Fic: Nine Tenths of the Law - 1/3 (BBC Sherlock)

[bendingsignpost]

Title: Nine Tenths of the Law
Rating: R
Wordcount: 7k this part, 17.4k overall 
Beta: arcsupport and seijichan
Disclaimer: Do not own. 
Warning: Graphic violence, abusive/violent leanings, vampires.
Summary: John knows what's his - of course he'll kill for it. (Modern vampire AU)


Chapter One
Chapter Two

John isn’t much of a drinker. It’s not that he can’t see the appeal to a quick nip now and then. He can. That’s the problem.

It runs in the family, the Watson penchant toward a liquid solution. Harry’s proof of that. His old dad was proof of that too and the ache that it’s left doesn’t ever quite fade. He reminds himself of it, warns himself with it: don’t ever forget what happened to Dad.

When he really needs a drink, he thinks it through. Sometimes three hours in advance, sometimes days. He never lets himself act on the impulse until the first three hours of the craving pass. When the wait only worsens the intolerable twisting in his gut, he gets his pint. Cold, the way he hates it.

Before the first swallow, he always thinks he might have to force himself to finish it this time.

By the last, he’s already telling himself why he can’t have another.

Harry tells him he’s overly cautious, but look at her. A destroyed marriage, her job at risk and the neighbours beginning to look at her a bit funny. They’re both susceptible. If John is too strict on himself - which he isn’t - it’s only because there’s no one else to keep him in line. As a doctor, he can’t help but see it as more than an act of indulgence. This is a moral issue.

All the same, when his patients at the surgery begin to show up anaemic and sporting someone else’s bite marks, John is more angry and possessive than he is sickened.

He may not hunt on his territory, but that will never mean he’s not ready to defend it.

Defending it on his own is a bit of a problem.

Not the act of defending, per se. He’s an intelligent man in possession of a firearm and excellent aim. He has his patients’ trust and, thanks to that, photographic evidence of the interloper’s signature. The bite wounds all match, a double puncture on the left side of the patient’s neck, as bitten from behind. He knows he’s looking for either a woman or a man of below average height, recently moved into London. The interloper uses a stalking technique and then relies upon the paralytic administered through puncturing. If the short height were an indication of youth, the victims would have been drained until dead. Leaving the victim alive meant drinking less than three pints, which means someone older, their metabolism slower. They’re fast, not strong, and John is both.

No, the issue lies in defending it on his own.

Namely, without Sherlock Holmes.

Because while John’s poacher may have been the first, they haven’t been the last. After a few days of Sarah shooting John increasingly worried looks at the clinic, the call had come in from Lestrade: bite-marked corpses turning up in Bart’s morgue. Different marks, a truly worrying variety.

With that, forced between mentioning the clinic’s patients and concealing information Sherlock would ultimately discover anyway, John had immediately offered a limited version of events. Not the full version, obviously not that. Sherlock would never have believed it.

John isn’t exactly in line with the modern concept of vampires. No one really is, fortunately. Too many centuries of the pale, anaemic and unbitten being accused of vampirism instead of recognized as unappealing prey, and no one seems to expect a stocky vampire with their teeth conveniently at neck-level. Tagging along on Sherlock’s investigations has shown him more than enough of what people assume vampires to be. That had been embarrassing. As if Twilight weren’t enough.

Though all of the patients-turned-clients agreed regarding the way in which they were attacked, Sherlock had refused to believe actual vampiric activity was on the table. All victims were drugged with a paralytic and, yes, drained of blood to an anaemic state. The point of drainage is that double puncture wound in the neck. That’s also been the case of the dead victims who have begun to appear across the city. The deceased have almost all been bitten from the front.

So, the crux of the problem: John needs to go out and kill someone - several someones - without Sherlock noticing.

“It’s meant to look like a vampire,” Sherlock said, keeps saying. “It has to be something else, John. A fantasist or someone impersonating one.”

“Right then,” John says, shrugging on his jacket and speaking to Sherlock through the mirror. “While you sort that out, I’m going to the dentist.”

“Yes, yes, fine. I’ll text if I need you.”

“You always do,” John replies, feeling more than seeing Sherlock’s answering smirk as John heads down the stairs and out the door.

“I’m here to see Dr. Travers,” John tells the young man at the desk. “I don’t have an appointment, but it’s an emergency. Tell her it’s Dr. Watson, I did text.”

