Fic for agent_era: The Case of Gutters and Stars
Title: The Case of Gutters and Stars
Author: 42footprints
Recipient: agent_era
Characters/Pairings: John, Sherlock, Mycroft, original characters (gen)
Rating: R
Warnings: Prostitution (original characters)
Summary: John takes on a case for a patient, and gets a little out of his depth. Sherlock and Mycroft team up for the rescue effort.
The Case of Gutters and Stars
John hated hindsight, in whose clear light the case taunted him with its simplicity. The moment when he saw the case fall into place like dominoes had come too late, and not for the first time in their association Sherlock had saved John’s life. He took it as payment for the equal or higher number of times that Sherlock had put his life in danger, taking a strange satisfaction from the knowledge that this would never have occurred to Sherlock.
It had started with hookers. Not a promising beginning, but a true one. There was a girl, eastern European with broken English, barely older than twenty one, who had appeared at John’s clinic with a strange pattern of bruising and a dislocated jaw. She had fallen, in the snow, hit her face on a step. John shook his head minutely, eyes closed.
“Please,” she had said; “please.”
There were so many things he’d learned from the army, and the look in her eyes fit snugly into the space in his mind that he had reserved for civilian casualties. There was fear, sure, but more than anything there was a glassy refusal to acknowledge the situation. It was going to be over, they would leave this place, and all would be well. The girl, Anna, according to her notes, defied John with her eyes, which were infinitely sad, but hard as granite.
John had relocated her jaw, of course. His Hippocratic Oath hadn’t wavered in Afghanistan, in the face of Sherlock’s madder and less legal schemes, it wouldn’t hesitate in the face of a frightened girl. He prescribed her some anti-inflammatories, some medium level painkillers, nothing she could sell, nothing she could get hooked on, just enough for her to get some sleep.
Her voice was clear, the voice of a naiad, or of water itself. “Thank you, doctor.”
It was less than a month before Anna appeared again in John’s consultation room, holding the hand of another girl. If anything, she was younger than Anna, paler skinned. She was holding one wrist, prone, across her waist. John looked at Anna, a silent question.
“My sister,” she explained, insufficiently.
John took the sister’s wrist in his hands, ran his fingers along her delicate bones, moved her arm, hand, fingers. There was no break, from the swelling, bruising, red marks over her skin, he suspected a serious wrench. He didn’t want to think about what she would be pulling away from so strongly that she nearly broke her wrist. He bandaged the wrist, keeping a catalogue of the looks exchanged between the girls. There was pain, fear, the expected emotions, but also surprise. He wondered when a man last touched either of them gently, and felt briefly but violently sick.
He looked into Anna’s face, trying to read her, looking for sparks. “How many sisters do you have, Anna?”
Nothing, not a flinch; “six”
“If they’re sick, if they’re injured, bring them here, okay?”
She nodded, took her sister by the elbow. “Thank you, doctor.”
John thought his life would be better if he never heard her say that again.
Obviously, that wasn’t how his life worked. He and Sherlock were running for their lives, or liberties, or something, ten days later, when John bowled around a corner in Islington into Anna and her sisters. They nodded to him, and to Sherlock, deferentially.
In returning their nod, John noticed a strange glitter from the pavement. Scattered in the frost were seven small metal rings, nothing unusual, just small washers; a constellation it would be all too easy to miss.
He flicked his eyes up to Sherlock, who was looking at him like a puzzle piece, like he hadn’t looked at him since the early days of their cohabitation, and they ran off in the direction of Baker Street.
“What was that about, with the prostitutes?” Sherlock’s lack of tact was refreshing, even when it grated against John’s adrenaline fuelled nerves.
“They’re patients, from the clinic.” He collapsed heavily into the armchair, nursing a mug of tea so hot and strong he worried about his risks of oesophageal cancer.
“What do you know about them?”
John sighed. He knew that tone. It was the ‘I’ve found something that will hold my interest for at least thirty seconds so give me the information I need or I will make a fractious two year old look well mannered’ tone, one of John’s personal favourites.
