the inspiration. “Only just come out, myself,” he said cheerfully. “But my sister did ages ago, practically in primary school. Isn’t that funny, two siblings turning out gay? My mum’s despairing about grandchildren.”
Kit de Vries took a long pull from his beer. John felt a little bad for imposing on his evening, honestly. Then again, his brother had just been violently murdered, and he was out having a drink like it was any other night. John reconsidered his sympathy.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the twin was saying. “My family and I don’t really get on.”
“Oh,” John said sympathetically. “Sorry.”
“‘S fine.”
“I don’t blame you,” John sympathized. “Plenty of times I’ve considered cutting off contact with my sister. Hard to do though, isn’t it, when they live practically next door. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were here tonight.”
Kit was looking into the crowd. “Mine wouldn’t step foot here,” he replied, and gulped down the remainder of his beer.
Rapid alcohol consumption; sign of grieving? JW
This texting thing was getting easier. But—hang on—his answers didn’t sound right. Hadn’t Sherlock said his dead brother was gay as well? And hadn’t he been to this club just before he was killed? John wanted to press further, but he could tell he was quickly losing the twin’s attention.
“Actually, I hope you don’t mind me saying,” John said quickly, “but you’ve got a spot of something right there on your chin.” He indicated a place on his own chin.
“Oh, right,” said Kit as he brushed at his face. “Is it gone?”
“Yep,” John reassured.
cuticles seem pretty normal to me. bit of dry skin, hangnail or two. JW
“Still here?” Keith was rounding the corner of the bar, looking more compact than he had seemed before. Perhaps he held himself differently when he was behind the bar. John glanced at his watch, startled.
“They let me go a little early,” Keith explained, correctly reading John’s surprise.
“Ah.”
Kit de Vries was gone; John had watched him dance for a short time with the man in the striped top and then depart around midnight. Since then, John had been passing the time with a third whiskey, hoping Sherlock would arrive in time to question Keith himself. His hopes for rescue seemed to be definitively in vain now, though, so John emptied his glass and quickly reviewed the ways he’d seen Sherlock flirt, cajole, or scold information out of the general populace. It all seemed simple enough. If you set aside the ethical dilemmas of manipulating other people’s feelings and all that.
John got as far as meeting Keith’s eyes before he faltered. The other man looked... well, interested. Sincerely interested.
Bugger.
The next word out of his mouth was not the one he originally planned. “But.”
Keith’s expression deflated a bit.
“I’m sorry,” John apologized quickly. “But I don’t think I’ll take you up on that drink after all.”
The taller man’s bright brown eyes studied John’s face for a few seconds. Music pumped loudly around them. “Just so I know,” Keith finally inquired, “if I see you another time, should I ask again? Or leave well enough alone?”
It was spoken with total sincerity, and John felt like even more of an arse for thinking of leading the younger man on. “Okay, look. The thing is, I’m actually not gay.” Keith raised his eyebrows. “I came here tonight as a sort of... favor. For a friend.” Stick to medicine, Watson—you are shit at undercover work.
Keith accepted this with surprising aplomb. “Okay,” he replied lightly.
He probably thinks I’m in the midst of a sexuality crisis, John realized.
Keith put a hand on John’s forearm. “But if you’re ever not not gay, John, you know where to find me.” He leaned in just a little, and then with a wink and a squeeze of his hand, he was gone.
He definitely thinks I’m questioning, John’s deductive skills confirmed.
Well, that was just fine. John left the club thinking it was sort of nice to be flirted with, gender aside.
Things went to hell right around when he rounded the corner from the club. He was partway through a text to Sherlock when—
“Oi, poof,” called a menacing voice to his right. A broad man strode up to his elbow and nudged him toward an alley on his left. The unmistakeable sound of measured breathing issued from the shadows there—at least two assailants, then.
John slowly took his hands from his pockets and raised them in front of him, palms forward. “Not looking for any trouble, okay?”
His first thought was that this was a mugging. There should have been a demand of some kind before the situation escalated to physical violence. Those expectations were dashed when the large bloke to his right took a sudden sharp swing at his stomach. John’s quick reflexes served him well, luckily, and he immobilized the man’s arm before it made contact.
Unfortunately, John realized, looking at his grip on what was supposed to be the attacker’s forearm, the three whiskeys had affected his aim. Still more unfortunately, they had gotten him to let his guard down, and he hadn’t noticed the small pocket knife his attacker held in his hand.
Ignoring the pain where the knife had begin to cut into his left palm, John wrenched the man’s arm around and up so that he dropped the blade. John kicked it away.
The man in the shadows chose that moment to come flailing at John’s back, and while John had been expecting as much, he couldn’t have planned for the one very lucky blow that landed at just the right angle on his shoulder. It was a lucky hit with enough force behind it to make John’s bad shoulder buckle. Pain flashed through him, and the next thing he knew, he was on the ground.
Deliriously, a part of John wanted to laugh. Of all the things that threatened his safety on a daily basis, the thing that finally tripped him up was a pair of blockish drunk idiots cornering him in an alley.
