Fic: Fine Days in the West (2/2)
Part 1
John was a little surprised. Not that he’d expected anything much, but he had thought Sherlock would at least acknowledge him. Then again, he looked a little bit too interested in the dead body to really say anything.
John had seen his fair share of bodies. However, in general they had died either `honourably` - or in the middle of battle, which was what his superiors meant; of thirst after losing their way; after a stand-off in the street; or swinging from the noose. This one did not meet any of the standard categories. He’d been shot, unsurprisingly for a death out here, but in the back of the head, and as soon as they had reached the house Sherlock had started on Lestrade about how the shot must have been made from outside, and there were signs that the dead man had been talking to somebody else at the time, and John was slightly alarmed to see Sherlock looking far more interested now than when a man had been aiming a gun at the back of his own head. He could almost understand why Mycroft might be concerned enough to pay somebody to spy on him. Almost.
Apparently frustrated with Lestrade’s higher concern about treating the body with respect and suchlike, Sherlock threw himself onto the floor, examining the fatal wound with far more interest than anybody should ever examine gaping holes in men’s heads. Certainly to the point where it was very clear that neither John nor Lestrade existed for him anymore.
“Hello again,” John tried. Nothing.
“You do this often?” Just a quiet grunt and a shake of the head, as if trying to ignore a fly.
“So,” he started, “I just met your brother.”
Surprisingly, Sherlock actually flinched just at the reference. “How much did he offer you?”
John hesitated. “You were expecting him to make an offer?”
“My brother always does. Anybody who might be able to give him information. He’s rather remarkably paranoid about what I might get up to without his supervision.” He said `supervision` in the same way that somebody else might have said, for instance, `dysentery`.
“You really think that?” Not that John blamed him. Mycroft certainly hadn’t seemed the relaxed type.
“I moved to the frontier to get away from my family. He coincidentally became the mayor of the very town where I eventually settled. What do you think?”
Well, that was… There was really nothing to say to that.
“I didn’t take the money.”
“Shame, you could use it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your clothes,” Sherlock murmured, producing what looked like a pencil to lift something from the ground, “your lifestyle. Bullets cost money.”
“I…” John took a deep breath. “Do you mind not doing that while you’re doing…this,” he finished lamely, realising he didn’t really have a word for what Sherlock was saying to him or whatever the hell he was looking for here.
“Problem?”
John stared at him incredulously, and slowly pointed at the corpse lying between them. “There’s a dead body there.”
“Perfectly sound analysis.”
“Analysis? Sherlock, he’s dead. And you’re just going to stare at him?”
“No,” Sherlock said, as if that would be madness. At last.
“Good, because - ”
“I am going to observe him, and then deduce what happened.”
This said, with the definite air of a man who would put up with no further distractions, Sherlock turned back to his `work`. John just stared.
“You’re insane.”
Sherlock glanced up long enough to give him a slightly odd, lop-sided smirk. To his surprise, John found himself automatically smiling back. Why the hell was that?
“As I said before: perfectly sound analysis.”
Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately return to his examination. However, then a voice rang out from behind them, breaking the moment. “Come to gloat, heathen?”
Sherlock just rolled his eyes, looking back down at the body. “Perfect,” he muttered.
John looked over to in confusion to see a man in clerical dress framed dramatically in the doorway, a rather unreligious sneer on his face. While John liked to think that he was still a Christian man, he was slightly alarmed to feel an instinctive dislike, man of the cloth or not.
“Father Jonathan,” he heard Lestrade say. “That was fast.”
“I was granted our God’s speed,” the clergyman intoned in the sort of voice better suited to the pulpit than a room with three men and a dead body on the outskirts of town. “I knew that the local heretic would already be here, to desecrate the body.”
“Anderson, shut up,” Sherlock said simply. “You’re lowering the intelligence of the entire room.”
He gasped. “You hear how he speaks to a representative of the Lord? My good sheriff, clearly this man is a threat. We have already heard him speak of witchcraft - ”
“Science,” Sherlock interrupted. “There’s no such thing as witchcraft. Or whatever you claim to represent.”