“Seven girls, all young, but by my guess over the age of consent, so between sixteen and twenty one, eastern European, but they speak a little English, enough to interact independently. The eldest, Anna, is the care taker for the group, and consequently the most often injured. They present with dislocations, severe sprains, wrenches, strains, everything short of broken bones, but not by much. Strange pattern bruising, almost ligature marks, but not quite.”
Sherlock had his fingers steepled against his lips, thumbs against his chest, head bowed. He was the dictionary definition of concentration, alive and focused on the matter at hand, mind processing information at a speed that computer programmers could only dream of.
“One other thing; I noticed tonight, there were seven washers on the pavement. Could be coincidence, but it’s an oddly specific number.”
Sherlock’s eyes shot open, pupils wide and intense from the darkness of his eyelids. “Seven.”
It was a revelation, clearly, but it meant nothing to John; seven, the mirror of Anna and her six sisters. “What?” The smile on Sherlock’s face was wolfish, and if John hadn’t learned to trust him, he would have been deeply frightened by it. As it was, he was just worried. “What, Sherlock?”
“Just an idea. Get some sleep, I need to think. Pass me my phone.”
John passed him the phone, an automatic motion that he had long since stopped attributing to anything other than keeping the peace. “Night, Sherlock.”
The clinic was blissfully quiet the next day, and John’s mind kept drifting to the washers on the pavement. It had to mean something. If he’d learned anything from living with Sherlock, it was that everything meant something. The only question was what. He decided to take a detour on the way home, to check out the corner.
John crouched over the footprints in the frost, eyes scanning in sections like a battlefield, waiting for the flash of recognition. The flash came, but it was pain, exploding behind his eyes from a blow to the back of the head. He dialled Sherlock’s number, dropping the phone into the gutter, and passed out.
When he came to, he was on a sofa more comfortable than anything he could possibly afford. He was stripped of his belt, shoes and jacket, pockets emptied. Anna was suspended in a rope cradle, a strange series of knots and spaces that should have been a tangle, but looked like a perfect pattern.
He realised with a start that she was, necessarily, completely naked.
She looked at him, hard, willing him not to do anything stupid. Too late, he thought. A man in a suit that looked like something Mycroft would wear walked over to her, turned her face to different angles; John felt the anger fill his stomach, cold and heavy. The man backhanded her, hard, across the face. That’s how he dislocated her jaw, John thought, absently. He walked across to John, wiping his knuckles on a white cotton handkerchief.
“Doctor Watson,” he extended his hand, which John ignored, “I am sorry that Anna was careless enough to bring you into family affairs.”
Behind him, Anna flinched, but kept her eyes on John, silent but powerful. Her sisters filed into the room, and John wanted to burn the image of these frightened, naked girls out of his mind forever. Two of the girls perhaps twins, or intended to represent twins, were tied together at the hands, at the necks, their hair plaited together, holding their faces close to one another, unable to look away. One was lifted by the man in the suit, like so much coal, and her hands chained to the wall, before being dropped. Her toes touched the floor, and John could see her lungs struggling under the weight of her, the blood rushing out of her arms, ribs pressing against her skin. Another was spread-eagled across a table, the man in the suit tied her tight to the table legs by her wrists and ankles, long hair spilling over the edge like a freeze frame of someone knocking over a glass of wine. A third was tied to a chair, ankles to the chair legs, hands tied behind her back and looped through the seat back. The tension radiated off her shoulders, and she didn’t raise her eyes from the floor though the man in the suit knocked her under the chin with his knuckles. The last, smallest girl offered a small smile to John as she walked towards him. The anger in his stomach boiled. Chained to the wrist he had bandaged, had held in his hands like an injured bird, was a tray with champagne, lubricant, and a bowl of warm water. A towel was draped over her arm. She knelt beside his feet, and offered the tray towards him.
“You are a guest here, Doctor Watson. You are welcome to the facilities that I can provide.” The suit waved its arm lazily, indicating the girls in their prone, vulnerable positions.
John’s blood crashed in his ears like a red riptide of fury and hopelessness.
“You will not refuse our hospitality, Doctor. You will become one of us, or you will stay with us.”
