Wait for the Ricochet (2a)
Hereby I acknowledge that this chapter would be impossible to write without ArianeDeVere s episode transcripts. I borrowed some of your very words, Ari, I hope you don't mind overmuch.
.
John stopped at the crossing, casting his glance swiftly to the right, then to the left- and realised he no longer lay in the bed next to his target’s.
It always happened like this - the arrival into a dream with no actual awareness of any descent. No slow drifting off into a slumber, no growing weight on your eyelids, no chasing of scattered thoughts behind your forehead; one second you were counting down on the DreamShare program and the next you were walking the streets- that is to say, if your Architect was so kind as to provide you with a maze in a shape of a city. John used to be amazed by the aptness with which the brain adopted a new situation, wrapping itself around the forced reality and providing all the additional information that it subconsciously expected to get, extrapolating from previous experiences. He’s been in the dream only a couple of seconds now and his feet already felt as if it had walked for some time, sending short stabs of ache up his calves upon each step.
As he continued his walk, he tried his best not to look utterly flabbergasted by the vivid and realistic nature of the dream. The London streets he trod on looked as if they had been copy-pasted from reality. The people who populated them had distinguishable faces; all of them. John was used to meeting personifications of people in his target’s mind, the more detailed and true to form the more important for the target they were; but the rest of the dreamy population were usually a number of faceless, shadowy figures in the background, or nondescript persons with a generic face, much like his own. There were exceptions, of course: once, he shared a dream with a bloke who was fond of LSD. The people he met inside his dreams reminded John of Del Toro’s horrors. It was one of the rare occasions his usual strategy failed - to blend into that dream he had too few eyes and a considerable lack of scales or wings. In Sherlock’s mind, as far as John could see, the everyday people were captured down to the very last detail, as if photographed. Sherlock must have an eidetic memory, John thought, and an admirable memory storage system too.
Damn, it must have taken months to build a whole fucking London out of one’s memories. No wonder he got stuck.
He roamed the city for the better part of two days in his search for Sherlock Holmes, the feeling of absurdity of such an endeavour making his shoulders sag. The man could have been anywhere. Mycroft Holmes had provided him with next to no valuable information about his brother. Then there was the fact that John couldn’t make his search any more efficient simply by asking people for help- that would be a flashing beacon announcing his presence to Moriarty’s guards. So far, John didn’t even dare to buy himself any food, knowing that the gripping pain in his stomach was only a product of his basal brain that had adopted the dream for its new reality. The hunger he felt wasn’t real and he wasn’t in any danger of perishing from it - he didn’t even expect any observable lessening of his strength during the time he would have to spend in here - what appeared like days in a dream were mere minutes in the real world.
It took John two days to notice the oddities revealing that, despite the inhuman accuracy of it, the dream was still only a dream.
The stars didn’t move. Every night, the sky was scattered by shining pinpoints that kept their exact place above the city through all the night. The sun rose duly in the east and set in the west, and John had to laugh when he figured out the reason behind it. In Sherlock’s deeply-rooted opinion, the Sun revolved round the unmoving Earth. John wondered what kind of a man would clutter his headspace with such copious detail about total strangers he passed by on the streets, omitting the grammar school knowledge of the laws of nature. The fact that John couldn’t recognise a single constellation in the haphazard scatter of the stars above revealed that astronomy wasn’t high on Sherlock’s list of priorities either.
Then there was the beautiful music, or more precisely, snatches of it that he caught walking past restaurants. Nearly all of it was classical: concertos and violin sonatas mostly; opera, apparently, also belonged among Sherlock’s favourites. Sometimes, when passing a crowded club or a noisy, beer-reeking pub, he caught a fragment of more popular melodies, but nothing past the dreadful late nineties. Sherlock must have stopped paying attention to pop music about the time he stopped clubbing.
Not that John needed to wait for sunset or turn on a radio to make sure he was still inside Sherlock’s head. Every now and then, his hand went up to scratch the scar on the left side of his chest, just under the shoulder. It was almost an unconscious gesture, a constant reminder better than any totem could be. The scar was there only when he dreamed, a memory of the shot that had ended his career as an Extractor. The tremor in his hand lasted even in his waking hours; but only in dreams did he have a visible cause for it.
