Bantam Wars Chapter 8

[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: Terrefic tentacle_love took care of this while Caroline's having school adventures, but there were some last minute additions at the end she didn't get a crack at, so if there are any errors at the end, it's my fault, not hers. This chapter introduces Grendel, the gun and a small break down. Enjoy! Visit me at thursdayplaid.tumblr.com for more information than you could possibly want about anything.


When the siren went off just before the ten minutes was up the man who had tortured Tim jumped away from the side of the building, his panic obvious, and fumbled with what John assumed was a key card before rushing inside with the kind of hurry that turned people into all palms and no fingers. As soon as he was through the door the two of them sprang out of their misappropriated seats and made for the door as discreetly as they could. The trick would be to get in before lab techs started to barrel out, but after the cameras cut off.

Tim’s phone buzzed and he was up the concrete steps to the door, looking like some strange life sized doll, pale and brown and burgundy, against the massive beigeness of the side of the lab. John followed at a slower pace, one hand under his coat and against the gun at the base of his back. Tim raised his phone to the key card reader and pressed some button on the screen. The door made a wooshing sort of click as it unlocked and Tim swept John inside with a gentle sweep of his hand. The sound of an alert siren erupted from inside the room at a pitch and frequency John wasn’t altogether prepared for though he didn’t have much time to react to it. The space beyond the service door wasn’t particularly large, hardly a couple meters in width, all whitewashed concrete with a pair of mail trolleys yellow and blue respectively. In such cheery colours it looked a bit like some giant child had pushed a few toys into a corner.

To the left were concrete stairs going up and a cargo elevator. It only took a moment for Tim to disable the emergency lockdown and pop the doors open. The elevator was hushed once they were inside, as if the heavy quilted fabric hanging from the walls had made for them a nest. It was barely a moment before Tim had the doors closed again, shutting them up in the quiet, quilted space. Against the far wall was a cart, a deep shade of blue with huge letters on the side of it. John started to head for it, but the cart was almost taller than he was; there was no point in trying to get anything out of it.

“You aright?” Tim asked, pulling open the top flap and pulling out the bright red contamination suit to pull on over his clothes.

“Oh, I’m used to looking the world in the navel by now,” John snapped with clenched fists.

Pausing in taking off his worn down boots, Tim looked at him as if he was struggling to get on the same page John was on. “No,” he said finally getting it. “I meant with the extraction, you’re good? Ready to go?”

John suddenly felt embarrassed, looking away for something to distract himself with, but of course there wasn’t. The only thing of interest in the space was Tim struggling to get into the gear. “I’m fine. Ready.”

Before he was too overburdened with the weight of his contamination suit Tim reached in and hefted out the containment barrels, adding new scuffs to the scarred wooden floor. “Good. Are you also ready to be boosted in? Once you’re in there you can unzip it from the inside. I’ll give you a nudge when it’s time.”

“Sure,” he still felt fairly abashed, enough that he didn’t even put up a token protest at being hefted up and dropped inside, and the gentle press of Tim’s palm curled against the back of his neck for a brush of a moment.

“Go ahead and close the top,” John told him, sitting down in the cart to brace himself.

“Sure thing Captain,” Tim grinned at him and zipped the top, keeping a watch on him as the lid closed. The cart was sturdy, meant to transport containment barrels. John’s small weight was no burden on the firm bottom or the thick industrial fabric; no one could even tell he was in there. He was taking a moment to take deep breaths and center himself when the top came up again with Tim’s face distorted and fuzzy through his spaceman suit, his head piece tilted up so a sliver of his chin showed.

“Here,” Tim held out a giant clunky pair of headphones; they looked like something you’d find in the airport.

“What’s this for?” They curved like some piece of alien technology in his hands, something mysterious and strange.

“On the upper floors the siren is going to be very loud, the helmet will cut out some of the volume for me, but it won’t for you, and you’re ears are young,” his mouth tilted up gently at the corner. “Even if the rest of you isn’t. Don’t want to make you deaf before your time. See you in a mo,” he said finally and closed the cart on him again.