“Sherlock,” Lestrade interrupted. “Play nice.” He looked back at Anderson, who looked close to apoplectic with rage. “He does get results, Father.”
“That is what he wants you to think! That is the Devil’s way!” Anderson practically snarled.
Lestrade looked uncomfortable, apparently torn between his religion, calming down and not alienating a key member of the community, and his need to get answers. “Look, Father, I assure you he will be out of here soon enough.” He shot Sherlock a glare. “Two minutes,” he hissed, before turning back. “Of course I’ll let you exorcise the building afterwards.” Moving up to Anderson, he put his arm around him, and slowly guided him out. “But first, I wanted to ask you about…” Unfortunately John never caught what was diverting enough to distract him, as they stepped outside and the door shut behind them.
“Why am I not surprised the local clergy hates you?”
“Because I try to actually catch criminals when they weren’t caught in the act?”
“By poking around corpses.”
“If that’s what it takes.”
John frowned. “What he said… You don’t do the Devil’s work, do you?” He tried to laugh it off, but stopped in the face of the heat of Sherlock’s scornful glare.
“You heard my reasoning. You know I don’t employ arcane, outdated and nonexistent methods. I just use my eyes. For that, I’m a Devil-worshipping freak.”
With that, he turned back to his work. And it was work; John was starting to see that.
“Lestrade doesn’t seem to think so. And there’s your brother.”
Sherlock picked up a ring from the floor and examined it. “Kindly don’t mention my brother when I’m trying to think.”
“Right.” John looked around uncomfortably, then coughed. “Do you actually need me here?”
“Not really,” Sherlock said bluntly, then suddenly looked at him. “Wait.” Carefully he replaced the ring, then slowly stood up, circling the body. “There was someone else here,” he announced. “Besides the one who shot him. Nobody raised the alarm straightaway. This man knew him, but he was scared - he paced back and forth, and fiddled with his ring.” Sherlock indicated where it had fallen. “But he must have felt safe if he let him into the building. Oh!” He pointed to where a pistol was still clenched in his hand - Sherlock had been rather dismissive when `suicide` had been mentioned though. “He held a gun to his visitor’s head, so he assumed he was safe. Which was when the shooter took him out - stationed close to the house.” He indicated the window. “Must have been to make the shot to kill him instantly, which he must have done because he never shot at his visitor.”
“Not necessarily.”
Sherlock frowned, apparently not happy at being interrupted. “What?”
“You’re not a good shot, are you?”
Sherlock might have looked as if he hadn’t heard, if John hadn’t seen him stiffen.
“I mean, you’re not bad, but you’re not good. Right?”
Sherlock scowled at him, then looked away. “Is that relevant?”
“Only because I know I could do it from further away than that. You just have to keep your hand level, compensate for wind speed, all that.”
Sherlock looked through the window, then down at the body. Without a word he paced across the room, knelt down, and before John could stop him he actually lifted up the head to look more closely at the wound. John was a doctor and even he wasn’t sure he’d do that. Especially with a corpse.
“Hmph.” Sherlock looked up at him, seeming more annoyed than anything else. “That would be consistent with the wound.”
John smiled. “You’re welcome.”
“Lucky guess,” Sherlock muttered. “How many people could make that shot? Hypothetically?”
John felt rather flattered to be consulted. “Not many.”
“But you could?”
“I’m good.” He looked Sherlock right in the eye. “Very good, actually.”
“So whoever was here, he knew what would happen, and happens to employ someone as good as you think you are.” John might have reacted to that, except Sherlock’s eyes had suddenly lit up. “Oh,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I believe I know who did this.”
“Who?”
Sherlock opened his mouth, looked up at him…and then, rather uncharacteristically, closed it again. “No one of importance to you,” was all he said, before suddenly standing and sweeping dramatically out of the building. John was just slightly too slow in following him, only catching something that sounded like “-arty” and seeing Sherlock move past a Lestrade who actually looked rather worried.
“Something wrong?”
Lestrade was frowning after Sherlock. “Local problem,” he said.
“…Right.” John glanced at Anderson, already muttering prayers over the house, and asked what had been preying on his mind ever since getting here. “Why do you let him do this?”