John blinked, remembering what he knew about hostage situations, and swallowed the lump in his throat. He wasn’t blindfolded, never had been. He had seen the room he was in, all of the girls, more of them than he could ever have wished for, and worst of all, he had seen the man in the suit. Who wasn’t wearing a mask. Who John could easily identify to Lestrade and the authorities if they let him leave. ‘Sherlock’, he thought, desperately, ‘Sherlock’.
John remembered the strength in Anna’s eyes, and hoped beyond hope that she would understand that he was stalling, playing for time. He ran his fingers across her face, gently, almost clinically, combing them through her hair. He used the opportunity to pull her towards him, whispering into her ear, ‘trust me’, kissing her on the cheek, and continued to comb his fingers through her hair. The man in the suit tapped his foot, impatiently, and the youngest sister appeared at his side. John dipped his fingers into the water, as though he were in a Chinese restaurant, rubbing the pads of his thumbs across his fingers before shaking the water off delicately and taking the towel from her arm. He raised his eyes, looking around the room for cameras whose angles he would need to play to, and caught Sherlock in a shadowed balcony. Breathing freely for the first time since he’d left the clinic, he ran his hands up and down Anna’s arms, eyes closed in case they gave him away.
The next thing he heard was the click of a gun being cocked.
He opened his eyes on the man in the suit, whose gun was predictably pointed at him, but who looked rather startled to find the muzzle of Mycroft’s gun snug to the juncture of his skull and his spine. John stepped away from Anna, cautiously, drawing the man in the suit’s fire away from her, gesturing with one outstretched palm for the youngest sister to stay where she was.
Sherlock’s voice broke the silence, and John smiled to himself; he did love to hear himself speak. “Guns may be terribly inelegant weapons, but on occasion they have been known to have their uses.”
His smile broadened at the feel of his service weapon being pressed into his hand, hanging loose at his side. He drew his gun to firing height, aiming directly between the eyes of the man in the suit, who locked his jaw, maintaining the stand off for a few long seconds, before raising his hands and surrendering his gun to Mycroft, who pulled a pair of handcuffs out of an inner pocket and took grim satisfaction in applying them to the man in the suit. Seeing them next to each other, John acknowledged that he had been wrong. The man in the suit was wearing something that he wanted to make him look like Mycroft, but in the presence of the real thing, he was a poor, shabby impostor.
Mycroft nodded to John; “I have had ambulances sent for these young women, please persuade them to accept the treatment, it has no price. I believe MI6 may have some questions to ask of this man, and I shall take delight in a job well done when I deliver him to them. Good evening ladies, John, Sherlock.”
He took the keys to the girls’ cuffs from the man in the suit’s waistcoat pocket, throwing them to Sherlock with the ease of a childhood spent loathing one another. Sherlock caught them, one handed, watching John tuck his gun, safety in place, down the waistband of his trousers.
Sherlock unlocked the cuffs of the girls on the chair, the table, and caught the tallest of the girls as he unlocked her from the wall and her body gave way under the strain. John untied the twins from each other, releasing their hair so that it curtained their faces, hiding them from him. He took the keys from Sherlock, unlocking the cuffs that held the tray onto the arm of the youngest of the girls, and turned his attention to Anna. He was overwhelmed by the complexity of her bindings, and the twins placed a hand on each of his shoulders.
“Please,” they said, “let us do this.”
It was mesmerising, watching six pairs of hands working on releasing Anna from her ropes, like a dance. John felt Sherlock’s warmth behind him, fascinated, unable to look away.
They put all of the girls into Mycroft’s ambulances; wrapped in blankets, with their bare feet dangling, they looked like children.
Anna went last, and she turned back to John, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Thank you, Doctor.”
As the last ambulance drove away, John turned to face Sherlock. “Who did I just point my gun at, out of interest?”
Sherlock affected a bored tone, which convinced John not at all because of the accompanying wicked smile on his face. “Oh, Ukrainian mob boss. Probably. Mycroft was a bit closed mouthed about it. You know how he can get. Such a kill joy.”