It wouldn’t matter when this was all fixed, John thought, Not that they were talking about that. Tim would try to go, which was ridiculous. The time John was pulled out of was before the time Tim was, if something went wrong it was better for John to go first, wait a little while, find Tim and tell him his toes had fallen off or whatever and then they could fix the gun and Tim could go back to his family. It was a bit selfish for Tim to always want to go first, lead the charge, as if it wouldn’t kill John just as much to be without him as it would him to suddenly lose John. It hadn’t been that long since he lost his family, John knew, remembering the burden of widows and widowers struck down with shock. To lose that and one’s children…

It hadn’t even been a year. Tim had thrown himself into danger with a lack of self-preservation so hard John wasn’t sure that he realized how hard he threw himself. Especially now that he had John too.

There were some things the people you love do wrong that one should never mention, as if the recognition of it would be worse than stopping the habit. It was better for John to watch and keep pace, and not say anything else until Tim stopped living in a graveyard in his head. It took time.

He was getting there.

If nothing else John suspected he was starting to get bored of the depression, his anguish notwithstanding. That he just wanted to remember how happy he’d been without a complimentary side of vivisection by guilt.

The cart shifted, the kicking off of its brakes a heavy, industrial feeling and its movements steady and inescapable. John sat down inside like a bird in his nest and waited to be signaled.

The bleat of the siren when they exited the elevator was hypnotic, pulsing like a migraine, like a hammer inside the skull. The abominable sound of it had John finally giving in to the clunky headphones that put John in mind of sheep pressed tight to his head. They weren't what could be called comfortable by any stretch, but they made him feel slightly less likely to burst apart. The sound was likely engineered to keep the lab staff from staying to play with their microscopes when mold samples had mutated and gone sentient next door.

It was the sort of thing Sherlock would do, disdain the slightest interference in the middle of an experiment, even if it was some mold monster.

The siren had been muffled slightly by the heavy drapes around the containment cart, traditionally holding barrels and boxes impervious to even the maddest of science. Now containing a tensed army doctor, bristled up absently to appear bigger, even with only himself to see. The little space was vaguely organic, even in weighty peacefulness. Alarm lights cast the space, warm from John's flexing anxiety, blue and purple in waves. The cart jumped infinitesimally with each of Tim’s jogged footsteps as they went at speed around corners and down corridors. Finally they came to a stop, John rocking slightly with the suddenness of it and left to wait, counting seconds, as time seemed to lean forward on its tiptoes before tipping over.

The top of the cart suddenly disappeared, leaving John blinking at the sudden influx of flashing lights so much more intense without the protection of the little closed cart cubicle. Face partially obscured by the hood of his suit, Tim pressed his eyebrows together, expression tense and pulled with annoyance. In his hand was his phone, the screen reading PRIORITY ACCESS, CARD READER KEY. It took John longer than he’d care to admit until he realized Tim couldn’t work the buttons on the screen with his gloves on.

John lifted the phone against the card reader like he’d seen Tim do and pressed the button. For a moment it looked like nothing would happen, and wouldn’t that be charming after the favours Tim had had to call in to get them this far, before the light ponderously turned green and the door shifted slightly as the lock disengaged. Tim got the door open before it could change its mind and shoved the cart, and John, through.

John turned in the cart, trying to find a way to ask can you pick me up out of this thing? without asking to be picked up out of this thing, and froze, words stopped in his throat and heart stopped in his chest. There it was.

There it was.

After a sort at least.

The last time he had seen it he had more of a view of its muzzle than its length. It was long, boxy. It looked a bit like a large water gun with an edge added on instead of rounded off, but filled with something radioactive. Whatever it was that was powering it had a strange bluish glow that made John feel a bit headachey and nauseous. The barrel of it looked like it had been gold at some point strangely enough, but had discomposed sideways into something greenish in tint. There were cables, vaguely like remoras clinging to it and tablets scattered around in disarray as if they had been shot down in surprise and left where they lay. When he looked at Tim his face had gone still with hiccuping shock.

That was all well and good, but they needed to move.

After a brief tug on Tim’s sleeve he seemed to come out of it enough to grip John under the arms and lift him, after a false start, out of the cart. John ran to the lab table, clamoured up a chair and reached out to touch the gun.

He promptly was introduced to the unique experience of falling from a height while vomiting. His vision swirled and spotted, his skin crawled and compressed, his bones aching; the puzzle pieces of his body trying to find any excuse for the physical wrongness he was feeling.

“We have to destroy it,” he snarled between his teeth. “Tim, help me destroy it.”

“John,” Tim mouthed from where he was kneeling by John’s side, bracing his shoulders. John had almost forgotten about the earphones.

