Sherlock (BBC) / Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie) Xover fic: The Women part 4
Title: The Women
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could (hopefully) be R in later parts
Warnings: Some racism (from a 19th C. character) in part 1
Summary: Set post-Game of Shadows and pre-Reichenberg Fall, the Dr Watsons and the Sherlock Holmeses have gone missing; Mary Watson is in the wrong century; Irene Adler may or may not hold a clue.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Odd numbers by tawabids, even numbers by me!
Mary, John Watson thought as bright red, glowing bullet-thing zipped past his face. Dear God, let her not be mixed up in any of this.
The thought gnawed at him constantly, in any brief moment when he had time to think at all. She’d been so close behind him when he got whisked off to that other London, but he had no way of telling if she’d been sucked through with him. Perhaps she was still at home, missing him, demanding answers from Lestrade. She’d go to Mycroft too, she’d never give up on him. Please, let that be all. Let her be safe.
‘Now,’ Holmes said in his ear. ‘Go!’
Now. Watson dived forwards, just in time to avoid another blast from one of the lethal little guns. The warehouse they were hiding in was no longer a safe haven for them, but neither would it be for the people chasing them when the explosives went off. He prided himself for being able to get his hands on explosives when necessary. Apparently even in the future that skill held true.
They were very impressive explosives, he thought as he picked himself up off the dusty street, ears ringing. ‘Holmes? Holmes!’ Holmes was staggering upright w few yards away. Watson grabbed him by the collar and steered them both behind a wall. ‘Come on. Are you alright?’
Holmes patted the top of his head and frowned. ‘I’m missing my hat.’
‘We’re not going back for your hat.’
‘No,’ Holmes said. ‘Time marches on. And so should we, towards the more populated areas, I think.’
‘Which way?’ It was a damnably confusing city. At a guess they were in New Cross, though it seemed to have been razed to the ground and covered in warehouses the size of cathedrals.
Holmes smirked. ‘You look, Watson, and yet you do not see.’ He jerked his head at a signpost by the corner of the nearest undamaged building.
A minute later Watson was running for his life up the Old Kent Road. He shouldn’t laugh. He shouldn’t even smile. The laws of time had stopped making any sense, and he was desperately afraid for his wife.
But Sherlock Holmes was alive.
***
Two days ago, in a bizarrely twisted version of Clerkenwell, Watson stood on the doorstep of a home that wasn’t his. There was unfamiliar glass in the door, with criss-cross lines in it like tiny wires. Inside, wobbly and unclear through the panes, a long desk stretched across what should have been a freshly painted primrose-yellow hallway. Now it was nothing but an officious, grey reception area, the kind that belonged in an east end hospital. He hadn’t tried to get inside. There was little point in trying his key in the sleek brass lock.
After a few seconds of grim contemplation he started back down the strange grey-black road, striding past the stationary metal monsters and forcing himself not to flinch when, every minute or so, a flashing automobile appeared with terrifying suddenness around a bend. He stuck to the small streets and alleys and, having nowhere else to go, found himself winding his way down a route he knew backwards and forwards, though he had no reason to walk it any longer.
It was in one of the last alleys, cutting through onto Baker Street itself, that the way home appeared. The doorway - if you could call it that - was something like a telescope lens grown to twice the size of a man, glittering and flashing. Through it he could see the cobbles and fog of London as it should be. The metallic tang of the air was suddenly overlaid by coal smoke and the animal scent of street dirt. Jumping into the lens was probably not a good idea. He did it anyway, blinking as he landed in a London filled with the cries of newspaper sellers and the clatter of hooves. He spun to look behind him, but the disc was gone.
If it were anyone else he’d call it a delusion, brought on by a fever or overindulgence in opium or alcohol, or just the derangement of a mind. But he had not indulged. His pulse was steady, and if it were truly a derangement of the mind he was more capable of questioning it than any mental patient he had yet known. He would not end in Bedlam. That could not happen.
A cup of tea, he told himself. Mrs Hudson would give him a cup of tea. She still had a fondness for him. Still a fondness for Holmes too, despite her complaints. She had wept at his funeral. Many had. Even the stinking riff-raff that the verger had tried to shoo from the church.