“So, are you going to tell me how you found us?” John and Sherlock were in a cab, which John would undoubtedly pay for. It was safe, and John felt the tension beginning to dissipate in his neck and shoulders.
Sherlock handed John back his phone. “Seven.”
“Really?”
“Seven, John. Seven sisters. Anna told you where she was from the beginning.”
John rolled his eyes. “And I suppose you just knocked on all the doors in seven sisters until someone said ‘sure, there’s an illegal bondage den in the basement, do come on in’?”
“Don’t be facile, John, it doesn’t suit you.” Sherlock’s tone was harsh, but he crossed his arms and the look on his face was pleased, so John didn’t mind at all. Nothing pleased Sherlock more than a mystery John had to ask him to explain. “You first met Anna about six weeks ago, so I…”
“Have you been hacking into my medical records?”
Sherlock didn’t even have the good grace to look ashamed of himself. “I’ve been meaning to mention to you that your clinic’s security needs an overhaul. A semi-intelligent twelve year old could hack it. Anyway, you first met Anna about six weeks ago, so I looked at recently acquired properties in seven sisters, of which there were about twenty. That’s when the washers came in.”
John raised his eyebrows, gesturing in a way that he hoped conveyed ‘yes that’s very clever Sherlock, please get to the good part already’.
“They were clearly a symbol, to potential clients. Seven shiny things, seven sisters, the Pleiades were the obvious connection really. Which brought me here, which is owned by a company called Atlas Holdings.” Sherlock sat back, explanation complete, awaiting praise, but John looked confused. “Atlas being the father of the Pleiades, John, honestly, do I have to do all the work?”
John nodded, and then smiled. “You brought Mycroft.”
“Yes, well,” defensive wasn’t something Sherlock was used to being, and John enjoyed the seconds of flustered fidgeting before he regained his composure, “someone had run off and got himself into danger, and you know how I feel about guns.”
John smiled, sliding a hand behind his back to run his knuckles over the handle tucked into his waistband.
“It was a brave thing you did, John.” Sherlock’s face was complicated, and John didn’t even try to decipher it. “Don’t do it again.”
John laughed, paid the taxi driver, and followed Sherlock up the steps and home.
Author: 42footprints
Recipient: agent_era
Characters/Pairings: John, Sherlock, Mycroft, original characters (gen)
Rating: R
Warnings: Prostitution (original characters)
Summary: John takes on a case for a patient, and gets a little out of his depth. Sherlock and Mycroft team up for the rescue effort.
The Case of Gutters and Stars
John hated hindsight, in whose clear light the case taunted him with its simplicity. The moment when he saw the case fall into place like dominoes had come too late, and not for the first time in their association Sherlock had saved John’s life. He took it as payment for the equal or higher number of times that Sherlock had put his life in danger, taking a strange satisfaction from the knowledge that this would never have occurred to Sherlock.
It had started with hookers. Not a promising beginning, but a true one. There was a girl, eastern European with broken English, barely older than twenty one, who had appeared at John’s clinic with a strange pattern of bruising and a dislocated jaw. She had fallen, in the snow, hit her face on a step. John shook his head minutely, eyes closed.
“Please,” she had said; “please.”
There were so many things he’d learned from the army, and the look in her eyes fit snugly into the space in his mind that he had reserved for civilian casualties. There was fear, sure, but more than anything there was a glassy refusal to acknowledge the situation. It was going to be over, they would leave this place, and all would be well. The girl, Anna, according to her notes, defied John with her eyes, which were infinitely sad, but hard as granite.
John had relocated her jaw, of course. His Hippocratic Oath hadn’t wavered in Afghanistan, in the face of Sherlock’s madder and less legal schemes, it wouldn’t hesitate in the face of a frightened girl. He prescribed her some anti-inflammatories, some medium level painkillers, nothing she could sell, nothing she could get hooked on, just enough for her to get some sleep.
Her voice was clear, the voice of a naiad, or of water itself. “Thank you, doctor.”
It was less than a month before Anna appeared again in John’s consultation room, holding the hand of another girl. If anything, she was younger than Anna, paler skinned. She was holding one wrist, prone, across her waist. John looked at Anna, a silent question.