He kept one eye on the lookout for Mary at all times. London was a big city but John was sure that they would meet sooner or later. It was as inevitable as casting a shadow when the sun shone.
Mary would be like a spark of life in this gloomy place, John thought and then he stopped dead in his tracks to wonder why he had just formulated that particular thought. Then it hit him: Mary was extraordinary. Her petite frame and impish grin were a mere masquerade of her quicksilver mind and flint-hard eyes; especially when you were unfortunate enough to behold them from the wrong side of a gun sight. She was a surprise in a flowered dress, a perfectly harmless killing machine. But the things around here- the life happening on the streets, the random people he passed by, everything John witnessed- never had a single element of surprise in them. It was all amazingly precise, yes; but equally predictable. Nothing ever happened that would be out of the ordinary, people tracked the well-trodden paths of everyday life without a single aberration. Every event appeared to aim straight for the middle of the Gaussian curve of probability. This dreamy London was built using the laws of statistics, and as such, it was incredibly boring.
In the early hours of his third day spent on aimless wandering, John remembered the skull. Maybe Sherlock had a taste for the macabre, maybe it was scientific interest, but there was the probability he could be found near mortuaries. John put on his doctor role, that trusty face and the overworked bearing of a man pulling a thirty-six hour rotation, and searched through the hospitals methodically. It was the third he visited, St. Bartholomew’s, where Fortune smiled on him.
He recognised Mike Stamford as soon as he spotted him in the hospital canteen. The years had done their job on him in an expectable, waist-line-expanding way- bad habits die hard and Mike was always prone to comfort eating during stressful exams. John wondered how much this personification of his Uni mate was a result of the logical extrapolation that seemed to rule everything around here, and how much was a semblance of the real, middle-aged Mike. Sherlock must have known him in real life, that much was certain.
With a shift of his shoulders and a slight change of stance John dropped his role of a doctor. That wouldn’t do with Mike. In a flash of inspiration John grabbed a cane that someone had left forgotten by one of the tables, and putting on that enduring, angry-with-himself look of a patient in rehab, he limped towards his old friend.
In no time they embarked on some non-committal small-talk. John looked genuinely broke and was waiting for a good opportunity to ask an innocent question about Sherlock when Mike beat him to it. Jackpot, John thought and agreed to go and have a look at his potential flatmate.
The Sherlock Holmes he found in the lab surprised him. For one thing, he looked several years younger than his sleeping self. His looks and overall appearance were even more blindsiding than John had imagined. The man moved with the grace of a dancer and carried the six feet of his body with an arrogance that reminded John instantly of the elder Holmes, not to mention the comparable expensiveness of their clothes. Even with his attention not directed on John, the younger man looked like an exclamation mark in the otherwise familiar laboratory, and John had to bite his lip to hold back his curiosity and just stand there, waiting for a cue.
Which happened to come as an offer to hand over his mobile phone, when Sherlock complained about the lack of signal on his own.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
John frowned. Without any warning he found himself treading dangerous ground.
“Sorry?” he hesitated, searching for some help, but Mike’s smug smile wasn’t helpful in the least.
“Which was it - Afghanistan or Iraq?” Sherlock’s deep voice had a bored edge to it, indicating that Sherlock was sure of an answer anyway. John decided to blindly take a pick.
“Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know...?”
Sherlock apparently didn’t find it necessary to explain himself and plunged right into something that sounded like an arrangement of flat sharing terms. John did his best to look taken by surprise at the development. Well, the riding crop in a mortuary did sound a bit alarming...
“Is that it?” he stopped Sherlock’s monologue at last, just when the impossible man was about to leave the lab. Sherlock turned back from the door and strolled closer.
“Is that what?”
John smiled in disbelief - it couldn’t be that easy, could it? “We’ve only just met and we’re going to go and look at a flat? I mean - we don’t know a thing about each other.”
Pale grey eyes bore into him for a moment before Sherlock spoke.
“I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him - possibly because he’s an alcoholic; more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic - quite correctly, I’m afraid.”
