Bantam Wars Chapter 7

[americanjedi]

Title: Bantam Wars
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: T
Summary: John thought when he lost his past and gained an irritatingly eight year old physique that the mad scientist Dr. Grendel and almost ended him. But now, pushed away by Sherlock after the Great Game, he has new purpose again. To find Dr. Grendel and either fix what's been broken or destroy any remnant of the time ray forever. With Tim Dimmock, his brother in arms and the protective shadow of the fabricated genius W, John Watson is off to war.

Author's Note: This week tentacle_love was my beta extraordinaire. Also a little warning, there is a very, very brief mention of past child abuse, if you blink you miss it, but I thought I should mention it. My tumblr is thursdayplaid.tumblr.com and I enjoy messages even though I take epochs to answer.


After reading Sherlock’s text it occurred to John how much trouble they might be in. And then he bristled, first at the idea he was manipulating anyone and then in defense of Tim. Everybody seemed to be picking on him, and while the man could indubitably handle it, John was a bit tired of it.

There wasn’t much he could do now either way. He just had to wait for Tim to get back from his park rendezvous. When they got the gun to work again it wouldn’t matter. The more Sherlock’s message sat on his brain the angrier it made him, the more frustrated. John needed to focus on other things. Such as Tim walking rapidly out of the park, one hand in his pocket. For anyone who knew anything about urban warfare, it was obvious he had a weapon in there that he was trying to be discreet about. Of course. He was also looking a bit harassed, which was better than angry and always made John want to tease Tim more. It was a good sign that they weren’t about to be shot on the spot.

Tim disappeared from view into a café and so John disappeared from the window of the green wallpapered safe house, or rather safe flat. There were a couple flats around Paris Tim had condemned through whatever sneaky police related means he always did. By the time John had arranged tea, black and peppermint respectively (although he was tempted to throw caution and the peppermint out the window), on the table of the lima bean coloured kitchen. Tim jumped easily through the window muttering to himself about young knees and clearing the room with an anxious sweep and side step.

“No one here but me,” John said, adjusting the plates.

“Shut up,” Tim snapped, bending so his forehead hovered a moment over the crown of John’s head, his hand hovering a moment over the back of John’s neck. “I worry.” For a moment every tense motion of Tim’s kind paranoia flared up loud in his ears, everything was taut with meaning and information. The space, Tim’s breath, the smell of roses and grass, his posture, the placement of his feet, the-

Pressing his eyes closed, John forced himself to breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. The murmur of static that had taken up right behind his eyes cut off, leaving him tense. Flexing his hands on either side of the plate, John listened to Tim’s breathing, the sudden catch and concern in it.

“Are you alright?” he leaned back to give John space.

“Fine.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately. Has it been something I’ve-”

Anger curled and snapped in John’s belly, making him reckless. Angry like he’d been with his stupid useless leg. He slammed his hands down on the table, interrupting Tim. “I’m fine.”

It took him a moment to realize that had even burst out of him. “Sorry, sorry. Just. It’s headaches I think.”

“It’s not anything I’m doing?”

“No.” John looked up at Tim, licked his lip absently. “No, nothing like that.”

“If you’re having any… problems you’ll let me know.”

“Of course.”

“Good.” It should have been awkward, but Tim sat down across from John, sipped his tea and made a face.

“Probably a little hot, sorry.”

“Not at all, I need something bracing.” He made a face again, this time a preemptive one, and took another sip of tea. “Godfrey’s contacts are just as bad as he is. Lupin leapt out of nowhere and disappeared in about the same way. He was a bit nosy, nothing too bad. He got us this,” he fished inside his pocket and placed two key cards on the table and a folded packet of brown paper tucked closed in some sort of arcane arrangement that had John confused how to open it, “and a window of time.” He paused to set his gaze sternly on John until he stopped pressing and pulling at the edges of the packet where he found a fold that looked promising.

John blinked up at him, the faint intrigued expression on his face drawing back to make room for proper abashment. He slid the paper puzzle away and folded his hands together on the table.