“Please,” John realized he was crying, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered until that abomination was gone. “Help me kill it, I have my gun, we can shoot it. We can-”

Tim pinched him hard, the jolt of it chasing up his arm and spreading like shattered glass.

“Stop.” John read Tim’s lips, reeling with surprised betrayal. “We can’t. We need it to fix things.”

“That doesn’t matter, nothing matters but-” Tim pinched him hard again, pulling off his hood, his face flickering back forth with surprise, fear and determination.

“My family John,” Tim gripped his shoulders hard and shook him.

Selfish, that was selfish when that thing still lived. How could Tim be so selfish? John would do it himself…

But…

But Tim wasn’t being selfish. John gripped his head with both hands and moaned. “What was that?” He couldn’t hear the answer, but Tim squeezed his shoulders as if emphasizing a point. There was a betrayal now in the corner of Tim’s eyes when John looked up, almost considering, and it nearly broke John’s heart. John leaned forward with his arms around Tim’s neck, “I’m sorry Tim. I’m sorry I don’t know what came over me. It was- I don’t know. You know I want to get you back to your family.”

When Tim finally gripped him back it nearly crushed the air from his lungs. He could feel the breath against the side of his head as Tim spoke, and wished he knew what he was saying.

“I’ll get the paperwork,” John said. “You take care of the gun, I won’t risk touching it again.”

Ashamed, John disengaged from the hug as soon as Tim allowed him to and avoided the gun and its cables as if it were the plague. Tim had relied on him all this time to help him; he wouldn’t make him regret that.

Most of the blueprints were filled with diagrams that didn’t make sense and strange equations that almost looked like there were parts divided by zero. There were big arches of scribbles that made no sense, but John didn’t take the time to look at them much. Even with his resolve strengthened, just looking at pictures of the inside of it made him feel a bit dizzy. He was flipping through the sheets of equations and diagrams when he discovered a wide piece of graph paper, nearly as big as the sweeping blueprints. It made John go still for a moment, just looking at it, with nothing on it but small, precise, perfect handwriting repeating: NO, NO, NO, NO. Finally, at the bottom, in small, precise, strangely childlike writing was scrawled, we have to kill it.

He swept up the blueprints, trying to stack them into as tidy a pile as he could, not thinking about those rows and rows of perfect no’s. He waited for Tim to lower in the gun, swaddled in lab coats, into the cart and then drop the blueprints in after it. John didn’t dare get back into the cart with it now and Tim didn’t dare to put him there. They checked up and down the hall and then set off at a trot, the hood of Tim’s suit flapped behind him. They had system, John peeking around the corner and waving Tim on if the way was clear; people were just as likely not to look down as they were up. It was a system that worked until John almost ran straight into Dr. Grendel.

While he was stunned and stumbling his way backward, Grendel raised a hand and clawed down with nails that were gnawed to the quick, showing dark, blackish-burgundy pools of blood trapped beneath, snagging against the front of John’s jumper.

He had never in his life felt such an intense hatred. He was willing to rip out Grendel’s throat with his teeth if he could do it without touching him. Apparently it was a feeling the two of them shared.

Grendel bared his teeth, jaw hanging low and frothing spit dripping pendular from the corners of his mouth. He looked like a rabid animal, saliva glistening behind his teeth before foaming around bottom lip. It looked like he had been eating soap John thought hysterically, flinching back, his heaving headphones knocking loose to hang around his neck awkwardly. Belly dropping past the soles of his feet, John stumbled through the powerful swoop of nausea. Without the giant headphones making him John stumbled in shock at going from a world with mute on to a blare of sound. It stunned him for a moment, stuck his feet to the ground.

Grendel’s face suddenly changed, shifted. The animal ferocity melting away to something sad, and gentle, and tender. He must have been handsome once. Waves of auburn hair, a strong jaw, a distinguished nose. The sort of face you wanted to trust, you wanted to be seen with.

“Little child,” he called earnestly past the warning siren. “Darling little nasty child. Little baby Watson. Aren’t you so lonely? Isn’t this all so wrong? It’s just a mistake, I’m not the bad guy here. This is all, it’s wrong. Just a mistake. I can erase it, if you come with me I’ll erase it and make it better. It’s just a slipped stitch I need to fix. Just a darling little mistake. It won’t even hurt. Please, just let me fix you.”

It all sounded so true, sliding through the spaces in the sirens, so… sincere.