John looked down at his cane and shuffled his feet in an attempt to hide his utter bewilderment. That moment of awkwardness saved him from another smug smirk from Sherlock Holmes, before the man disappeared at last.
Well, that was something, John thought. He could see where he gave an impression of an Army doctor - he didn’t try to conceal the fact that he studied medicine. After all, it was Mike, his former classmate, who introduced him to Sherlock. John was also quite fond of the simple haircut he got used to during his days in the Army - though he was never deployed, neither to Afghanistan nor to Iraq. The bit about the psychosomatic limp was most likely to be blamed on the cane, though John would like to hear a closer explanation of that. But how Sherlock conjured up John’s alcoholic brother remained a mystery, especially as John didn’t have a sibling in real life and had never pretended to have one in any of his mind heists.
“He’s always like that,” Mike winked and John felt a tang of excitement. This will be interesting.
***
“Okay, you’ve got questions.”
The cab made slow progress through the evening traffic on their way to Brixton. In the backseat, John’s head was still spinning from the whirlwind of what was supposed to be an afternoon spent looking at a flat that had resulted in an invitation to be Sherlock’s assistant for a case of four serial suicides.
Who are you? That was the most important question for John at the time. Apparently, this Sherlock Holmes was no Extractor. John was beginning to doubt if there were any mind heists done in this architecture of a dream. Whatever the Navigator wanted from Sherlock didn’t encompass his exceptional abilities, and it was possible that Moriarty hid this aspect of Sherlock’s life from him completely. “What do you do?” John asked.
“What do you think?”
There was a hint of pride in the younger man’s voice, so John picked his words carefully: “I’d say private detective ...but the police don’t go to private detectives.”
“I’m a consulting detective. Only one in the world. I invented the job.”
John wondered if this was what Sherlock would have become in real life had it not been for the existence of DreamShare technology. Both endeavours, Mind Heist and the detective work, were focused on discovering what was hidden, both required an equal share of brains and guts, both could bring the reward of a good hunt. John already knew Sherlock as a terrific Extractor. How good would he be as an amateur detective?
“The police don’t consult amateurs,” John remarked. Sherlock threw him a look.
“When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said, ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ You looked surprised.”
Yeah, anybody would look surprised finding themselves suddenly in the middle of a geography exam. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation as you entered the room said trained at Bart’s, so Army doctor - obvious. Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing.”
John winced internally. When he was forced to leave England after the Scott fiasco with Interpol at his heels, sunbathing was the last thing on his mind, indeed.
“Your limp’s really bad when you walk but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Afghanistan or Iraq.”
John mentally chided himself for the slip of not asking for a chair. Pretending to be lame was obviously a harder thing than it seemed. The cane was a spur of the moment inspiration, supposed to help him to blend in among the hospital patients. He had never expected it to inspire such a castle in the air of deductions. Well, if Sherlock thought it psychosomatic, so much the better. John could pretend to get miraculously cured by some exciting experience which was sure to come as long as he stayed by Sherlock’s side, and then he would be done with the cane for good.
“Then there’s your brother.”
Yeah, I’d love to hear about him. John shifted forward, prepared to listen carefully. If he was to have any success with winning Sherlock’s trust, he had to act according to what he was supposed to be, to what Sherlock expected of him.
“Your phone.” Sherlock extended his palm expectantly. John fished out the mobile phone he bought in a pawn shop after his return to London and gave it over to Sherlock.
“It’s expensive, only a six months old model, but you’re looking for a flatshare - you wouldn’t waste money on this. It’s a gift, then.”
Six months? John frowned. He was not exactly a technology-savvy person but even he knew that this particular model was a hot commodity more than four years ago. It gave him a rough estimate of the time shift between the dream and the real world outside, although he still had no idea what was the reason for it in the first place.
Sherlock ran his fingertips over the scratches on the phone casing. “It’s been in the same pocket as keys and coins. The man sitting next to me wouldn’t treat his one luxury item like this. Next bit’s easy.”