“Hmm,” Tim gave him a careful look. “Like I said a window. We have an hour to get in and out, which should be plenty of time. If we get close enough to the lab I can jump onto the wifi network in the lab and pick my way into the emergency response system. I’ll trigger an evacuation. I go in a suit and you hide in a cart, we roll up to the lab marked on this map,” he tapped the packet. “One of us grabs the gun and we get out the same way.”

“That’s it then? We’ll have the gun by the end of the night?” A sudden relief overtook him with such force he was afraid he’d be swept clear up to the green ceiling. Finally a chance to try and repair things. He knew, logically, realistically that it was possible there was no way to fix the tear Grendel had made when he tried to rip John out of existence. But there was that childish, hopeful part of the human heart that always believed that there would be some sort of magic reset. That things would never be allowed to get too bad. That reserved a place for horses riding toward the sunset, for last ditch escape, for home to stand against the storm. Toy soldiers put away, everyone alive in time for tea, each child called home by referee, by mum, horrors gone like puffs of wind. Beneath the logic, that part of John was sure everything could be fixed again. Surely Tim felt the same, but his face was set into professional lines. If his heart raced at the possibility, he reigned it tightly to be sure it would become a reality. John tried to focus.

“Well,” Tim said. “You’re the army doctor. It’s not like I haven’t planned sting operations before, but I thought we could plan out the rest together. We’ll need the Austrian for one thing, unless you’ve got a secret degree in physics in your back pocket.”

“Is he still settled in the… um.” It wasn’t in a safe house per se. But it was a fairly safe place with someone he trusted.

John hadn’t been contacted, hadn’t been able to be contacted because of the mess with Moriarty; he had set things up and left them.

“He should still be with your friend, unless they were murdered. Or if our scientist friend has had a breakdown. He was nervous enough sitting among the tax books.”

“No one knows the tunnels like Bailey.” John’s stomach clenched despite his euphoria. Bailey could get a bit… edgy at times, but he had a good head on his shoulders. After the bomb blast Bailey flinching back into the tunnels after his loss in a way that was painfully familiar to John. He needed something to do, something to keep him focused on something other than his failure, something to give him a sense of usefulness again. “Dr. Tobel will be fine.” He hoped Dr. Tobel would be fine, or there’d be quite a bit of trouble. “Any idea why the map we need is folded into some sort of origami vault?”

“Because Godfrey is the worst,” Tim groused. “And he’s being passive-aggressive about calling him while he’s so busy. I can find something to cut it open. We don’t have time for power plays. I’m not going to make time for power plays.”

“I can get it,” John said. “It can’t be that hard or he wouldn’t have done it up this way.” He picked up the packet again, and let it sit for a moment in front of him. He just looked at it. The paper was of deceptively high quality, although it had the look of brown postal paper about it, it was smooth and subtle, the edges melting together. The longer he looked at it, the closer he stared, faint flickering lines began to appear in his mind’s eye. The edges appeared as an overlay. /he tried ignoring different lines to see if they made different shapes. Such as I’m apparently insufferable when you don’t book my services ahead of time. The lines in his mind’s eye curled and opened as clear as if they had been neon signs directing him where to push and pull. Unfurling, the packet spread open, the map of the lab delineated in hall and vents and electricity.

Tim looked slightly constipated.

“Not terribly hard once you give it a good look.”

“You would tell me if you weren’t feeling yourself, wouldn’t you?” Tim asked, cut across John’s cautiously good mood. The angst was getting boring.

“No. I’d wait until my brain imploded,” John snarked back. “No need to look so surprised. I am a doctor.”

“I’m not surprised,” Tim’s face cleared at the familiar heartbeat of their banter. “You just seemed to have become smarter since we first met.”

“I think,” John said with an imperiousness that would have made Bad Davey proud, “that you’ll find I’ve always been this smart, it’s just that now less of my brain power is occupied with getting you to ingest things other than coffee beans and misery, and more in solving the Grendel problem.”

“I always thought you had smarts enough, with you keeping pace with Holmes.” He downed the rest of his tea and held out the cup for more, looking entirely too pleased with himself now. “Since you can’t have any of the food stuff and I’m sure you don’t want it to go to waste.”