“My sister,” she explained, insufficiently.
John took the sister’s wrist in his hands, ran his fingers along her delicate bones, moved her arm, hand, fingers. There was no break, from the swelling, bruising, red marks over her skin, he suspected a serious wrench. He didn’t want to think about what she would be pulling away from so strongly that she nearly broke her wrist. He bandaged the wrist, keeping a catalogue of the looks exchanged between the girls. There was pain, fear, the expected emotions, but also surprise. He wondered when a man last touched either of them gently, and felt briefly but violently sick.
He looked into Anna’s face, trying to read her, looking for sparks. “How many sisters do you have, Anna?”
Nothing, not a flinch; “six”
“If they’re sick, if they’re injured, bring them here, okay?”
She nodded, took her sister by the elbow. “Thank you, doctor.”
John thought his life would be better if he never heard her say that again.
Obviously, that wasn’t how his life worked. He and Sherlock were running for their lives, or liberties, or something, ten days later, when John bowled around a corner in Islington into Anna and her sisters. They nodded to him, and to Sherlock, deferentially.
In returning their nod, John noticed a strange glitter from the pavement. Scattered in the frost were seven small metal rings, nothing unusual, just small washers; a constellation it would be all too easy to miss.
He flicked his eyes up to Sherlock, who was looking at him like a puzzle piece, like he hadn’t looked at him since the early days of their cohabitation, and they ran off in the direction of Baker Street.
“What was that about, with the prostitutes?” Sherlock’s lack of tact was refreshing, even when it grated against John’s adrenaline fuelled nerves.
“They’re patients, from the clinic.” He collapsed heavily into the armchair, nursing a mug of tea so hot and strong he worried about his risks of oesophageal cancer.
“What do you know about them?”
John sighed. He knew that tone. It was the ‘I’ve found something that will hold my interest for at least thirty seconds so give me the information I need or I will make a fractious two year old look well mannered’ tone, one of John’s personal favourites.
“Seven girls, all young, but by my guess over the age of consent, so between sixteen and twenty one, eastern European, but they speak a little English, enough to interact independently. The eldest, Anna, is the care taker for the group, and consequently the most often injured. They present with dislocations, severe sprains, wrenches, strains, everything short of broken bones, but not by much. Strange pattern bruising, almost ligature marks, but not quite.”
Sherlock had his fingers steepled against his lips, thumbs against his chest, head bowed. He was the dictionary definition of concentration, alive and focused on the matter at hand, mind processing information at a speed that computer programmers could only dream of.
“One other thing; I noticed tonight, there were seven washers on the pavement. Could be coincidence, but it’s an oddly specific number.”
Sherlock’s eyes shot open, pupils wide and intense from the darkness of his eyelids. “Seven.”
It was a revelation, clearly, but it meant nothing to John; seven, the mirror of Anna and her six sisters. “What?” The smile on Sherlock’s face was wolfish, and if John hadn’t learned to trust him, he would have been deeply frightened by it. As it was, he was just worried. “What, Sherlock?”
“Just an idea. Get some sleep, I need to think. Pass me my phone.”
John passed him the phone, an automatic motion that he had long since stopped attributing to anything other than keeping the peace. “Night, Sherlock.”
The clinic was blissfully quiet the next day, and John’s mind kept drifting to the washers on the pavement. It had to mean something. If he’d learned anything from living with Sherlock, it was that everything meant something. The only question was what. He decided to take a detour on the way home, to check out the corner.
John crouched over the footprints in the frost, eyes scanning in sections like a battlefield, waiting for the flash of recognition. The flash came, but it was pain, exploding behind his eyes from a blow to the back of the head. He dialled Sherlock’s number, dropping the phone into the gutter, and passed out.
When he came to, he was on a sofa more comfortable than anything he could possibly afford. He was stripped of his belt, shoes and jacket, pockets emptied. Anna was suspended in a rope cradle, a strange series of knots and spaces that should have been a tangle, but looked like a perfect pattern.
He realised with a start that she was, necessarily, completely naked.