Lestrade sighed. “Because I’m desperate,” he said honestly. “This is my town, and the people here don’t always die the way they should. God help me, but Sherlock’s who I need if I want to actually do my job. Besides,” he added, “it means he doesn’t get bored. Trust me, that’s the last thing we want.” He jerked his head after Sherlock. “Speaking of, you’d better hurry after him - I need to keep the Father happy.”
Reluctantly John did so, if only because Sherlock could go at quite a pace when he wanted to. “What is it?”
“Moriarty,” Sherlock murmured.
“Excuse me?”
Sherlock looked down at him, seeming slightly surprised to see John there. Then he shook his head. “I told you: my own concern.”
“That’s not quite what you said,” John muttered, but glancing up at Sherlock’s expression he decided to drop it for the moment. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked what he saw.
“So,” he said casually, trying to change the subject, “what do you do to pass the time around here?”
“Observation.”
“What?”
----------
Sherlock apparently had an inability to go, well, anywhere without getting in a fight. John supposed it was probably thanks to his winning personality. So the results of their repairing to the saloon, on multiple occasions, were rather inevitable.
Still, Lestrade was surprisingly friendly, especially for a sheriff, and it meant the several days had hardly been boring. Funnily enough, John had the feeling Sherlock saw it that way too.
Somehow it only seemed natural to keep trailing back to Mrs Hudson’s rooms with Sherlock. John never got around to searching for alternative accommodation, and the chair really wasn’t that bad.
Apparently John had had a few too many this time though, because on about the fifth day in town he woke up with the sun distinctly higher in the sky than `early morning` and with the horrible feeling he had missed something.
Stumbling downstairs, he was slightly surprised to see Mrs Hudson loading a shotgun. “Did I miss something?”
She smiled up at him. “Oh, just being prepared, dear. Sherlock got a note this morning - he’s over at Angelo’s, I told him I’d send you over.”
“What sort of note?”
She very obviously hesitated, before saying soothingly, even though she was clearly still unsettled, “Oh, just a threat.”
“But doesn’t Sherlock get threats all the time?”
Mrs Hudson paused. For some reason this made John far more nervous than anything else. “I’m sure it’s alright,” she said eventually, and John reflected on how well she kept up the reassuring act even when she was clearly lying. “It’s just that Sherlock actually seemed rather bothered by this one, and then that nice Sheriff Lestrade and Sherlock’s brother told the whole town to be on their guard. You weren’t planning on getting anything done today, were you?”
John stared at her. “Er…no.”
“Just as well, I don’t think anybody’s accepting visitors. Like I said, Angelo’s Saloon. Oh, and here.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out a box, which she handed to him. John cautiously opened the lid, and then stared at the carefully organised stack of ammunition. “Just in case,” she told him. “I find you always run short just when you need it.”
John nodded dumbly.
“Well, good luck, dear.”
“You too,” he mumbled, as he shouldered his Winchester - having retrieved it from where it had lain untouched since getting here - and showed himself out.
----------
Mrs Hudson hadn’t been kidding: the streets were absolutely deserted. (Not that there were all that many, but that just made it more noticeable.) The whole way to Angelo’s, John didn’t see a single person, save for the odd face peering around a window frame. The silence felt heavy, as if it might press him face-down into the dusty ground. John generally didn’t consider himself the nervous type, yet he found himself fingering the grip of his pistol, just in case.
Angelo’s looked just as unwelcoming as every other building in town. Turned out the saloon actually had some rags to pass for curtains, where the windows weren’t still boarded up from what looked like months ago.
Carefully he stepped inside, and immediately saw Angelo piling up boxes of what was most likely ammunition on the bar, overseen by Lestrade and his deputy, the latter scowling up at Sherlock, who was crouched by the window at the top of the stairs with the air of a child waiting for a surprise.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Moriarty.”
John frowned. “What’s Moriarty?”
“More like who. You could say he runs a gang of outlaws around here.”
“`Could`?”
“Well, more like gangs. Every time we run someone down, Sherlock traces them back to this guy.”
“I reckon he likes it,” Donovan butts in. “Him and Moriarty. Same as how they talk. Like attracts like, if you know what I mean.”