The secretary studies John’s mouth as he speaks, watches the way John’s tongue peeks out when he pauses. “Bit of an invasion up in your side, too?” he asks.

John bristles.

The secretary doesn’t smirk, doesn’t rub it in, which is how John knows the man’s territory has taken a hit as well. The man’s much too young to have any significant amount of space, not in London. Even working with Dr. Travers, it’s unlikely he has a claim beyond a block and a half. The nametag clipped to his breast pocket reads Brian.

“You’re the one who lives with the detective,” Brian realizes. “Dr. Travers, she reads your blog. Is your detective on the case?”

“Him and Scotland Yard, for the ones who have died,” John confirms. “But no, I’ll not be typing this case up, don’t worry about that.”

“Your detective,” Brian says again.

“Didn’t send me, doesn’t know what he’s looking for. We’ve pictures of four distinct bites, though, maybe five. If I can get names to match, all of this goes away.”

Brian nods. “I’ll tell Dr. Travers you’re here, Dr. Watson.”

“Thank you, Brian.”

John sits down with his folder across his knees. Twenty minutes later, he clasps hands with Dr. Travers and follows her into her office. “Hello, Brigit. Anyone here look familiar?” he asks, offering her the folder.

“Someone isn’t losing time with pleasantries.” She takes it from him all the same, the line of her mouth giving the lie to the flippancy of her tone.

“Someone’s feeding on my ground,” John replies.

“You’re not the only one.”

They pull up the territory map and mark out every attack. Brigit has a number of them that he wasn’t aware of, and John has a number neither Brigit nor the police knew about, courtesy of Sherlock’s homeless network. Putting down the sites of the poaching and checking the bite marks on all victims confirms it: there are eight of them creeping onto established territory.

“I’ll make a few calls, I think,” Brigit muses. “Do you have Roger’s number?”

“I’ll call him,” John answers, mobile already in hand. “And Sarah - we’re still on speaking terms.”

“Shall we make it dinner?”

John considers Sherlock. John considers the odds of being able to make it through a meal against the odds of being able to explain away a territory council. “I’ll probably have to duck out halfway through, but sure.”

“Your detective?” Brigit asks. Rhetorical. It’s always rhetorical, these days.

“My flatmate,” John confirms, a warning curve in his lips. His flatmate, his flat, his territory. No one touches Sherlock, no one, not a single mark on that ridiculous neck.

“Would he out us?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” He holds up his hand as Roger picks up down the line. “Hey, Roger, hey. I’m at Brigit’s office and we’ve noticed a number of interlopers in your area. Yeah, thought you might have noticed that. No, we don’t know who they are yet - no dental records on file here. What? Yeah, I’ve photo evidence. Territory council tonight?”

As he runs the plan by Roger, Brigit does the same with the other major contenders of London. Their phone tree takes very few calls to activate, and within twenty minutes, they have five different reservations for eight on technically neutral ground. Each district will settle on their leader, then leave the matter to the head five. Though John counts as a newcomer these days, he’s been in London for as much of his life as he’s been able. Being a medical professional doesn’t hurt, territorially speaking. Though everyone is entitled to the block surrounding their residence, doctors able to treat their kind are few on the ground. There are very distinct benefits, enough to make the temptation of the operation table well worth it.

More territory and a stronger claim to it - even wounded, John had thought he could rest easy. Apparently not.

Brigit has Brian make copies of the photos and John takes back the original file. In the few hours until the dinner meeting, he patrols his territory. Just one man walking amicably through London, quick of pace, but normal. Just a normal man, walking. From the clinic to his flat, back and forth, enraged instinct beneath his skin. He does this, has always done this. Even wounded and limping, he had still walked.

As he walks, he remembers being young. He’s pushing forty now, too old to want an area larger than his short strides can devour. But he remembers the rush of first territory. The first time he’d stepped outside and looked up and down the street and thought: this is mine. It had been his until deployment, and now half of that block is Roger’s and the other half might be Julia’s. He’s not even sure about that. A lapse of attention over domain he might have once killed for.

He remembers his father, which is not something he does casually. Blooddrunk, unable to control himself, unable to hold onto the edges of his domain regardless of what John and Harry did to help him. What’s the point of territory if you don’t hunt? The unending question and lament of Harold Watson. What good are they if you don’t bite them? And their mum would shake her head and do what she could to calm him, to put him away where he couldn’t hurt anyone, and John had bent his life toward a career with access to blood banks.