She looked at him, hard, willing him not to do anything stupid. Too late, he thought. A man in a suit that looked like something Mycroft would wear walked over to her, turned her face to different angles; John felt the anger fill his stomach, cold and heavy. The man backhanded her, hard, across the face. That’s how he dislocated her jaw, John thought, absently. He walked across to John, wiping his knuckles on a white cotton handkerchief.
“Doctor Watson,” he extended his hand, which John ignored, “I am sorry that Anna was careless enough to bring you into family affairs.”
Behind him, Anna flinched, but kept her eyes on John, silent but powerful. Her sisters filed into the room, and John wanted to burn the image of these frightened, naked girls out of his mind forever. Two of the girls perhaps twins, or intended to represent twins, were tied together at the hands, at the necks, their hair plaited together, holding their faces close to one another, unable to look away. One was lifted by the man in the suit, like so much coal, and her hands chained to the wall, before being dropped. Her toes touched the floor, and John could see her lungs struggling under the weight of her, the blood rushing out of her arms, ribs pressing against her skin. Another was spread-eagled across a table, the man in the suit tied her tight to the table legs by her wrists and ankles, long hair spilling over the edge like a freeze frame of someone knocking over a glass of wine. A third was tied to a chair, ankles to the chair legs, hands tied behind her back and looped through the seat back. The tension radiated off her shoulders, and she didn’t raise her eyes from the floor though the man in the suit knocked her under the chin with his knuckles. The last, smallest girl offered a small smile to John as she walked towards him. The anger in his stomach boiled. Chained to the wrist he had bandaged, had held in his hands like an injured bird, was a tray with champagne, lubricant, and a bowl of warm water. A towel was draped over her arm. She knelt beside his feet, and offered the tray towards him.
“You are a guest here, Doctor Watson. You are welcome to the facilities that I can provide.” The suit waved its arm lazily, indicating the girls in their prone, vulnerable positions.
John’s blood crashed in his ears like a red riptide of fury and hopelessness.
“You will not refuse our hospitality, Doctor. You will become one of us, or you will stay with us.”
John blinked, remembering what he knew about hostage situations, and swallowed the lump in his throat. He wasn’t blindfolded, never had been. He had seen the room he was in, all of the girls, more of them than he could ever have wished for, and worst of all, he had seen the man in the suit. Who wasn’t wearing a mask. Who John could easily identify to Lestrade and the authorities if they let him leave. ‘Sherlock’, he thought, desperately, ‘Sherlock’.
John remembered the strength in Anna’s eyes, and hoped beyond hope that she would understand that he was stalling, playing for time. He ran his fingers across her face, gently, almost clinically, combing them through her hair. He used the opportunity to pull her towards him, whispering into her ear, ‘trust me’, kissing her on the cheek, and continued to comb his fingers through her hair. The man in the suit tapped his foot, impatiently, and the youngest sister appeared at his side. John dipped his fingers into the water, as though he were in a Chinese restaurant, rubbing the pads of his thumbs across his fingers before shaking the water off delicately and taking the towel from her arm. He raised his eyes, looking around the room for cameras whose angles he would need to play to, and caught Sherlock in a shadowed balcony. Breathing freely for the first time since he’d left the clinic, he ran his hands up and down Anna’s arms, eyes closed in case they gave him away.
The next thing he heard was the click of a gun being cocked.
He opened his eyes on the man in the suit, whose gun was predictably pointed at him, but who looked rather startled to find the muzzle of Mycroft’s gun snug to the juncture of his skull and his spine. John stepped away from Anna, cautiously, drawing the man in the suit’s fire away from her, gesturing with one outstretched palm for the youngest sister to stay where she was.
Sherlock’s voice broke the silence, and John smiled to himself; he did love to hear himself speak. “Guns may be terribly inelegant weapons, but on occasion they have been known to have their uses.”
His smile broadened at the feel of his service weapon being pressed into his hand, hanging loose at his side. He drew his gun to firing height, aiming directly between the eyes of the man in the suit, who locked his jaw, maintaining the stand off for a few long seconds, before raising his hands and surrendering his gun to Mycroft, who pulled a pair of handcuffs out of an inner pocket and took grim satisfaction in applying them to the man in the suit. Seeing them next to each other, John acknowledged that he had been wrong. The man in the suit was wearing something that he wanted to make him look like Mycroft, but in the presence of the real thing, he was a poor, shabby impostor.