John had a horrible feeling he did.
“Oh, don’t look like that. You only just rolled in; you don’t know him like you think you do.”
“Maybe,” John allowed, and then moved away before she could go on. The saloon was practically deserted - he guessed that most people were holed up wherever they had the most ammo. While he may not have known Moriarty, he recognised the signs of a town readying itself for a shoot-out. (Come to think of it, John had probably been involved in a few too many himself if he knew how to recognise them that easily.)
“Well?”
“Well what?” Sherlock asked, sounded more than slightly irritated to be interrupted from his exciting activity of watching out of the window.
“Moriarty. I’m guessing he sent you the note Mrs Hudson mentioned?”
Sherlock spared him a glance. “Apparently he actually wants to meet. Says we have some catching up to do.”
“Wait, this is the same man who stood there while someone was shot right in front him.”
“On his orders,” Sherlock confirmed.
“How do you know him?”
“Through his work. The stagecoach poisoner, for example. Moriarty seems to like being involved in anything interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“As opposed to the dullness we normally have.”
“Sherlock… Are you enjoying this? Because - ”
He was cut off by Sherlock’s intake of breath, and followed his gaze down to the street.
And John had heard stories. Everybody had. But despite having been travelling from town to town for the last few years, he had never actually seen that one man in black slowly riding down the middle of the deserted street, tumbleweed and all. It made quite an impression.
When he came to the saloon, he pushed himself off, and tied up his horse by the watering trough - John tried very hard not to think about the parallels - as if this was a perfectly normal ride into a deserted and well-armed town. Then John actually flinched as he turned and looked straight up at them.
“I know you’re up there, Sherlock,” he sang out - actually sang, John had not been expecting that. “Come on down. I just want to talk.”
“Like hell you are,” Lestrade snarled, appearing behind them. “Sherlock, you are not going out there.”
“Why not?” Sherlock asked, hardly looking fazed at all by this.
“Because he will kill you,” Lestrade said slowly, as if explaining the concept to an idiot. “And this is the closest we’ve ever come to him. I’m not letting him get away, not this time.”
“Why don’t we just shoot him?” Donovan demanded. Before any of them could stop her, she had her gun at the ready, aimed out of the nearest window. However, evidently somebody was quicker off the mark, since a shot rang out before she could even squeeze the trigger. Almost immediately, she was collapsing back, her own shot going off somewhere into the air over the opposite buildings. Some of which, it turned out, had already been infiltrated by Moriarty’s people, judging by the sudden rain of gunfire after that first bullet.
Lestrade hissed a curse, by her side in an instant, as John dragged Sherlock to the floor as suddenly shot after shot filled the air, puncturing holes in the doors and leaving mark after mark in the front. John blinked as a hole suddenly appeared in the floor right before his eyes, but he could already feel the eerie calm he recognised from countless battles settling over him as he carried on down the stairs to where Donovan was lying.
“Well?” Lestrade demanded.
John ran a quick, battle-trained eye over her. “She’ll be fine,” he said, almost certain he was telling the truth. The bullet had hit her hand, dead centre - they’d been aiming to make sure she wouldn’t be making that shot.
Lestrade looked at him sceptically. Donovan bit around a word John didn’t think he’d ever heard a woman say before. “I’ll be fine, sir. I shoot just as well with my left.”
At least now she was the one getting the look. “You don’t have to prove anything, Sally.”
“Forgive me, sir, but yes I do.”
At least the hasty argument gave John a chance to glance through the window.
And then start firing back.
----------
He could not believe this.
He had been in town a grand total of almost six days, if that. And that was far too short a time for him to now find himself crouched by the wall in the saloon, trying to reload his pistols as fast as possible as the front was peppered with bullets. His Winchester was still leaning against the wall at his side - right now John was more concerned about quantity than quality. Besides, he had it on very good authority that when it came to hand guns he didn’t lose much when it came to the latter.
Lestrade apparently took the opposite approach. When he bent over to reload, John nudged his own rifle towards him. “Aren’t your pistols loaded?”
“Of course,” Lestrade said, sounding almost offended. “I like to save them up.”