In the end, Harold Watson’s territory had no longer been his own, but that of his wife and children. Not the joint holding it had once been, but gone. Anyone so irresponsible with their hunting ground would lose it; this was a lesson his children had learned from an early age. They’d thought their father would know it too.

But he hadn’t.

He truly hadn’t known it.

When he’d lost his hunting ground, he’d turned on their mum, and that had been that. He hadn’t been himself, not at the end - this is what the Watsons tell each other, what other families tell the Watsons. Too much hunting, that was the ruin of him. Too much thinking nothing could stand against him when, of course, there was little enough that didn’t.

Most Londoners don’t hunt, but territory is still territory. It is still important, so very important to be able to step outside and look up and down that street and to know it, bone-deep, blood-thick: this is mine. Cities have always been an issue for their kind, but people like them are rare enough and coordinated enough to carry it off. Compared to the expanses in the country, physical territory is tiny, but population density more than compensates. It’s regulated by force of will, the poachers treated as harshly as the rapists. Punishment is harsh, severe, the delivery of it enough to fulfil any hunting need.

John likes London for that reason, loves it. He likes to know exactly where the boundaries are, enjoys having it in exact terms. He likes to nip downstairs and eat at Speedy’s, looking out the window and watching the people who, for a few short blocks, are his. Each untouched neck is a matter of pride. His patients, Mrs Turner and her married ones, Mrs Hudson, Sherlock - no one touches them. No one touches John’s territory.

Not until now.

When the time for the impromptu territory council draws near, John checks his mobile and finds Sherlock still has yet to summon him. Ought to be safe to go. John walks to the edge of his territory and only then does he take the tube. Sherlock doesn’t take the tube, and it’s always possible Sherlock might be following him.

At the restaurant, John is on the edge of underdressed, but he manages it well enough. His table is the same as Sarah’s, which is a bit awkward, but it’ll make matters simpler if Sherlock calls him away mid-meeting. John will barely have to explain, if he does at all. At any rate, his friendship with Sarah has noticeably improved since this common threat appeared.

As he takes his seat, he catches Mike Stamford’s eye from across the room and gives a nod. Mike nods back, his jovial face turned serious for the occasion.

As always, there’s a disproportionate number of medical professionals gathered, but it’s good plausible deniability. As always, everyone orders their steak rare. There’s the preliminary chitchat about families, and then about health screening, and then about streets they’d be willing to swap. Then they get down to business.

There have been some sightings of the poachers, but not many. There’s someone present who has access to the CCTV network, and when John strains in his seat for a view of their government insider, he has a moment of almost bemused recognition. They all share what information they have, and people seem to know that information ought to be funnelled toward John these days. “Your detective,” everyone says, and they all say it in front of Sarah. More than a little agonizing, that, but he can live with it.

By dessert, there are roughly five plans in place for tracking suspects, investigating the newcomers to their territory, and checking through the bite records of everyone documented in the greater London area. Everyone present has been cleared of suspicion of poaching, which is a start. Everything else will take some time.

“I’ll see what Sherlock has,” John promises. “Keep me updated - you know my email, right? You can message me through the blog, that works too.”

They say their goodbyes and part, still on edge. No one asks what will happen if this results in a major leak. They’ve all considered it, all thought about it. A community best defined as fiercely territorial and prone to murder and rape - all true of their community, regardless of the measures they take against it - is not a community that particularly wants recognition. Disbelief is their greatest weapon, but these attacks have gone too far, provided too many corpses. There’s too much evidence.

“I think they want to hold us hostage,” John suggests to Sarah as he walks with her to the tube station. “They’ve been copying the existing territory maps. They could blame all of the attacks on us, get us locked up, and move in and take over.”

“It wouldn’t be that simple,” Sarah counters. Not with force, though. She’s considering it.

“No, but it would be a good way to begin.” John knows full well that his claim to territory is a result of his medical degree. Their people have health needs, just like everyone else, if not more. Drink once from the wrong person and that’s HIV for life, however much life there’s left to be had. If John can ever operate again, he’ll be a valuable commodity. Not many can resist blood the way he can, not with it hot under the nose. It’s why Mike had to fall back on teaching. The point is, a newcomer on the London scene, or even a returning player, can’t get a good foothold the way matters stand now.

Sarah knows this. They all know this. The longer Sarah stays silent, the more obvious it is that she’s begun to agree.

“You know whoever goes to the police first will have the better of it,” John adds.