Watson had stopped that. Aside from him, perhaps, the street urchins and thieves had understood Holmes the best.
A cup of tea would set him to rights, before he went to reassure himself that Mary was where he had left her, until he could lay his head against her shoulder and tell her a strange tale and hear her laugh at him. So he walked along a street he’d once called his home, stepping through the door of a large, pleasant and utterly familiar house.
It was the right door, for all that it opened unexpectedly under his hands. He knew the shape of it, and the weight, and the tiny creak as it swung closed behind him. And yet, the cramped, dark stairwell beyond it wouldn’t be found on any Baker Street that he knew.
Dingy wallpaper. Unfamiliar smells. Strange, ragged carpet under his feet. Watson shuddered. He would have turned and gone straight back outside, but for the smooth roar of one of those infernal machines going past. Clearly outside would not be his Baker Street either.
‘Ooh, you gave me a start! Who let you in?’
He’d been so unnerved that it hadn’t occurred to him that there might be someone living in this place. Belatedly, he removed his hat. ‘I do beg your pardon, Madam.’
The shabby middle-aged woman gave him a motherly smile. ‘You’re one of Sherlock’s, then? Well, who else would you be dressed like that. He’s upstairs, I suppose, though I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him. In one of his moods. Not my business, dear, I’m just his landlady. You go on up, it’ll cheer him up to have someone to talk to.’ She was ushering him up the stairs as she spoke, and reaching round him to push open a door marked ‘B’. Sherlock, of 221 Baker Street, flat B, Watson told himself bewilderedly as the woman trilled, ‘Sherlock! Here’s someone come to see you.’
For the briefest moment as the door swung open Watson’s heart stuttered with impossible, painful hope, sharp as a knife to the chest. It was almost a relief to have it quelled. Sprawled in a dusty armchair was a man a dozen years younger than Holmes, with a thin face and pale, supercilious eyes under a shock of black hair.
‘I beg your pardon…’ Watson began.
The man tilted his head slightly to the side, with the faintest of distracted frowns. ‘Interesting.’ He flicked his gaze briefly up and down Watson’s clothes and back to his face, then raised his voice a little to call to someone out of sight. ‘Late 19th century, but that’s expected. Army doctor, invalided out. Not familiar with the particulars, but I presume it was Afghanistan. And injured in the shoulder. But he doesn’t have a psychiatrist.’ He glanced into the gloomy rear of the flat, where Watson could see about half of a kitchen table, a number of unrecognisable objects and a human liver in formaldehyde. ‘I could tell you his name, but that would be cheating. Oh, and he’s married. Someone young, pretty. Mixed feelings about it, of course, because…’
‘Ah,’ another voice interrupted, ‘that will do.’
Watson felt the marrow freeze in his bones.
Sherlock Holmes stepped out into the room.
He looked so perfectly himself. No different, in fact, from when Watson had last seen him. Still pale, as though recovering from injury. Still smartly dressed. Still indefinably larger than life, as though drawn with a bolder pen than the world around him.
‘Holmes,’ Watson said. ‘My God. Is it really you?’
The younger man gave a tiny snort of laughter ‘You call him Holmes,’ he said, fixing Watson with his cool, blank stare. ‘How convenient.’
***
Since then, John Watson had been imprisoned, beaten and shot at, he’d punched Holmes twice, shouted insults he did not regret at all, and understood perhaps a quarter of what was happening. It was the happiest he’d been since the Reichenbach falls.
‘If we’re going to run we need somewhere to run to,’ he panted as they sped down another street of flickering lights, pursued by the brand new set of uniformed thugs that had appeared about three streets ago. ‘This is not a long-term strategy, Holmes.’
The bright-clothed throngs melted away from the armed men behind them, like ice cubes from a blowtorch. Dodging a tiny craft that was swooping down to land, they dived into an alley hemmed in by sleek metal, with machinery humming deep inside the walls. Holmes glanced back at Watson over his shoulder. ‘You told me once that the universe is infinite,’ he puffed, ‘and it seems there are several. I feel sure we’ll find somewhere. Now, if you wouldn’t mind concentrating on the dodging and shooting that you’re so very good at...’
‘Yes, yes, alright.’