“The engraving.” John had to suppress a smile when he saw where this was leading. On the back of the phone was engraved: ‘Harry Watson - from Clara, xxx.’ Those words were there already when he bought the phone. He had actually picked up this particular exemplar because of them; his name was so common that he could afford to live in London under the name of Harry Watson, his phone supporting his backstory to accidental onlookers.
“Harry Watson: clearly a family member who’s given you his old phone. Now, who’s Clara? Three kisses say it’s a romantic attachment. The expense of the phone says wife, not girlfriend. Marriage in trouble then - six months on he’s just given it away. If she’d left him, he would have kept it. But no, he wanted rid of it. He left her.”
What a badass of a brother I have. John smirked, careful to face the window as he did. Only the last item of Sherlock’s deduction remained unexplained, the most far-fetched of them all.
“How could you possibly know about the drinking?”
Sherlock smiled self-confidently. “Power connection: tiny little scuff marks around the edge of it. Every night he goes to plug it in to charge but his hands are shaking. You never see a drunk’s phone without them.”
Except for when you get a discount for it accompanied by the pawn shop owner’s apologies about his two year old daughter who stayed unguarded for twenty minutes, having obviously had a very good time with the phone and Daddy’s keys. John didn’t mind the scratches, as long as the charger worked, and welcomed the discount. Until now, it never occurred to him that the poor state of his phone could be blamed on any different cause than a technology-loving toddler.
Sherlock looked out the side window, biting his lip. John thought he was amazing, considering. No, it was amazing without condition - the man couldn’t have known about the actual age of the gadget, nor could he have guessed the name coincidence on the engraving.
“That ... was extraordinary; quite extraordinary,” he said with heart-felt conviction.
Sherlock turned around, surprised. “That’s not what people normally say.”
“I’d guess,” John laughed at last. “They tell you to piss off, don’t they?”
Sherlock grinned. “Did I get anything wrong?”
John paused for a second, unsure if he should be boosting Sherlock’s ego any more or if it was safe to take just a little piss at him.
“Harry’s short for Harriet.”
The teeth-gritting self-reproach on Sherlock’s face was worth it. Considering everything John already knew about this dream and its natural relations, he was now bound to meet his lesbian sister sooner or later in flesh, brought to life as a personification of Sherlock’s deductions. He could only hope that they would get on.
.
.
. Next chapter
.
John stopped at the crossing, casting his glance swiftly to the right, then to the left- and realised he no longer lay in the bed next to his target’s.
It always happened like this - the arrival into a dream with no actual awareness of any descent. No slow drifting off into a slumber, no growing weight on your eyelids, no chasing of scattered thoughts behind your forehead; one second you were counting down on the DreamShare program and the next you were walking the streets- that is to say, if your Architect was so kind as to provide you with a maze in a shape of a city. John used to be amazed by the aptness with which the brain adopted a new situation, wrapping itself around the forced reality and providing all the additional information that it subconsciously expected to get, extrapolating from previous experiences. He’s been in the dream only a couple of seconds now and his feet already felt as if it had walked for some time, sending short stabs of ache up his calves upon each step.
As he continued his walk, he tried his best not to look utterly flabbergasted by the vivid and realistic nature of the dream. The London streets he trod on looked as if they had been copy-pasted from reality. The people who populated them had distinguishable faces; all of them. John was used to meeting personifications of people in his target’s mind, the more detailed and true to form the more important for the target they were; but the rest of the dreamy population were usually a number of faceless, shadowy figures in the background, or nondescript persons with a generic face, much like his own. There were exceptions, of course: once, he shared a dream with a bloke who was fond of LSD. The people he met inside his dreams reminded John of Del Toro’s horrors. It was one of the rare occasions his usual strategy failed - to blend into that dream he had too few eyes and a considerable lack of scales or wings. In Sherlock’s mind, as far as John could see, the everyday people were captured down to the very last detail, as if photographed. Sherlock must have an eidetic memory, John thought, and an admirable memory storage system too.
Damn, it must have taken months to build a whole fucking London out of one’s memories. No wonder he got stuck.