“Why didn’t you bring this up at dinner?”

“Well, I’m still new. But I am making sense, aren’t I?”

“That’s what scares me,” she admits. They tap their Oyster cards against the reader and head down the escalator, Sarah first. She turns around halfway down, looking up over her shoulder at him. “When are you telling Sherlock?”

“Sherlock doesn’t believe in us,” John replies. “He’s sure it has to be something else.”

“Then he’s not going to stop them.”

“We can stop them on our own.”

“If we move quickly enough.”

“Well, yes,” John acknowledges.

“And Sherlock moves quickly.”

“Well, yes,” John repeats. “But.”

Sarah waits. They move onto the next escalator.

“I just...” John begins. “Have you ever come out to someone before?”

“Sort of,” Sarah says. “My dad was normal. So, my cousins.”

“How’d that go?”

“Bit awkward, but they already knew. I don’t have much in the way of thirst, so I guess they liked that I was looking out for them.”

“Sherlock is... different, Sarah.”

“Is he?” she asks dryly.

“I know, I know, sorry. Sorry.” He tries to start over, arranging his thoughts to the sound of the guitarist serenading this evening’s batch of travellers. The music echoes through the Underground tunnels, warped sounds under stale light. “I mean, his brother knows. First time we met, the man had my therapist’s notes. There’s no way he doesn’t know. He hasn’t said anything, just dropped comments here and there.”

“Like what?”

“Like....” John looks down, fiddling with the folder he’s still carrying. “He knows that Sherlock’s mine. I mean-”

“John,” she interrupts, giving him that look. The one where she might deck him if he tries to explain further. “He knows Sherlock is safe with you.”

“Yes,” John confirms. “That, yes.”

“You could go to the brother.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Tell the brother,” Sarah repeats. “About what’s going on, about us being willing to coordinate.”

“I can’t do that. I’m new on the ground, Sarah.”

“I’ll share the clinic territory,” she says.

“You already do-”

“If they try to take it away from you,” she says. “I’ll share anyway.”

John... isn’t sure what to say to that.

“Thanks,” he answers eventually, belatedly. Once they’re already waiting for their train. It’s long enough a pause that she blinks at him a bit, needs to remember what they were talking about.

It’s crowded, so when they climb on, they both have to stand. He gives her the better spot, the one near the wall, and she leans and holds the arm of his jacket. It’s comfortable, and he’s glad for it.

“John?”

“Mm?”

“Have you considered just... doing it?”

“Doing....”

“Him,” she finishes, which is exactly what he’d hoped she wouldn’t say.

“For the last time, I don’t want to shag my flatmate.”

“I didn’t say shag,” she corrects quietly. For all their speech is coded, they’re still in public. But John understands.

He’s considered it.

The second day he knew Sherlock, mere hours after meeting to view a flat, he’d more than considered it. Tall man, gorgeous neck at just the proper height for John - of course he’d entertained the fantasy. Unwinding the scarf, taking a handful of those curls, and sinking his teeth into soft, tempting flesh. The initial jerk before the inevitable surrender. Sucking thick warmth and licking it up where it dripped down, staining the tight crispness of his shirt wet and red. But that’s all it was, a fantasy.

Much more problematic than the fantasy is the reality: Sherlock is his flatmate. Sherlock is his territory. There’s no magic way to bite without wounding, to drink unnoticed, but, god, John wants to. The last time John had felt this way about someone, he’d driven the poor girl to tears. He’d hated himself, every unrelenting minute of it, but hadn’t been able to stop. The drive to possess and isolate had finally terrified him enough that he’d broken things off, and he’d never forget the way she cried with absolute relief. He’s never confused possessiveness with love since.

“Sherlock has a drug history,” John replies. “I don’t... not with a drug history.” He drinks by blood donation standards, which Sherlock certainly doesn’t meet. If John has to tell himself this more often than not, that’s simply John’s problem to live with.

Sarah considers for a bit. Or maybe she’s thinking about something else. He hopes she’s thinking about something else. “The cabbie?” she asks.

He meets her eyes. She’s read his blog, the story he invented for the occasion.

His hesitation is all she needs.

“John,” she says, as if, well, as if catching him in an absurd territorial display. “When I saw you at the circus, going for that swordsman,” she adds, then stops.

John sighs. He wants to say he can’t help it, but he knows he can. “He’s my best friend.”

“Now,” she agrees. “You’d known him a month then.”