Then they both had to quickly move in opposite directions as the wood between them was blasted by a particularly lucky shot - or unlucky, depending on your point of view.
“What do you reckon’s going on here?”
John leaned out to fire off two quick shots - in a slightly detached way he noted that both were accompanied by yells of rather satisfyingly obvious pain - before he answered the question. “Knowing Sherlock, they really do want to talk.” Another break for shooting. “A lot.”
Lestrade nodded in acknowledgement as he fired off a shot towards someone who didn’t duck fast enough. “Bloody mess, this,” he muttered. “I did my best for my town, and then this Moriarty just swans in and all this happens.”
“It’s not over yet,” John reminded him, cursing as he realised he was temporarily out of ammo but with a clear shot. Lestrade covered him as he ran for the bar and grabbed what he could. “You can still fix it after it’s over.”
“Depends on how it ends, doesn’t it?”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You sure about that?” Lestrade looked over as John threw himself against the wall next to him, reloading as fast as he could. “I know I asked before, but…why do you trust Sherlock so much?”
At least John did him the dignity of actually considering the question. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I just do.”
“You flatter me.” Apparently Sherlock had deigned to join them. “You realise this would stop if I went out.”
“No!” they said at the same time.
“John, you only just came here, you don’t understand what - ”
Lestrade held up a finger, cutting him off. “You hear that?”
They all crouched there in silence for a moment. “No,” John admitted.
“Exactly. It’s quiet. Too quiet, for my liking.”
Looking on the positive side, this did not last for long. On the negative, John then heard that voice again - one he doubted he would forget for a long time.
“Come on, Sherlock. I just want to talk.”
“I’m sure,” John muttered. He turned to comment to Sherlock, but stopped when he noticed that Sherlock’s expression looked more…interested than anything else. “No,” he hissed.
Sherlock didn’t even look at him.
“No.” John reached out to grab him by the shoulder, because damn it, Sherlock was not going to ignore him on this one. “You are not going out there.”
At least this did earn Sherlock’s attention. However, he just sighed and said, “You’re not a part of this, John. You never were.”
It felt like he’d been shot. Again. He felt his grip on Sherlock’s arm go slack, which of course was all he needed to stand up, right where Moriarty could see him. Slightly numbly John noticed that this was not immediately greeted by the sound of a gunshot and a falling body, so clearly both of them were insane. How nice.
Instead, all he heard was Moriarty’s satisfied cry of “There you are!”
“The hell are you - ” Lestrade started, only to be cut off as Sherlock side-stepped his hand as he tried to grab him and walked out into the street. “…He’s dead,” he announced, looking probably as stunned as John.
“Looks that way,” John agreed, staring blankly back into the saloon without really seeing anything.
“I - what are they doing?”
At the sound of Lestrade’s confusion, John managed to pull himself around to peer over the window sill. To his surprise, he was not just in time to see one or both of them get shot.
They were standing about ten paces apart in the street, looking eerily similar when you couldn’t see their faces and all you had to go on were their black hats. Quite frankly though, John was more concerned by the fact that neither of them seemed to have their guns out.
“Oh, this is good,” Moriarty said with obvious glee. “I’ve been following your work, you know, same way you’ve been following mine. Have to say, though, I’m a little bit disappointed.”
“I didn’t realise I was trying to impress you.”
“And yet sometimes you do! Funny how that works. But Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock, bit of a waste, isn’t it? So much you could be doing. You’re just like me, after all.”
John tried not to wince at that. Sherlock’s face, if anything, looked worryingly amused.
“I seriously doubt that.”
“Really? You’re not at all interested in what you could be? What we could be? You might say we were made for each other.”
John reached out just in time to hold Lestrade down. At his glare, he hissed, “Not yet.” However, as the silence stretched out, he started to wonder how long he could hold him. Lestrade, meanwhile, was taking the opportunity to reload.
“I could just shoot you.” Unfortunately, Sherlock did not follow up on this inspired piece of normal sensible thinking.
“Well, then you’d get to see the look of surprise on my face.” Moriarty made some corresponding over-the-top performance, which for some reason came off as more unsettling than John might have expected. Was there anything genuine about him? “Because I would be, Sherlock, I really would. So?”