He roamed the city for the better part of two days in his search for Sherlock Holmes, the feeling of absurdity of such an endeavour making his shoulders sag. The man could have been anywhere. Mycroft Holmes had provided him with next to no valuable information about his brother. Then there was the fact that John couldn’t make his search any more efficient simply by asking people for help- that would be a flashing beacon announcing his presence to Moriarty’s guards. So far, John didn’t even dare to buy himself any food, knowing that the gripping pain in his stomach was only a product of his basal brain that had adopted the dream for its new reality. The hunger he felt wasn’t real and he wasn’t in any danger of perishing from it - he didn’t even expect any observable lessening of his strength during the time he would have to spend in here - what appeared like days in a dream were mere minutes in the real world.
It took John two days to notice the oddities revealing that, despite the inhuman accuracy of it, the dream was still only a dream.
The stars didn’t move. Every night, the sky was scattered by shining pinpoints that kept their exact place above the city through all the night. The sun rose duly in the east and set in the west, and John had to laugh when he figured out the reason behind it. In Sherlock’s deeply-rooted opinion, the Sun revolved round the unmoving Earth. John wondered what kind of a man would clutter his headspace with such copious detail about total strangers he passed by on the streets, omitting the grammar school knowledge of the laws of nature. The fact that John couldn’t recognise a single constellation in the haphazard scatter of the stars above revealed that astronomy wasn’t high on Sherlock’s list of priorities either.
Then there was the beautiful music, or more precisely, snatches of it that he caught walking past restaurants. Nearly all of it was classical: concertos and violin sonatas mostly; opera, apparently, also belonged among Sherlock’s favourites. Sometimes, when passing a crowded club or a noisy, beer-reeking pub, he caught a fragment of more popular melodies, but nothing past the dreadful late nineties. Sherlock must have stopped paying attention to pop music about the time he stopped clubbing.
Not that John needed to wait for sunset or turn on a radio to make sure he was still inside Sherlock’s head. Every now and then, his hand went up to scratch the scar on the left side of his chest, just under the shoulder. It was almost an unconscious gesture, a constant reminder better than any totem could be. The scar was there only when he dreamed, a memory of the shot that had ended his career as an Extractor. The tremor in his hand lasted even in his waking hours; but only in dreams did he have a visible cause for it.
He kept one eye on the lookout for Mary at all times. London was a big city but John was sure that they would meet sooner or later. It was as inevitable as casting a shadow when the sun shone.
Mary would be like a spark of life in this gloomy place, John thought and then he stopped dead in his tracks to wonder why he had just formulated that particular thought. Then it hit him: Mary was extraordinary. Her petite frame and impish grin were a mere masquerade of her quicksilver mind and flint-hard eyes; especially when you were unfortunate enough to behold them from the wrong side of a gun sight. She was a surprise in a flowered dress, a perfectly harmless killing machine. But the things around here- the life happening on the streets, the random people he passed by, everything John witnessed- never had a single element of surprise in them. It was all amazingly precise, yes; but equally predictable. Nothing ever happened that would be out of the ordinary, people tracked the well-trodden paths of everyday life without a single aberration. Every event appeared to aim straight for the middle of the Gaussian curve of probability. This dreamy London was built using the laws of statistics, and as such, it was incredibly boring.
In the early hours of his third day spent on aimless wandering, John remembered the skull. Maybe Sherlock had a taste for the macabre, maybe it was scientific interest, but there was the probability he could be found near mortuaries. John put on his doctor role, that trusty face and the overworked bearing of a man pulling a thirty-six hour rotation, and searched through the hospitals methodically. It was the third he visited, St. Bartholomew’s, where Fortune smiled on him.
He recognised Mike Stamford as soon as he spotted him in the hospital canteen. The years had done their job on him in an expectable, waist-line-expanding way- bad habits die hard and Mike was always prone to comfort eating during stressful exams. John wondered how much this personification of his Uni mate was a result of the logical extrapolation that seemed to rule everything around here, and how much was a semblance of the real, middle-aged Mike. Sherlock must have known him in real life, that much was certain.
With a shift of his shoulders and a slight change of stance John dropped his role of a doctor. That wouldn’t do with Mike. In a flash of inspiration John grabbed a cane that someone had left forgotten by one of the tables, and putting on that enduring, angry-with-himself look of a patient in rehab, he limped towards his old friend.