He ducks his head, adjusts his stance as the train rumbles to a stop. They sway. “I’ll tell Mycroft,” he says. He’d call Anthea, but after the aborted chat-up, he’s never managed to get her number. “It’ll get taken care of.” Maybe only to keep Sherlock out of it, but John doesn’t doubt this promise to Sarah will hold.

“Thank you,” she says, and there’s trust in their hug, the way they tuck their faces into the other’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” John answers. “About the sharing thing.”

“You’d work harder to keep it than I would,” she points out, then steps out onto the platform without another word or wave or glance.

There’s a seat open now, but John stays standing, thinking.

As soon as John steps out into Baker Street, his mobile begins to chime. It begins to chime a great deal, delayed text after delayed text rushing in. None of them can be older than half an hour, forty minutes at the outside, and that thought allows John to check them without too much trepidation.

A minute later, he’s run the block between the Baker Street Station and 221B, unlocked the door, and mounted all thirty-four steps to his room. He tosses the folder onto bed before he goes for his desk drawer and confirms that Sherlock has taken his gun. He checks his ammunition - please, dear God, please - and Sherlock forgot to reload it, the idiot. Why the hell, why the hell does he think John keeps the gun loaded? Ever since the pool, he’s never risked leaving it lying around like that for his deranged flatmate to run off with.

John doesn’t waste time cursing, merely grabs a warmer jacket and hurtles back down all thirty-four stairs with a full magazine clip in his pocket. He hears Mrs Hudson yell something and hurriedly shouts, “Sorry, Mrs Hudson!” before locking the door behind him. It’s too late in the evening for many cabs on Baker Street, so he runs down to Marylebone. There, he hails a taxi on the first try, climbs into the back, and rattles off the address Sherlock has left for him, adding, “And, please, it’s urgent.”

“Got it, mate,” the cabbie answers, pulling out into the thinning evening traffic. “What’s the rush?”

“I’m a doctor - it’s my friend - please, just drive.”

“Right, yeah.” The cab speeds up a bit, which is the closest John is going to get to comfort for the foreseeable future.

He takes out his phone and texts Sarah and Mycroft the same message: SH just walked into a vampire den. He supplies the address. I’m en route. What now?

Remarkably, Sarah replies first. You’re facing up to eight. Telling the elders - don’t get killed.

Mycroft is only a second after: Keep him alive.

To both he answers: That was already the plan.

John pays the cabbie hurriedly, pays him probably too much, but he can’t be arsed to care. He’s too busy working out how to break into the empty office building. Sherlock’s already been in there an hour and hasn’t responded to a single one of John’s texts. Fat lot of good the gun did him. Either Sherlock can’t reply or he won’t, and the one is as bad as the other.

Sherlock entered through the back, John finds. The door is still unlocked. Cautious, careful, John enters. He comes up through dark back hallways and listens to the sound of voices and footsteps from above. He finds the stairs and climbs, careful of where they might creak. He has to guide himself with his hands against the walls, then spies a sliver of light spilling out from beneath a door. The closer he gets, the easier it is to hear.

John knows that baritone. That baritone is a good sign. The knot of possessive fury beneath his stomach begins to unclench, but fails to unwind.

He keeps his footsteps soft until he approaches the door, near enough to hear what they’re saying. Or, rather, what Sherlock is on the verge of yelling.

“No,” the detective is berating someone. “Your reasons. Your actual reasons. You can’t be that delusional.”

“Sherlock?” John calls through the door. “You all right in there?”

“Fine,” Sherlock scoffs.

John tries the door. No luck. Probably one of those safety locks. “Mind letting me in?”

The sound of deliberate footsteps and the door opens, Sherlock still aiming his gaze and John’s gun across the room.

Entering, John notes that their suspects have been herded against the wall opposite. Seven of them, three women and four men, none much taller than John. There should be eight. A single ceiling light illuminates the room. The floor is clear, the windows boarded over - this is a base of operations, not a residence. This is their neutral ground.

“John,” Sherlock says, gesturing slightly with John’s unloaded gun, “they actually believe themselves to be vampires.”

“Huh,” John says. “That would explain the biting.”

“But not the draining,” Sherlock insists. “They shouldn’t have been able to extract so much blood from the victims, not without equipment, but I can’t find whatever it is they’re using.”

“Huh,” John says again. “The police are on their way.” At least, John thinks they are. He’s not actually certain what Mycroft is up to.