As well as the explosives they’d got their hands on a couple of the lightweight guns. Watson fired wildly backwards as they ran, buying them a few brief seconds while the pursuers ducked away. It was enough time to find a shelter of their own behind a stack of metal crates.
‘For God’s sake, Holmes,’ he snapped, ‘what did you do to these people?’ He was beginning to think that it must have been something. Holmes had an unmatched ability to make people precisely this angry.
Holmes spared time from the fire fight to shoot him a look of weary patience. ‘Watson, as you’re well aware, I know nothing more of this than you do.’
‘I find that very hard to believe.’ Another shot sent sparks of semi-molten metal showering over the pair of them. ‘And why the devil are there two of us? I mean, two of each of us?’
It was after the first set of men with guns stormed through the walls of 221B Baker Street like insubstantial ghosts that Watson had first seen Sherlock (an uncomfortably familiar form of address, but he couldn’t call the blasted man Holmes) show a flicker of any emotion besides reptilian interest. It was quickly suppressed, but it was worry, before he went haring off to look for one John Watson, an ex-military doctor who has served in Afghanistan, and who had apparently ‘left his phone behind, the idiot, not that there’s likely to be any reception out there. Here, you two keep mine…’
The second set of men were rather more substantial. Or rather, Baker Street suddenly wasn’t. He and Holmes had done a lot of running after that, though not, apparently, quite enough.
All he’d seen of the other John Watson was a glimpse when they were marched past his cell. Sherlock had been sitting on one bed looking sullenly bored, while another man, stocky and sandy-haired, jumped up from the other bed, smiled awkwardly and raised a hand in what appeared to be embarrassed acknowledgement. Watson had given him a friendly enough nod in return, and glanced around at Holmes, only to catch the tail-end of a lascivious smile. That had been irritating, but they were both distracted soon after by the explosion and gunfire and daring escape. Somewhere in the smoke he thought he’d caught a glimpse of two figures, running just as he and Holmes were. He couldn’t be sure.
Watson took another look above the crate, and calmly picked off a man who was dodging unwisely across an open space, trying to work his way round behind them. ‘You must have some idea of why we’re here. It can’t be a coincidence. Not two pairs of Watson and Holmes.’
‘If you can’t work it out, my dear,’ Holmes said, unnecessarily brushing some dust off his highly singed coat, ‘I may have to disown you.’
‘We’re in the distant future, on the run, with people shooting at us,’ Watson snapped back. ‘Do you really think now is the time for your games?’ In his hand, the pistol vibrated slightly. He got off five more shots before it gave a little phut noise and stopped firing. Shaking it and swearing at it had no effect. It must need reloading, but they didn’t have any of the little red glowing bullet things and he wouldn’t know how to put them inside it even if they found some. ‘Give me your gun.’
Holmes passed it over. ‘I fear it won’t be much use to you. It appears to have run out of magic.’
‘Damn it all to hell.’
‘There appears,’ Homes said, peeping over the top of the crate and ducking down hastily, ‘to be another on the floor, dropped by one of our overenthusiastic friends there. I shall go and retrieve it.’
Watson sighed. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Good chap.’
It was a mad scramble to get to the gun, but from the number of shots that fizzed around him there was only one assailant left. Holmes welcomed him back to safety behind the crates with a serene smile. ‘Let me see,’ he said, as though nothing had interrupted their conversation, ‘why would someone abduct the world’s greatest detective from two universes?’
Well, when he put it like that, it did hint at a certain conclusion. A highly improbable one… but not quite impossible.
‘You can’t seriously think someone has a case for us. If they did, why on earth…’ Watson said, and flung himself upwards to squeeze off another shot. There was the delicious thud of a falling body, and then silence. He sprawled backwards, panting for breath.
Holmes rolled neatly to his feet. ‘If you’re asking why someone who wants to use us is trying to kill us,’ he said, offering Watson a hand up, ‘clearly, they’re not. Did you think there was only one player in this game?’
Watson shot him a weary look. ‘You know, you’re insufferable when you’re smug.’
The two of them picked their way across to the stack of crates where there erstwhile opponent had been sheltering. Holmes poked at the slumped body with a foot, turning it over to reveal a neat, charred hole in the forehead. ‘And you’re delightful when you’re accurate,’ he said, favouring Watson with a smile. ‘Come along.’