In no time they embarked on some non-committal small-talk. John looked genuinely broke and was waiting for a good opportunity to ask an innocent question about Sherlock when Mike beat him to it. Jackpot, John thought and agreed to go and have a look at his potential flatmate.
The Sherlock Holmes he found in the lab surprised him. For one thing, he looked several years younger than his sleeping self. His looks and overall appearance were even more blindsiding than John had imagined. The man moved with the grace of a dancer and carried the six feet of his body with an arrogance that reminded John instantly of the elder Holmes, not to mention the comparable expensiveness of their clothes. Even with his attention not directed on John, the younger man looked like an exclamation mark in the otherwise familiar laboratory, and John had to bite his lip to hold back his curiosity and just stand there, waiting for a cue.
Which happened to come as an offer to hand over his mobile phone, when Sherlock complained about the lack of signal on his own.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
John frowned. Without any warning he found himself treading dangerous ground.
“Sorry?” he hesitated, searching for some help, but Mike’s smug smile wasn’t helpful in the least.
“Which was it - Afghanistan or Iraq?” Sherlock’s deep voice had a bored edge to it, indicating that Sherlock was sure of an answer anyway. John decided to blindly take a pick.
“Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know...?”
Sherlock apparently didn’t find it necessary to explain himself and plunged right into something that sounded like an arrangement of flat sharing terms. John did his best to look taken by surprise at the development. Well, the riding crop in a mortuary did sound a bit alarming...
“Is that it?” he stopped Sherlock’s monologue at last, just when the impossible man was about to leave the lab. Sherlock turned back from the door and strolled closer.
“Is that what?”
John smiled in disbelief - it couldn’t be that easy, could it? “We’ve only just met and we’re going to go and look at a flat? I mean - we don’t know a thing about each other.”
Pale grey eyes bore into him for a moment before Sherlock spoke.
“I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him - possibly because he’s an alcoholic; more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic - quite correctly, I’m afraid.”
John looked down at his cane and shuffled his feet in an attempt to hide his utter bewilderment. That moment of awkwardness saved him from another smug smirk from Sherlock Holmes, before the man disappeared at last.
Well, that was something, John thought. He could see where he gave an impression of an Army doctor - he didn’t try to conceal the fact that he studied medicine. After all, it was Mike, his former classmate, who introduced him to Sherlock. John was also quite fond of the simple haircut he got used to during his days in the Army - though he was never deployed, neither to Afghanistan nor to Iraq. The bit about the psychosomatic limp was most likely to be blamed on the cane, though John would like to hear a closer explanation of that. But how Sherlock conjured up John’s alcoholic brother remained a mystery, especially as John didn’t have a sibling in real life and had never pretended to have one in any of his mind heists.
“He’s always like that,” Mike winked and John felt a tang of excitement. This will be interesting.
***
“Okay, you’ve got questions.”
The cab made slow progress through the evening traffic on their way to Brixton. In the backseat, John’s head was still spinning from the whirlwind of what was supposed to be an afternoon spent looking at a flat that had resulted in an invitation to be Sherlock’s assistant for a case of four serial suicides.
Who are you? That was the most important question for John at the time. Apparently, this Sherlock Holmes was no Extractor. John was beginning to doubt if there were any mind heists done in this architecture of a dream. Whatever the Navigator wanted from Sherlock didn’t encompass his exceptional abilities, and it was possible that Moriarty hid this aspect of Sherlock’s life from him completely. “What do you do?” John asked.
“What do you think?”
There was a hint of pride in the younger man’s voice, so John picked his words carefully: “I’d say private detective ...but the police don’t go to private detectives.”
“I’m a consulting detective. Only one in the world. I invented the job.”
John wondered if this was what Sherlock would have become in real life had it not been for the existence of DreamShare technology. Both endeavours, Mind Heist and the detective work, were focused on discovering what was hidden, both required an equal share of brains and guts, both could bring the reward of a good hunt. John already knew Sherlock as a terrific Extractor. How good would he be as an amateur detective?
“The police don’t consult amateurs,” John remarked. Sherlock threw him a look.
“When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said, ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ You looked surprised.”