Across the room, the vampires begin to show signs of panic. Increased signs. An hour spent in a room with Sherlock Holmes tends to result in panic, John’s noticed, even without the gun.

“Nobody move,” John warns.

They stop moving.

Sherlock immediately resumes rattling off his best theories of draining the blood from the victims, disparaging most, excluding others. He announces the connections between the victims, dismisses any clear pattern beyond susceptibility. He keeps gesturing with the gun but never takes his eyes off the vampires. Now and again, he breaks his own monologue to demand “Which is it?” of the men and women he has at gunpoint.

All the while, John memorizes their faces. None of them are familiar. “Sherlock, we’re missing one,” he interrupts, announces once he’s sure he could identify them if they escaped.

“How do you know?”

“Because....” John begins to say, which is when he realizes. The woman, shorter than John, and older. The others are young, younger. She stands out, conspicuous, and John knows.

By the widening of her eyes, she can see it in his face. The accusation, the declaration of what she is.

Poacher.

John steps forward, the word on his lips, the word mouthed and silently thrown, like a gauntlet, like a rock from a sling.

John steps forward, Sherlock catches at John’s shoulder, and John pulls away, still advancing, unable to stop, unable to want to stop. Sherlock is still saying something, but John can’t hear him.

The woman steps forward as well, and that’s when it happens. The moment when humanity isn’t quite so human. A human is as much or as little an animal as it cares to be, and their kind are as human as they can make themselves be. They are always just as human as they can make themselves be, and here, it tears, is torn, shatters and is shattered, because John has a list of names, John has his patients, Sarah’s patients, his territory, her territory, their territory.

“Kyle Chamberlain,” John growls. “Jessica Parker. Bhabesh Dhakal.” The woman’s eyes are wide, confused, utterly without recognition. As if every patient John patched up meant nothing, was nothing, wasn’t John’s. “Alison Peel. George McCandless.” Every name an accusation, every name a theft, and Sherlock won’t stop catching at his arm, won’t stop trying to pull John back from the poacher, from the threat, the thief, the invader.

“Sherlock!” John snaps, pulling free, pushing Sherlock back, away. Pushing Sherlock behind him, away from the threat, away from the threat Sherlock is protecting. “Stop defending her!”

Sherlock’s eyes: wide, alarmed, confused. “John, what are you--”

The woman lunges, an empty-handed threat, and John slams his fist below her sternum, just below. When she gasps, doubling over and eyes rolling back, he decks her.

“John!”

John strikes her again, and again, and when she falls and her companions step forward, John lets his fury show. Six opponents. Six threats. John sees them now, his possessive wrath turned transparent but unfading nonetheless. The poacher is on the floor, hurt, stunned, possibly concussed and bleeding internally. Certainly bleeding from the nose. John’s knuckles burn, bones aching beneath scraped skin.

A slow choking pull gently takes John from behind, Sherlock’s hand on his shirt collar. The rage quiets, a force no less destructive for its silence.

“No,” Sherlock warns the remaining six. “You stay back, and I keep John from killing the rest of you until the police arrive. All of you. Yes, you with the nose ring, you as well. John, what do you think you’re doing?” A tug at his collar. “John.”

But the words aren’t working. The threat of the gun isn’t working. John has shattered the stalemate and the scent of blood is rising.

The vampires step closer. One by one, they bare their fangs.

Sherlock aims at the foot of the closest and fires.

In the wake of the blank shot, silence resounds.

The vampires charge.

John turns and shoves Sherlock out the door, then slams the door shut between them.

Sherlock shouts, his words distinct and meaningless. He rattles the lock as if it’s John who needs protecting.

Six on one. Largely untrained; stalkers, hunters; not fighters. Still six on one. John sets his back into that corner, limits them, keeps the door protected. John strikes one, strikes another, and pulls the first man against him, biting viciously though his shirt, through the neck, so close to the spinal cord. The man twitches and falls, overwhelmed by the paralytic long stored against the roof of John’s mouth, potent with age.

Five on one.

No, three on one, the three dragging John away from the door and the two others making a run through it, out and after Sherlock. John snarls, rages, blood fresh on his teeth, and the poachers have it wrong, still think they’re hunting. They can grapple, try to restrain him, but John can break free, can slam elbows and palms and the crown of his head into any soft piece of vulnerability within reach. This is about damage, about killing, and they come for him as if for a drink. Three on one is easier, is almost manageable as long as he can keep a hostage between himself and the two others. He breaks the nearest woman’s arm, using her for a shield.