Mycroft nodded to John; “I have had ambulances sent for these young women, please persuade them to accept the treatment, it has no price. I believe MI6 may have some questions to ask of this man, and I shall take delight in a job well done when I deliver him to them. Good evening ladies, John, Sherlock.”
He took the keys to the girls’ cuffs from the man in the suit’s waistcoat pocket, throwing them to Sherlock with the ease of a childhood spent loathing one another. Sherlock caught them, one handed, watching John tuck his gun, safety in place, down the waistband of his trousers.
Sherlock unlocked the cuffs of the girls on the chair, the table, and caught the tallest of the girls as he unlocked her from the wall and her body gave way under the strain. John untied the twins from each other, releasing their hair so that it curtained their faces, hiding them from him. He took the keys from Sherlock, unlocking the cuffs that held the tray onto the arm of the youngest of the girls, and turned his attention to Anna. He was overwhelmed by the complexity of her bindings, and the twins placed a hand on each of his shoulders.
“Please,” they said, “let us do this.”
It was mesmerising, watching six pairs of hands working on releasing Anna from her ropes, like a dance. John felt Sherlock’s warmth behind him, fascinated, unable to look away.
They put all of the girls into Mycroft’s ambulances; wrapped in blankets, with their bare feet dangling, they looked like children.
Anna went last, and she turned back to John, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Thank you, Doctor.”
As the last ambulance drove away, John turned to face Sherlock. “Who did I just point my gun at, out of interest?”
Sherlock affected a bored tone, which convinced John not at all because of the accompanying wicked smile on his face. “Oh, Ukrainian mob boss. Probably. Mycroft was a bit closed mouthed about it. You know how he can get. Such a kill joy.”
“So, are you going to tell me how you found us?” John and Sherlock were in a cab, which John would undoubtedly pay for. It was safe, and John felt the tension beginning to dissipate in his neck and shoulders.
Sherlock handed John back his phone. “Seven.”
“Really?”
“Seven, John. Seven sisters. Anna told you where she was from the beginning.”
John rolled his eyes. “And I suppose you just knocked on all the doors in seven sisters until someone said ‘sure, there’s an illegal bondage den in the basement, do come on in’?”
“Don’t be facile, John, it doesn’t suit you.” Sherlock’s tone was harsh, but he crossed his arms and the look on his face was pleased, so John didn’t mind at all. Nothing pleased Sherlock more than a mystery John had to ask him to explain. “You first met Anna about six weeks ago, so I…”
“Have you been hacking into my medical records?”
Sherlock didn’t even have the good grace to look ashamed of himself. “I’ve been meaning to mention to you that your clinic’s security needs an overhaul. A semi-intelligent twelve year old could hack it. Anyway, you first met Anna about six weeks ago, so I looked at recently acquired properties in seven sisters, of which there were about twenty. That’s when the washers came in.”
John raised his eyebrows, gesturing in a way that he hoped conveyed ‘yes that’s very clever Sherlock, please get to the good part already’.
“They were clearly a symbol, to potential clients. Seven shiny things, seven sisters, the Pleiades were the obvious connection really. Which brought me here, which is owned by a company called Atlas Holdings.” Sherlock sat back, explanation complete, awaiting praise, but John looked confused. “Atlas being the father of the Pleiades, John, honestly, do I have to do all the work?”
John nodded, and then smiled. “You brought Mycroft.”
“Yes, well,” defensive wasn’t something Sherlock was used to being, and John enjoyed the seconds of flustered fidgeting before he regained his composure, “someone had run off and got himself into danger, and you know how I feel about guns.”
John smiled, sliding a hand behind his back to run his knuckles over the handle tucked into his waistband.
“It was a brave thing you did, John.” Sherlock’s face was complicated, and John didn’t even try to decipher it. “Don’t do it again.”
John laughed, paid the taxi driver, and followed Sherlock up the steps and home.