Yeah, anybody would look surprised finding themselves suddenly in the middle of a geography exam. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation as you entered the room said trained at Bart’s, so Army doctor - obvious. Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing.”
John winced internally. When he was forced to leave England after the Scott fiasco with Interpol at his heels, sunbathing was the last thing on his mind, indeed.
“Your limp’s really bad when you walk but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Afghanistan or Iraq.”
John mentally chided himself for the slip of not asking for a chair. Pretending to be lame was obviously a harder thing than it seemed. The cane was a spur of the moment inspiration, supposed to help him to blend in among the hospital patients. He had never expected it to inspire such a castle in the air of deductions. Well, if Sherlock thought it psychosomatic, so much the better. John could pretend to get miraculously cured by some exciting experience which was sure to come as long as he stayed by Sherlock’s side, and then he would be done with the cane for good.
“Then there’s your brother.”
Yeah, I’d love to hear about him. John shifted forward, prepared to listen carefully. If he was to have any success with winning Sherlock’s trust, he had to act according to what he was supposed to be, to what Sherlock expected of him.
“Your phone.” Sherlock extended his palm expectantly. John fished out the mobile phone he bought in a pawn shop after his return to London and gave it over to Sherlock.
“It’s expensive, only a six months old model, but you’re looking for a flatshare - you wouldn’t waste money on this. It’s a gift, then.”
Six months? John frowned. He was not exactly a technology-savvy person but even he knew that this particular model was a hot commodity more than four years ago. It gave him a rough estimate of the time shift between the dream and the real world outside, although he still had no idea what was the reason for it in the first place.
Sherlock ran his fingertips over the scratches on the phone casing. “It’s been in the same pocket as keys and coins. The man sitting next to me wouldn’t treat his one luxury item like this. Next bit’s easy.”
“The engraving.” John had to suppress a smile when he saw where this was leading. On the back of the phone was engraved: ‘Harry Watson - from Clara, xxx.’ Those words were there already when he bought the phone. He had actually picked up this particular exemplar because of them; his name was so common that he could afford to live in London under the name of Harry Watson, his phone supporting his backstory to accidental onlookers.
“Harry Watson: clearly a family member who’s given you his old phone. Now, who’s Clara? Three kisses say it’s a romantic attachment. The expense of the phone says wife, not girlfriend. Marriage in trouble then - six months on he’s just given it away. If she’d left him, he would have kept it. But no, he wanted rid of it. He left her.”
What a badass of a brother I have. John smirked, careful to face the window as he did. Only the last item of Sherlock’s deduction remained unexplained, the most far-fetched of them all.
“How could you possibly know about the drinking?”
Sherlock smiled self-confidently. “Power connection: tiny little scuff marks around the edge of it. Every night he goes to plug it in to charge but his hands are shaking. You never see a drunk’s phone without them.”
Except for when you get a discount for it accompanied by the pawn shop owner’s apologies about his two year old daughter who stayed unguarded for twenty minutes, having obviously had a very good time with the phone and Daddy’s keys. John didn’t mind the scratches, as long as the charger worked, and welcomed the discount. Until now, it never occurred to him that the poor state of his phone could be blamed on any different cause than a technology-loving toddler.
Sherlock looked out the side window, biting his lip. John thought he was amazing, considering. No, it was amazing without condition - the man couldn’t have known about the actual age of the gadget, nor could he have guessed the name coincidence on the engraving.
“That ... was extraordinary; quite extraordinary,” he said with heart-felt conviction.
Sherlock turned around, surprised. “That’s not what people normally say.”
“I’d guess,” John laughed at last. “They tell you to piss off, don’t they?”
Sherlock grinned. “Did I get anything wrong?”
John paused for a second, unsure if he should be boosting Sherlock’s ego any more or if it was safe to take just a little piss at him.
“Harry’s short for Harriet.”
The teeth-gritting self-reproach on Sherlock’s face was worth it. Considering everything John already knew about this dream and its natural relations, he was now bound to meet his lesbian sister sooner or later in flesh, brought to life as a personification of Sherlock’s deductions. He could only hope that they would get on.
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. Next chapter