John slowly set down his cup of peppermint tea in its saucer, its path as dramatically weighted as that of the stars. Carefully lifted the thermos that was their makeshift teapot with both hands and with narrowed eyes executed the slowest tea pour in history. The tea - innocent as it was in the affair of fraternal affection - was trapped, dangling at a pace so ponderous that for a moment it didn’t seem to know whether or not gravity had the right to affect it.

Tim just grinned as if he had all the time in the world. It was hard, John knew, for Tim to say he loved anything. Ages were needed to work up to it. A shift in the continental plates. He got as close as he could to it. But he didn’t trust himself with the expression of love unless it was sideways, or backwards, or at strange angles. “And I’ve got a present for you.”

That made John’s brow wrinkle, “What? Why?”

Reaching into his pocket with his free hand he set the familiar weight of a hand gun on the table. It had a matte shine to it, a presence like a soldier at ease. A gun was very rarely just a gun. It had an understated personality that either overtook or mirrored the people who held it, becoming a tool or an escape.

Or an extension of one’s desire to protect.

With the reverence of someone who had suddenly found something missing, John set down the thermos and lifted the gun, felt its weight, checked the clip. “I use a Browning.”

“This will fit your hand better. And everyone uses Sigs. If I went for a Browning we’d have the Holmeses even faster on our tails.”

“Do you really think they’ll be after use then?”

Tim gave him a look, “It would be stupid not to, Sherlock is too emotional right now. It’s Mycroft I’m worried about, he was too solicitous with you.”

John tilted his head in silent question.

“You’re a fascinating conundrum any direction someone looks at you. And I can understand the desire to try and repeat the past with better results. He may not even realize it, but I recognize the way someone looks at a second chance.”

If Tim wasn’t looking at him with a face so firm and serious, John would have laughed at him. Instead his brain turned in a different direction. Mycroft hardly was the sort of man to sigh over the discordant relationship with his brother, but there was a hint of something in the idea of wanting to raise a genius child again with a chance to avoid any vicious rivalry at the end of it. Although John had the idea that Sherlock was a bit like Tim in that he had been bitten to the quick too many times for loving things, and the only way left he had to say he cared was to bite first. Maybe that’s how he thought people cared for each other. With quick wit like bared teeth.

“If nothing else he’d like to get his corkscrews in us.”

“If it comes to that,” Tim said. “You’re to let him grab me. He’ll find out that I’m nothing much, just like Grendel did. And you’ll be able to disappear much easier than I will.”

John slammed the magazine home with one small hand. “Absolutely not. It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re getting the ray gun by tonight, and then things will be fixed. It’ll become a nonissue.”

“If this works,” Tim said. “I won’t remember you for a long time. I’m in my fifties.”

“I’ll reintroduce myself,” John grinned. “But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. First the ray gun, then the scientist, then we plan.”

Moving the odds and ends of their tea, Tim made room for the map to be unfolded. It took John a moment to find what he was looking for. “Here,” he pointed with one small finger. They still looked weirdly… spritely… delicate… small to him. “Service entrance.” He traced the zigs and zags of the hall, “Look how close it is to our target lab.”

“Go ahead and call Bailey, I’ll set the rest of this up,” Tim said, focused on reading all the little notations on the map.

Bailey seemed glad to hear from him, it was hard to tell over the noise of the London street in the background. “Give me a mo. I need to find an alley or something. Tobel’s trying to educate me, keeps taking me to museums.”

“He’s meant to be hidden.”

“You think I don’t know how to hide someone in London?”

“Of course not Bailey,” John sighed and rubbed at his brow. He was working his way to early wrinkles. “Thank you for doing this.”

Bailey said something in Gaelic, mostly to himself. “Tobel’s okay. I’m taller than him and he’s old anyway. I could take him if I had to.”

There was no choice but to ignore the implication behind that. It wouldn’t help anything. “I was wondering actually if he might be ready to be moved again. We need him shipped to France.”