Then he hears Sherlock yell.

When John can next think, he’s in the hallway. Down the hallway. Running, running down the hallway through the dark. The feeling in his right arm is gone, vanished from elbow down. His chin is warm and wet and sticky. He has a vague sense of having just killed someone.

He rumbles down the stairs, charges forward, and is almost too far gone to notice the gun, his gun on the floor. Thrown, not dropped, left for him in a spot of window-given streetlight. Sherlock. John staggers to a stop, reaching for it with numb fingers, dripping red, and fishes the loaded magazine from his coat pocket with his other hand. Some of the feeling is coming back but not enough. He fumbles, and fumbles, and curses beneath the sounds of a fistfight gone wrong.

He shoves the magazine back into his coat, grips the gun in his left hand, and runs.

There is a thud, a half-strangled shout, and John has never, not in all his life, known rage such as this.

With two men over him, mouths against him, Sherlock is on the ground.

Sherlock isn’t moving.

John growls his fury.

The pair look up, withdrawing their teeth from blanched, bloodied skin, and then, then it is safe to attack.

The gun is in John’s hand, gripped at the barrel, and the sound it makes against the first man’s skull is a satisfying, wet crunch. John strikes him again, beats him to the floor, and he has all of a moment to look down into Sherlock’s eyes, open and wide. Just a moment before the second man slams his fist into John’s ribs, just a moment before the gun skitters across commercial grade carpeting, just a moment before John is down and the man is on him. Just a moment where Sherlock is conscious and bleeding and John’s chin drips with blood not his own.

And then the assault.

Winded, on his back, John curls in, lashes out.

The man lunges in.

John’s arm, up, blocking, bitten, burning, the chemical burn worse than the punctured muscle.

Numb right arm, more numb now for the second bite, for the fresh surge of paralytic pumped into his system. His nerves blaze, then fail. His shoulder spasms, his back, and he writhes up, flips them over. The man’s head strikes the carpet, bounces, and John shoves him down with the blunt force of his unfeeling right arm. Forces his own flesh harder against that mouth, against those teeth, forces the man’s head at an angle and lunges down for the throat.

When he finishes, he doesn’t bother telling himself he didn’t enjoy it.

The pistol-whipped man is stirring, groaning, is crawling away, so John hits him again, until he’s still.

The man is breathing, not moving, and John waits for him to move.

The man doesn’t.

Reassured, John scrambles to Sherlock on hand and knees, a limping, three-legged creature.

“Sherlock,” John breathes, his first word since true combat began.

Sherlock’s mouth is as open as his pale, hazy eyes. The noise he makes is soft and low, muscles lax from the two, no, three bites he’s suffered. They sit there, in Sherlock’s skin, marks from the wrong mouths. They bleed, a rhythmic weep of red with every beat of the detective’s heart.

“If he dies, I’m killing you,” John informs the only other living vampire in the hall. “I don’t care where you are, what jail cell they put you in. If he dies, I kill you.”

As John says this, Sherlock relaxes under his hands. Trust or blood loss, John cannot say. John’s body sees it as submission; his mind recognizes the medical emergency. The combination steadies him to a state close to sanity, his rage a steadying rock rather than a thrashing wave. Even so, it’s a close thing.

Sherlock’s heartbeat is faint, fluttering, his colour poor, and John has already gorged on the carcass beside them, just downed his pints in record time. He’s full to bursting, almost sick with it and certainly woozy, but Sherlock. His Sherlock. His Sherlock on the floor, bitten and immobilized, each mark the illegitimate claim of a poacher. John wants to lick him clean, to drink him dry, to kill him and scream ownership over the corpse until the sound tears his throat. He wants to bite, needs to, needs his teeth piercing where their teeth sunk, to overwrite false ownership with his own.

Instead, the doctor pushes his thumb into the half-curled circle of Sherlock’s hand and says, “Can you squeeze? Can you move?”

Weakly, barely, Sherlock squeezes his thumb.

“Hold onto me,” John says. “I need you to hold on, all right?”

Sherlock does, grey eyes focusing on John’s face, his cheeks and mouth and chin. The strength of that gaze is no strength at all, the piercing laser of Sherlock’s eyes turned to fog-hidden starlight.

But Sherlock is trying, is obeying.

Sherlock is his.