Then, before John could fight his way back to his feet, he was being kicked in the stomach. The fact that he was down seemed to bolster his assailants’ confidence, so they matched slurs to the punctuating thuds of their boots in John’s gut.
--
Sherlock received a text and opened it, thinking it was probably too much to hope that John would have realized the cuticle assessment of “pretty normal” was moronically insufficient.
Goin
The consulting detective waited exactly one minute for another text, in case John had accidentally pressed “send” and was going to follow it up with a completed message. At the end of that minute, Sherlock was on his feet, bellowing into Molly’s phone, which, all the more to her dismay, she still held pressed to her face.
“I will disassemble this door using any tools I can find,” Sherlock guaranteed, “unless you unlock it within the next thirty seconds.”
“Sh-Sherlock!” Molly tried to scold.
“You should know that I am brilliant and can easily follow through with that threat,” Sherlock added in a cold voice. “And that I have no incentive to leave any of its mechanisms or electronics intact.”
A tinny burst of speech issued from Molly’s phone speaker. She tried to hold it out for Sherlock to take, but he brushed it away angrily.
“Okay, thank you,” she said frantically into the phone before hanging up. “Sherlock, it’s all right, I know you can’t bear to be locked in like this but I really think if you could just calm down—”
“Molly, I am done being calm!” Sherlock’s voice rose to its full volume, and the high-ceilinged room echoed terrifyingly. “Look at this text!” He held his phone out.
“G-O-I-N?” Molly read out.
“Yes, G-O-I-N, as in ‘Going back to Baker Street,’ but something interrupted him mid-text.” Sherlock paced agitatedly.
Molly reached out a hand, saw the look in Sherlock’s eyes, and retreated. “I’m sure he’s fine, Sherlock,” she said. “I mess up texts all the time.”
The detective shook his head. “He was learning to text from his pocket; he spent the entire evening concentrating hard on every key he pressed. Not a mistake at all, no, Molly, can’t you see it? It’s a warning or a call for help.”
Molly furrowed her brow. Sherlock snarled sharply. “If something came up, he could have stopped typing and returned to finish the text later,” the detective explained, searching through the autopsy tools for those most likely to be of use against a locked door. “But he chose to send it, unfinished. He knew whoever interrupted him was a threat, and the only thing he had time to do was press ‘Send.’”
Before Molly could think of something (surely entirely unhelpful) to say in response, her mobile emitted a bright melody.
“Yes, hi, Jim,” she said into it. Her expression lightened. Slowly. Everyone was so hatefully slow and now John was somewhere being threatened or hurt—Sherlock roared, a wordless, feral roar that made Molly jump.
“Getting impatient, were we?” The voice from the now-open door had an unusual sing-song quality to it. Sherlock shoved his way through without so much as acknowledging that there was a person in his way.
“Bye-ee,” the man said to the sound of Sherlock’s retreating steps. “What got into him?”
Molly shook her head and laughed sadly. “His flatmate’s in trouble. God, I’ve never seen him that worried about anyone before.”
Within the half an hour, Sherlock was sweeping down the street in front of the club, his nerves ablaze. Possibilities flashed through his mind as he set off on the likeliest course John would have taken to get home.
--
Two streets away, John tripped over his own feet and came to a stop. His left hand opened and let a bloodied piece of gauze fall to the pavement. He’d discovered the gauze deep in his coat pocket during a cursory self-examination in the alley. It was a forgotten remnant of the first week of his friendship with Sherlock, when Sherlock had exploded a beaker with his back turned and John had had to put three stitches in his flatmate’s backside.
John threw his right hand up against the nearest wall to steady himself. His body curled around the other arm, which pressed gingerly against his middle. Fumbling in his pocket, he replaced the square of gauze on his palm with a fresh one. Bastards, he swore for the hundredth time in as many steps. He thought longingly of his bed at 221B, which seemed so far away it might as well have been on another planet. Hailing a cab had proved futile, since he couldn’t straighten up well enough to raise his arm properly.
To top it all off, the phone Harry’d given him was broken, the screen dismally cracked in several places, so he had no way of knowing whether Sherlock had realized what his unfinished text meant. Or if he had even managed to get free of the mortuary. No, John reminded himself, he couldn’t afford to sit down and wait for help to arrive. He focused his gaze on the next street corner and promised himself another two-minute break when he reached it.
--
It wasn’t long before Sherlock came across an alley that bore clear signs of having played host to a struggle. His chest constricted when he discovered a square of gauze, more red than white, like a signpost stuck to the filthy ground. The shadowy outline of John, on his side, curled in the foetal position, sprang up before him.
Sherlock left the alleyway hurriedly. If John was able to get the gauze out of his coat pocket, then it was unlikely that his attackers were still with him. That meant he was at the very least able to move on his own, and that he would be making his way toward Baker Street.
--
John thanked the heavens above when he heard a familiar deep voice ring out in the otherwise silent street.
“Followed your trail of gauze and blood. Bit grotesquely ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ don’t you think?”