Another horrible pause. Then, “And I strike you as somebody willing to work with a partner?”
“Well, I saw you with that acquisition of yours. Little Johnny.” John froze. “Seem to have taken a shine to him. Don’t worry, I can fix that.”
“No, you won’t. I will stop you, you know.”
John let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding.
Moriarty really did look disappointed now. It looked fake though - much more overstated than it needed to be. “Oh, that’s a shame, it really is. Because you can’t be allowed to continue. You just can’t.”
In a flash, Moriarty’s gun was there in his hand, and aimed steadily right between Sherlock’s eyes. Apparently he was much faster on the draw, effectively pinning Sherlock’s hand by his side. “Come out, Johnny,” he sang out. “I doubt you really want me to shoot him right here.”
John hesitated. Lestrade stared at him. “You really think it makes any difference if you go out there too?”
“I can’t let him shoot him.”
“And you’ll stop him? What makes you the hero?”
“I didn’t say I was,” John reminded him.
Then, before Lestrade could stop him, he too had stood up and let himself out.
“Atta boy, Johnny!” Moriarty said with clear glee, keeping his gun trained on Sherlock. Not for the first time, John reflected on Sherlock’s tendency to have people point guns at him.
A glance up at the building opposite revealed two men in clear view with impressive-looking weapons, one trained on John, the other on Sherlock.
Slowly, as if this was all merely a mild inconvenience - and judging by the circumstances when they hadn’t even met yet, John realised that probably was how he saw it - Sherlock looked up, from one shooter to the next, and then back at Moriarty. John made a promise to himself that he did not get shot in the head (or anywhere else) in the next five minutes he would use his newly appreciated life to wipe that bored expression off the bastard’s damn face.
“This is getting unnecessarily complicated, don’t you think?” Sherlock said, in the same voice he might have used had he and Moriarty simply been having a drink together. (Moments after the image entered John’s head, he amended it to no doubt include some sort of `game` revolving around poisoning each others’ drinks without being caught.)
“I just wanted a simple conversation man to man, Sherlock,” Moriarty said with a slightly exasperated air, as if this huge stand-off was Sherlock’s fault (which John hadn’t exactly ruled out yet). “You were the one who got others involved. You were the one who made it messy.” Evidently `messy` was the most intolerable thing of all.
As if the whole world had grown achingly slow, John watched Moriarty tip his head to one side - still looking almost disappointed - and raise his hand to apparently signal the men overhead, and told himself firmly that he would not close his eyes, he was not going to go out as a coward, and he looked over to Sherlock to try and somehow indicate that this was entirely his fault -
- and so when he heard shots fired, it took him a moment to realise just what had happened.
Namely that John was still alive, and unless Sherlock didn’t even die the same way as everybody else (not impossible), so was he.
He was only more surprised when he turned to look at Moriarty, to see him lying on the ground in a way that definitely looked dead.
While of course Sherlock got there first, John was only a step behind him, staring down in disbelief at the corpse. It was mildly satisfying to notice that Moriarty had died looking very surprised indeed.
A glance up towards the shooters’ building revealed nothing, meaning that either they’d turned and fled already, or they were dead too. Either way, the `multiple shots` suggested they wouldn’t be trying again in a hurry.
It was only when he looked down at Sherlock, and noticed his gaze fixed somewhere behind him, that he thought to look back at the saloon.
Turning slowly, he saw Lestrade standing in the doorway, with Donovan just behind him and his guns still drawn - although now lowered - and smoking.
Probably their surprise was obvious from their expressions - John didn’t see Sherlock’s but was fairly certain this was a turn of events he hadn’t been expecting, given his precious confrontation. Lestrade, however, just shrugged, holstering both guns.
“I told you: my town.”
Then he turned and went back inside.
A check revealed that yes, Sherlock looked stunned. A fact he would never ever admit to, no matter how many times John brought it up.
----------
Moriarty and his `friends` were given an obscure burial from which Anderson was mysteriously absent - in fact, most of the town seemed to have better things to do - and John once again found himself back in Angelo’s Saloon. After all, there really wasn’t anywhere left to go.
Which was really the problem.