“Okay,” John breathes. He wipes his mouth with the back of his bloodied sleeve, a flopping motion of his right arm. His stomach feels terrible, too much of the wrong sort of blood churning over a too-recent meal. The need to drink Sherlock still and tame, the want, the haunting desire, slowly becomes manageable. If John drank from Sherlock now, he’d vomit. He won’t waste his friend that way. “Okay. I’m going to take care of you. You’ll be all right. Sherlock, do you hear me?”

Sherlock squeezes his thumb.

“Good,” John says. “Now hold still - we need to stop the bleeding.”

John doesn’t have long. Backup arrives two minutes later, five minutes too late to be of any tactical assistance, but more than early enough to help Sherlock. The problem is, the rescue team is almost uniformly vampire. Be that Mycroft’s doing or Sarah’s, John isn’t sure, not until he sees Anthea. Mycroft it is.

Sherlock refuses to let go of John’s thumb the entire way to the ambulance, as if he knows John would rather kill him than let him let go. Sherlock’s had a large dose of the paralytic and the chemical, foreign to his body, is continuing its work on him well after John regains sensation in his arm.

They’re taken to Bart’s. John stays at Sherlock’s side, is somehow permitted to stay at Sherlock’s side until Sherlock is admitted into human care, with human caretakers. Only once John lets go does Mike Stamford appear at his elbow.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Mike says.

“Thanks, Mike.”

They get John cleaned up, the bites treated, the shots administered. They laugh a bit as Mike draws the blood sample from his arm, chuckling over iodine and needles. An x-ray of his forearm shows no bones broken, but the muscle damage is more severe than he’d like. Mike bandages him up as well as John’s restlessness will permit. He didn’t bite Sherlock, needs to bite Sherlock.

John cannot bite. For Sherlock’s life, he cannot permit himself to bite.

“He’s yours, mate,” Mike says, keeps saying every time John begins to twitch and fidget.

“I know.”

“You don’t need to prove it.”

“I know,” John promises.

“I knew he’d be perfect for you, if you could stand him and he took to you,” Mike goes on. “Solitary sort, no friends to compete with. Could tell from the start he wouldn’t be the kind to run from you. There’ll be some poking and prodding in your future, I’d bet.”

“I know.”

Mike attempts a smile and John attempts one in return.

Out in the hallway, Anthea and her Blackberry wait for him.

“There were only seven,” John says. “There should have been eight.”

“There are four now,” Anthea answers, typing on her phone. Hopefully telling Mycroft there’s a poacher on the loose, hopefully explaining what that means to people like them.

“Four left out of the seven, you mean?”

“Mm.”

John thinks about that. He’s fairly certain he knows which three he killed, but he isn’t sure.

“Anything else?” John asks.

“You left something at the office building,” Anthea informs him without glancing up. “Mr Holmes is having it cleaned and returned to your desk.”

“Oh,” John says, remembering the hair and blood on the handle of his gun. “Thank you.”

Anthea and her Blackberry don’t respond. However much territory John has gathered, it’s far from enough to impress someone like her, someone whose domain may happen to contain Mycroft Holmes.

“Where’s Sherlock?” John asks.

“I’ll take you to him,” she says, and does, and leaves.

Standing in the doorway, John doesn’t watch her go. Instead, he watches Sherlock breathe.

He enters and sits. He sets the tingling fingers of his right hand against the limp fingers of Sherlock’s left.

Sherlock doesn’t stir.

John turns on the telly and waits until he does.

The sound of John’s name is a fading, floppy noise, half-drawled, half-gasped.

“Yes?” John asks. He takes up the remote and turns off the telly.

Sherlock lolls his head to the side, gazing placidly at John. “That was... different.”

“And what have we learned tonight?” John asks.

It takes Sherlock a moment, his mouth moving oddly around the syllables. “Vampires are real.”

John shakes his head. “Not the lesson I was going for.”

“No?”

“No,” John answers. “Always check if the gun is loaded, you idiot.”

Sherlock’s mouth twitches, which is no different from what it’s been doing for the past minute. John sees a difference in it all the same.

“All right?” John asks, demands.

“Check the gun,” Sherlock confirms.

“Good.” And he squeezes Sherlock’s hand.

Sherlock squeezes back. His grip isn’t hard, isn’t soft from a lack of trying.

They look at each other, holding, gripping, until it’s enough.

“Turn the telly back on,” Sherlock tells him.

John does.

They sit and watch into the night, John’s fingers calm and steady on his flatmate’s pulse.

next