But his chin still glistened with spit, and the pale of his eyes where cracked through shot through with blood. John drew and braced his gun. Grendel snarled again, hands going to his belt, ripping it out so it curled through the air like a snake. All of a sudden John was so small, and his father was so angry, and he cringed as if he wasn’t a soldier, wasn’t a doctor, was only a bundle of anxious flight responses. He just watched the snap of the buckle right above his head as his shoulder plowed into a lab door, barely missing the door handle.

Tim surged forward, wild and snarling and threw Grendel sideways into the wall. The two of them fell to the floor in a knot of limbs. Tim tried to surge up and rush to John’s side, but Grendel was right behind him, crawling up his back. His face had transformed into something that made John’s hair stand up all over his body.

John’s heart stopped. Tim slammed his elbow back, missing Grendel’s nose but cracking in soundlessly against his cheekbone. Still Grendel held on.

There was a trickle of blood too near Tim’s eye where Grendel was digging his thumbnail into the skin of Tim’s face.

John drew his gun and as soon as Tim’s arm had dropped to try and find some other place to crack him loose John fired. The first did nothing more but make Grendel flinch a little. The two of them moved like dance partners while John watched on, Grendel gripped Tim’s arm while Tim swung out, trying to lurch free. It was as clear a shot as John was likely to get. The second caught Grendel full in the belly. His mouth opened, his molars reflecting white and red, white and red from the overhead light. His hands clawed at Tim’s suit, pulling him into an embrace, “I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU WATCH ME KILL THE LITTLE TUMOR AND THEN I’LL FIND W AND-” Grendel roared until Tim interrupted him by slamming the palm of his hand into the underside of Grendel’s chin. Making a fist with his knuckles raised, Tim struck him hard in the wound. He was released in a scramble and sway, a catch of blood against Tim’s knuckles, face hard, angry.

Murderous.

Grendel tried to catch Tim one last time and Tim turned, changing from cuddly, brotherly friend to a soldier, a commissioner of Scotland Yard. His solid body coiling together with the strength of a bear and his fist rising up with all the weight of a small moon. It slammed into the side of Grendel’s face, shocking a crater, ripples of impact into the side of his jaw and he dropped to bleed out on the floor, glistening teeth not quite sitting out anymore. “He’s not a cancer.”

Tim sprinted forward, his hand - which suddenly didn’t seem so big - catching John flat on the breastbone and swooping him off his feet with a loss of breath. His sneakers had no time to attempt a last ditch rubbery grasp of the tiled floor before he was tucked against Tim’s chest, a press of forehead against the crown of his head before he was dropped back down in the cart. Tim was all panic and fury, must have forgotten about John’s earlier reaction, but John hadn’t and he tried to keep his distance.

“Down,” John shouted uselessly, motioning with his gun as two men with guns came around the corner. He tried to brace his feet amongst the plans and the weight of the time gun (John had never thought it would be so heavy, in hindsight it should have been obvious), trying not to touch it and fired off a couple of shots. It was enough to get the men to duck and allow the two of them to barrel past and crash their way into the cargo elevator.

Tim knelt beside the cart, took hold of John’s face and pressed their foreheads together.

John was quietly hyperventilating in the cart and locked his arms around Tim’s neck, catching a fistful of Tim’s hair and his jumper collar.

“I’ve got you,” Tim muttered mostly to himself. “I’ve got you Johnny, you’re safe. You’re safe and sound.”

“I don’t feel right,” John said in a very small voice, suddenly sure that he wasn’t to move, wasn’t to open his eyes, wasn’t to let go or everything would fall to pieces.

“Shh,” Tim muttered in to his hair, lifting him up and bracing him on his hip. He rocked him slightly, the way one might a frightened child, holding him tight to his body. “Shh Johnny, you’re fine, you’re just fine. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere at all. I promise I won’t let anything happen to you. It’ll all be okay.”

The elevator doors opened and John’s body went tense, trying to go as small as possible. “Godfrey,” John could feel the tension and the relief where his cheek was pressed to Tim’s shoulder. “Godfrey quick-“

“What the-” there was an American voice John didn’t recognize.

“Not now,” Tim snapped. “Just help me get this into the van. Don’t touch the thing wrapped in lab coats. I using the decontamination gloves for that, just-“

“Just get the kid in the car,” the American ordered. “I’ll take care of this.”

I have a little project for you Irene. - JM