Then Sherlock—warm, solid Sherlock—was at his side, quick eyes taking in everything, looking for which part of him was bleeding. John gestured with his hand, dropping another piece of gauze. “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just give us a hand getting to bed, yeah?”
To his great relief, his friend made the uncharacteristic decision not to ask any further questions, and simply allowed John to lean on him in silence all the way to Baker Street and up the stairs to his room, where he pulled his clothes off one-handed and dropped almost immediately into slumber.
--
Sherlock was only two-thirds of the way through his investigation when the subject of said investigation came awake beneath him and casually lay a hand on his throat.
“You must remember, Sherlock,” said John, tightening his fingers gently. “I was in the army. My first instinct was to flip you over and cut off your air supply.”
An odd rush of adrenaline accompanied Sherlock’s annoyance at being interrupted. He ignored the former and batted John’s hand away. “I was nearly done,” he grumbled.
“And what, please explain, are you up to—straddling me in my bed of all things, for god’s sake you must know what that looks like—while I’m trying to sleep off a frankly awful beating I got from—”
“Two men, larger and taller than you, judging from the shoe sizes evidenced by your injuries,” Sherlock murmured. He picked up John’s left hand and studied the knuckles, then the bandaged palm.
With a deft twist, John turned their grip around so that he held Sherlock’s wrist aloft. He winced a little at the pressure on his wounded hand. “Is that what you’re doing here? Deducing? And it couldn’t wait until morning?”
“They wanted to injure you,” was Sherlock’s response. “Their blows fell primarily on your back and stomach, not your face. A person hits the face of someone who’s offended them, someone they expect to fight back. A person hits the stomach of someone they want to...”
“Leave bleeding in an alley?”
Sherlock balked. That thought was fantastically unpleasant. “...Injure severely.”
“Good job I know how to take a blow, then.” The lightness in John’s tone didn’t quite mask the dark flickers of pain apparent on his face.
Vaguely, Sherlock registered his desire to vomit. “They must have surprised you,” he spoke over his body’s unusual disobedience. “Otherwise, with your training, you wouldn’t have had any trouble fighting them off. You made short work of the blade—the only knife wound is the one on your hand, probably received while you disarmed your first attacker. Then, one of them came at you from behind, not aiming well, given the spread of bruises across your back. The fact that they got you to the ground was pure chance; a lucky blow to your bad shoulder. They kicked you...”
“Repeatedly,” John interjected. “Let’s just say they kicked me repeatedly. No need to count.”
Four times each, thought Sherlock, but for once, kept it to himself. “Why?”
John’s grip tightened further. It hurt Sherlock’s wrist (only a little), which meant it must have hurt John’s bandaged hand as well.
“Because they took issue,” he said simply, “with my being gay.”
It was nearly automatic at this point, after all of John’s attestations to his heterosexuality. “You’re not—”
“As if that matters.” John fixed him with a look. A look that said “don’t be stupid” with such strength, Sherlock was sure there weren’t curses enough in the English language to convey its force. “If it had been anyone else, someone who didn’t know how to stop the first blow... they could have... And all because...” John breathed heavily through his nose, his lips pursed.
The unfinished sentences hung between them; Sherlock could see them laid out in the air as if John had typed them there.
“I’m very sorry,” Sherlock finally said softly. “I wasn’t there. I could have helped you.”
John waved their hands, which swiped the words in the air away. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Yes, but.” This was important. Sherlock eased his wrist free and let it fall, his hand curled on its side on John’s sternum, high enough on his chest to be clear of the worst of the bruising. “If you had been badly injured. Or worse.” Sherlock met his friend’s eyes, which was not usually nearly as difficult as it was this time. “I honestly don’t know what I would have done, John.”
A corner of John’s mouth shook for the briefest moment. “I don’t imagine you say that to many people.”
“No.”
“Me neither.” John nodded, once. “But I would. Say it, I mean.” He cleared his throat. “To you.”
Yellowish light from the street danced in through John’s curtains. A car rolled past outside, its engine’s buzzing amplified in the nighttime quiet. Sherlock’s thumb bounced on John’s sternum, the same way it would if his hand were resting on a desk or the arm of his chair.
John enjoyed the companionable silence for a moment before he asked, “Have you noticed that we keep ending up like this?”
Sherlock looked down curiously at where his hips rested atop his flatmate’s.
“No, I don’t mean like that,” John laughed. “I mean in our bedrooms, at night. Either me in yours—or me right outside your door—or now you in mine.”
“The bedroom is traditionally a place of intimacy,” Sherlock said thoughtfully. “A feeling of privacy, the impression of being shuttered out of sight. And the semi-darkness of moonlight and streetlamps tends to assuage off-putting sensations of vulnerability.”
“Not typical behavior between flatmates, though, is it?” John observed.
“No,” said Sherlock. “No, it’s not.” His eyes traveled from bruise to bruise on John’s bare torso. “It’s fine, though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” John agreed. “Yeah, it’s... it’s good.”