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie films), Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Currently G, could (hopefully) be R in later parts
Warnings: Some racism (from a 19th C. character) in part 1
Summary: Set post-Game of Shadows and pre-Reichenberg Fall, the Dr Watsons and the Sherlock Holmeses have gone missing; Mary Watson is in the wrong century; Irene Adler may or may not hold a clue.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Odd numbers by tawabids, even numbers by me!
Mary, John Watson thought as bright red, glowing bullet-thing zipped past his face. Dear God, let her not be mixed up in any of this.
The thought gnawed at him constantly, in any brief moment when he had time to think at all. She’d been so close behind him when he got whisked off to that other London, but he had no way of telling if she’d been sucked through with him. Perhaps she was still at home, missing him, demanding answers from Lestrade. She’d go to Mycroft too, she’d never give up on him. Please, let that be all. Let her be safe.
‘Now,’ Holmes said in his ear. ‘Go!’
Now. Watson dived forwards, just in time to avoid another blast from one of the lethal little guns. The warehouse they were hiding in was no longer a safe haven for them, but neither would it be for the people chasing them when the explosives went off. He prided himself for being able to get his hands on explosives when necessary. Apparently even in the future that skill held true.
They were very impressive explosives, he thought as he picked himself up off the dusty street, ears ringing. ‘Holmes? Holmes!’ Holmes was staggering upright w few yards away. Watson grabbed him by the collar and steered them both behind a wall. ‘Come on. Are you alright?’
Holmes patted the top of his head and frowned. ‘I’m missing my hat.’
‘We’re not going back for your hat.’
‘No,’ Holmes said. ‘Time marches on. And so should we, towards the more populated areas, I think.’
‘Which way?’ It was a damnably confusing city. At a guess they were in New Cross, though it seemed to have been razed to the ground and covered in warehouses the size of cathedrals.
Holmes smirked. ‘You look, Watson, and yet you do not see.’ He jerked his head at a signpost by the corner of the nearest undamaged building.
A minute later Watson was running for his life up the Old Kent Road. He shouldn’t laugh. He shouldn’t even smile. The laws of time had stopped making any sense, and he was desperately afraid for his wife.
But Sherlock Holmes was alive.
***
Two days ago, in a bizarrely twisted version of Clerkenwell, Watson stood on the doorstep of a home that wasn’t his. There was unfamiliar glass in the door, with criss-cross lines in it like tiny wires. Inside, wobbly and unclear through the panes, a long desk stretched across what should have been a freshly painted primrose-yellow hallway. Now it was nothing but an officious, grey reception area, the kind that belonged in an east end hospital. He hadn’t tried to get inside. There was little point in trying his key in the sleek brass lock.
After a few seconds of grim contemplation he started back down the strange grey-black road, striding past the stationary metal monsters and forcing himself not to flinch when, every minute or so, a flashing automobile appeared with terrifying suddenness around a bend. He stuck to the small streets and alleys and, having nowhere else to go, found himself winding his way down a route he knew backwards and forwards, though he had no reason to walk it any longer.
It was in one of the last alleys, cutting through onto Baker Street itself, that the way home appeared. The doorway - if you could call it that - was something like a telescope lens grown to twice the size of a man, glittering and flashing. Through it he could see the cobbles and fog of London as it should be. The metallic tang of the air was suddenly overlaid by coal smoke and the animal scent of street dirt. Jumping into the lens was probably not a good idea. He did it anyway, blinking as he landed in a London filled with the cries of newspaper sellers and the clatter of hooves. He spun to look behind him, but the disc was gone.
If it were anyone else he’d call it a delusion, brought on by a fever or overindulgence in opium or alcohol, or just the derangement of a mind. But he had not indulged. His pulse was steady, and if it were truly a derangement of the mind he was more capable of questioning it than any mental patient he had yet known. He would not end in Bedlam. That could not happen.
A cup of tea, he told himself. Mrs Hudson would give him a cup of tea. She still had a fondness for him. Still a fondness for Holmes too, despite her complaints. She had wept at his funeral. Many had. Even the stinking riff-raff that the verger had tried to shoo from the church.
Watson had stopped that. Aside from him, perhaps, the street urchins and thieves had understood Holmes the best.