Lestrade sighed, in the manner of a man who hadn’t just saved his town single-handedly and hadn’t been receiving free drinks for the last week. “So. You’re heading out again?”
John nodded.
“Got to say, I’ll be sorry to see the back of you. Not a bad shot and first person to keep Sherlock under control.”
“I’m honoured.”
“You should be.” Lestrade took another sip of his whiskey. “We could probably use you around here.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” John assured him with a smile. “They’ve got you, haven’t they?”
Lestrade obviously tried to smile at that, although John could tell he was too modest to actually accept the compliment, so he offered him a change of subject: “How’s Donovan?”
“Mixed,” Lestrade said, obviously happy to get off the subject of himself. “Hand’s never going to be the same, Stanford’s told her that much, but she’s practicing all the time with her left. She’s not going to stop doing what she did, I can tell you that.”
“I didn’t really think she would.”
There was a slightly awkward silence as they both finished their drinks and both awkwardly stared at the empty glasses, wondering just what was supposed to come next.
“Well,” Lestrade said, and held out his hand, “good luck out there.”
John smiled and shook it. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome in town anytime.”
“I might take you up on that,” John said, and was rather surprised to discover that he meant it.
----------
Truth be told, John wasn’t entirely sure whether he wanted to say goodbye to Sherlock or not. The man was quite possibly clinically insane and had almost gotten him killed in some rather spectacular ways, but then again, that wasn’t so different from most people he’d met on the road.
It was probably just as well then that the decision was taken out of his hands. Sherlock had a bit of a talent for that.
“Where are you going?”
John didn’t even bother looking around. “Got to catch up with my regiment.”
“Are you honestly going to keep up that pretence?”
Frowning, John turned around to see Sherlock leaning casually against the wall of the saloon, eyebrow raised, confident as ever, as if he hadn’t been in a fight to the death recently. “Are you saying I’m a liar?”
“On this occasion, yes.”
Blunt as ever. John sighed. “I am following them, mostly. At least, I’m headed where they probably are. I’m just not actually looking for them.”
Unsurprisingly, Sherlock looked less than satisfied with this response. “If you’re not actively searching for them, where are you going?”
John frowned again, this time in confusion. If he didn’t know any better, he might have said that that question sounded far more like Why are you leaving?
He shrugged. “I don’t like staying in one place too long. It goes…grey.” Immediately he winced at his word choice, but when he looked over again Sherlock didn’t look disgusted, which was something. In fact, come to think of it, he probably had a very good idea of what John was talking about. Why hadn’t he thought of that? “I’m on the move anyway, so following them is as good a way as any. So…nowhere in particular, I guess.”
“`Nowhere in particular`.” Sherlock appeared to give this some thought. “That does sound distinctly less dull than here. I don’t suppose you would mind the company.”
John blinked in surprise, yet again feeling the now horribly familiar sensation of having skipped something important. “What?” He seemed to have spent the ten or so days saying little else. Apparently he might be getting even more practice. “You want to come with me?”
“I would think that was obvious,” Sherlock said dismissively. “I’m sure you understand that staying here is hardly appealing.”
“Right. I thought you could handle yourself just fine?”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t dull.”
John just smiled. “I assume you have a ride.”
“Of course.”
John examined the animal Sherlock indicated. Funnily enough, he hadn’t seen Sherlock anywhere near one the entire time he had known him. Not that that had been such a long time, but still, a horse tended to be something you met relatively quickly. Furthermore, when they both mounted their rides, he noticed that Sherlock looked rather uneasy - no doubt uncomfortable with the idea of trusting an animal with a mind of its own to still do precisely what he wanted.
“Is that yours?”
“Yes.”
John looked at him.
“Technically my family’s.”
John kept looking at him.
“Technically Mycroft’s, can we go?”
Now John let the smile he’d been holding back show through. “Absolutely.” He reached up and pulled the brim of his hat down. “How about…that way?”
“Fine,” Sherlock said immediately, clearly not looking where John was pointing. Which suited him just fine as well.
Which was how John found himself riding out of town as he had many times before. The only difference was the company. The sun was setting and life felt good.
It had been another fine day in the West.