“I don’t know France,” Bailey made a considering sound to himself. “And Tobel needs watching. He talks to strangers, like he doesn’t know any better. And he’s absolutely hopeless at hiding his readies. He’s like a babe in the woods.”

“Babe in the woods?” John hoped his raised eyebrows came through on the phone.

“Took me to see this opera thing. Swear on my mum, it was about the stupidest kids you’d ever seen, it’s no wonder Tobel’s hopeless if that’s the sort of thing he was raised on. For my education you know. He makes me talk weird too. Picked enough pockets to go out to eat at a real place though. But that’s not what this calls about. I’ll get him over. You’ll text me the place?”

“I’ll get the address to you,” John agreed, trying not to laugh at Bailey’s suddenly improved diction.

“I need to get back before Tobel talks to a copper or something. He tries it all the time you wouldn’t even believe. I’ll call you tonight and we can catch up.”

“I appreciate it,” John said, biting his smile at the corners. Bailey sounded so incredibly concerned about Tobel’s dangerously stupid behavior. Like a parent with toddlers who were entranced with trying to lick light sockets.

“Yeah,” Bailey agreed. “And thanks for something to do Doctor.”

“I needed someone I could trust.”

Bailey started to say something, but that was interrupted by him shouting, “Tobel! What did I tell you?”

John tried not to laugh as he told Tim what Bailey said.

At the end of an hour of planning and a bit of discreet dodging, they ended up surveying the service entrance where there was an unfortunate trickle of people smoking. The two of them stood awkwardly in the parking lot before they realized that was making things a bit, well, awkward. Through combined efforts and Tim complaining about archaic machinery they broke into a car and like something out of an old cheesy cop movie slunk low in their seats to watch the door. The French scientists who have snuck out the back seemed to have mastered the art of smoking like they were extras for a dramatic art film. John didn’t know whether he should be impressed or vaguely irritated. “This will make things a little harder.”

Tim, who had been fiddling with a pair of binoculars had gone tense as a wire, body trembling with tension.

It put John on alert, made him sit up and reach impatiently so he could have a look at what had Tim so tight around the mouth. But Tim wasn’t giving the binoculars up, just tensing back into the seat. Leaving it, John simply leaned forward and squinted. There was just a guy. Regular height, regular features, bluish coat. There was something about him vaguely harried, as if he lived in a state of perpetual sleeplessness.

“I know him.” The words snap and crack brokenly through Tim’s lips.

Tim looked a bit white around the mouth, the reason why was fairly easy to guess. Grendel’s team at the lab watching over his awful time gun; Tim’s last run in with the members of Grendel’s team. The realization crept in with animal intelligence, sleek and absolutely sure of itself, it made John shiver.

“He was the one who tortured you.” He watched Tim turn away, fiddling with his surveillance gear. It took two deep breaths before John was acting reasonably, in a way that would actually be helpful. He looked up at the regular looking man and tried to imagine him calmly following Grendel’s half coherent instructions. It hung in his brain, the care it took to place the small controlled burns in the boyish flesh of Tim’s side. Suddenly John had the powerful urge to shake his brain out and watch it. His stomach twisted with a powerful dark fisted nausea. “This is excellent, I’ll be able to shoot him.”

Tim watched him.

“He’s not a very nice man,” John said darkly. Not liking the look and not liking the tense shattered paleness that had preceded it.

“Not like that John.”

No, not like that. He shouldn’t. In his lap, John released his clenched hands.

“I do care about you too you know. And I’m not afraid of him.”

Of course not, John thought, your hands always shake like that. “When will the diversion start?”

The trembling started to recede as Tim checked his watch. “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen if anything goes wrong. Nothing will go wrong of course.”

“Of course not,” John had become hyper aware of the weight of his gun at his back. A finality he didn’t feel.

David, this is a kind of strange request. But Elsie father is dead and she doesn’t have anyone else who’s a good male friend.

I mean except for me, but I can’t because I’m getting married to her, you know that sorry

It’s just you’re the closest thing to a best friend I have. And you don’t have to if you don’t want to it’s just you and Elsie really seem to get along and so I was just wondering, would you mind walking her down the aisle?