A cup of tea would set him to rights, before he went to reassure himself that Mary was where he had left her, until he could lay his head against her shoulder and tell her a strange tale and hear her laugh at him. So he walked along a street he’d once called his home, stepping through the door of a large, pleasant and utterly familiar house.
It was the right door, for all that it opened unexpectedly under his hands. He knew the shape of it, and the weight, and the tiny creak as it swung closed behind him. And yet, the cramped, dark stairwell beyond it wouldn’t be found on any Baker Street that he knew.
Dingy wallpaper. Unfamiliar smells. Strange, ragged carpet under his feet. Watson shuddered. He would have turned and gone straight back outside, but for the smooth roar of one of those infernal machines going past. Clearly outside would not be his Baker Street either.
‘Ooh, you gave me a start! Who let you in?’
He’d been so unnerved that it hadn’t occurred to him that there might be someone living in this place. Belatedly, he removed his hat. ‘I do beg your pardon, Madam.’
The shabby middle-aged woman gave him a motherly smile. ‘You’re one of Sherlock’s, then? Well, who else would you be dressed like that. He’s upstairs, I suppose, though I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him. In one of his moods. Not my business, dear, I’m just his landlady. You go on up, it’ll cheer him up to have someone to talk to.’ She was ushering him up the stairs as she spoke, and reaching round him to push open a door marked ‘B’. Sherlock, of 221 Baker Street, flat B, Watson told himself bewilderedly as the woman trilled, ‘Sherlock! Here’s someone come to see you.’
For the briefest moment as the door swung open Watson’s heart stuttered with impossible, painful hope, sharp as a knife to the chest. It was almost a relief to have it quelled. Sprawled in a dusty armchair was a man a dozen years younger than Holmes, with a thin face and pale, supercilious eyes under a shock of black hair.
‘I beg your pardon…’ Watson began.
The man tilted his head slightly to the side, with the faintest of distracted frowns. ‘Interesting.’ He flicked his gaze briefly up and down Watson’s clothes and back to his face, then raised his voice a little to call to someone out of sight. ‘Late 19th century, but that’s expected. Army doctor, invalided out. Not familiar with the particulars, but I presume it was Afghanistan. And injured in the shoulder. But he doesn’t have a psychiatrist.’ He glanced into the gloomy rear of the flat, where Watson could see about half of a kitchen table, a number of unrecognisable objects and a human liver in formaldehyde. ‘I could tell you his name, but that would be cheating. Oh, and he’s married. Someone young, pretty. Mixed feelings about it, of course, because…’
‘Ah,’ another voice interrupted, ‘that will do.’
Watson felt the marrow freeze in his bones.
Sherlock Holmes stepped out into the room.
He looked so perfectly himself. No different, in fact, from when Watson had last seen him. Still pale, as though recovering from injury. Still smartly dressed. Still indefinably larger than life, as though drawn with a bolder pen than the world around him.
‘Holmes,’ Watson said. ‘My God. Is it really you?’
The younger man gave a tiny snort of laughter ‘You call him Holmes,’ he said, fixing Watson with his cool, blank stare. ‘How convenient.’
***
Since then, John Watson had been imprisoned, beaten and shot at, he’d punched Holmes twice, shouted insults he did not regret at all, and understood perhaps a quarter of what was happening. It was the happiest he’d been since the Reichenbach falls.
‘If we’re going to run we need somewhere to run to,’ he panted as they sped down another street of flickering lights, pursued by the brand new set of uniformed thugs that had appeared about three streets ago. ‘This is not a long-term strategy, Holmes.’
The bright-clothed throngs melted away from the armed men behind them, like ice cubes from a blowtorch. Dodging a tiny craft that was swooping down to land, they dived into an alley hemmed in by sleek metal, with machinery humming deep inside the walls. Holmes glanced back at Watson over his shoulder. ‘You told me once that the universe is infinite,’ he puffed, ‘and it seems there are several. I feel sure we’ll find somewhere. Now, if you wouldn’t mind concentrating on the dodging and shooting that you’re so very good at...’
‘Yes, yes, alright.’
As well as the explosives they’d got their hands on a couple of the lightweight guns. Watson fired wildly backwards as they ran, buying them a few brief seconds while the pursuers ducked away. It was enough time to find a shelter of their own behind a stack of metal crates.
‘For God’s sake, Holmes,’ he snapped, ‘what did you do to these people?’ He was beginning to think that it must have been something. Holmes had an unmatched ability to make people precisely this angry.
Holmes spared time from the fire fight to shoot him a look of weary patience. ‘Watson, as you’re well aware, I know nothing more of this than you do.’
‘I find that very hard to believe.’ Another shot sent sparks of semi-molten metal showering over the pair of them. ‘And why the devil are there two of us? I mean, two of each of us?’
It was after the first set of men with guns stormed through the walls of 221B Baker Street like insubstantial ghosts that Watson had first seen Sherlock (an uncomfortably familiar form of address, but he couldn’t call the blasted man Holmes) show a flicker of any emotion besides reptilian interest. It was quickly suppressed, but it was worry, before he went haring off to look for one John Watson, an ex-military doctor who has served in Afghanistan, and who had apparently ‘left his phone behind, the idiot, not that there’s likely to be any reception out there. Here, you two keep mine…’
The second set of men were rather more substantial. Or rather, Baker Street suddenly wasn’t. He and Holmes had done a lot of running after that, though not, apparently, quite enough.
All he’d seen of the other John Watson was a glimpse when they were marched past his cell. Sherlock had been sitting on one bed looking sullenly bored, while another man, stocky and sandy-haired, jumped up from the other bed, smiled awkwardly and raised a hand in what appeared to be embarrassed acknowledgement. Watson had given him a friendly enough nod in return, and glanced around at Holmes, only to catch the tail-end of a lascivious smile. That had been irritating, but they were both distracted soon after by the explosion and gunfire and daring escape. Somewhere in the smoke he thought he’d caught a glimpse of two figures, running just as he and Holmes were. He couldn’t be sure.
Watson took another look above the crate, and calmly picked off a man who was dodging unwisely across an open space, trying to work his way round behind them. ‘You must have some idea of why we’re here. It can’t be a coincidence. Not two pairs of Watson and Holmes.’
‘If you can’t work it out, my dear,’ Holmes said, unnecessarily brushing some dust off his highly singed coat, ‘I may have to disown you.’
‘We’re in the distant future, on the run, with people shooting at us,’ Watson snapped back. ‘Do you really think now is the time for your games?’ In his hand, the pistol vibrated slightly. He got off five more shots before it gave a little phut noise and stopped firing. Shaking it and swearing at it had no effect. It must need reloading, but they didn’t have any of the little red glowing bullet things and he wouldn’t know how to put them inside it even if they found some. ‘Give me your gun.’
Holmes passed it over. ‘I fear it won’t be much use to you. It appears to have run out of magic.’
‘Damn it all to hell.’
‘There appears,’ Homes said, peeping over the top of the crate and ducking down hastily, ‘to be another on the floor, dropped by one of our overenthusiastic friends there. I shall go and retrieve it.’
Watson sighed. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Good chap.’
It was a mad scramble to get to the gun, but from the number of shots that fizzed around him there was only one assailant left. Holmes welcomed him back to safety behind the crates with a serene smile. ‘Let me see,’ he said, as though nothing had interrupted their conversation, ‘why would someone abduct the world’s greatest detective from two universes?’
Well, when he put it like that, it did hint at a certain conclusion. A highly improbable one… but not quite impossible.
‘You can’t seriously think someone has a case for us. If they did, why on earth…’ Watson said, and flung himself upwards to squeeze off another shot. There was the delicious thud of a falling body, and then silence. He sprawled backwards, panting for breath.
Holmes rolled neatly to his feet. ‘If you’re asking why someone who wants to use us is trying to kill us,’ he said, offering Watson a hand up, ‘clearly, they’re not. Did you think there was only one player in this game?’
Watson shot him a weary look. ‘You know, you’re insufferable when you’re smug.’
The two of them picked their way across to the stack of crates where there erstwhile opponent had been sheltering. Holmes poked at the slumped body with a foot, turning it over to reveal a neat, charred hole in the forehead. ‘And you’re delightful when you’re accurate,’ he said, favouring Watson with a smile. ‘Come along.’