[FIC]Shatter These Walls 3/?

[starlightshade]

Hello everyone, and welcome to another installment of this story. Please fasten your seatbelts since we're picking up the pace. We suggest you pay close attention as there have been sightings of plot and other rare creatures. Thank you for considering Air starlightshade for your next trip!

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(This is a full day early. I'm so proud of myself! Nah, actually I've twisted my bum shoulder and can't train tonight so editing and posting it was.)
Title: Shatter These Walls
Author:
starlightshade
Beta:
jg5799
Pairing: Holmes/Watson, Watson/Mary mentioned (which is why I didn't tag it), everything else is up in the air atm.
Spoilers: for both movies.
Rating: NC-17/M in the future, right now it's... umm... something like PG-13/K+?
Warnings: Plot. Talking. Flowery prose. Blood/Violence for this one! M/M smut for later. More warnings will be given with subsequent chapters.
Prompt:: Watson likes rough sex but doesn't want to hurt Mary. Holmes offers to help out, pretending to like it.
X-posted? Yes.
Disclaimer: No money made. No ownership claimed. Fair use applies.

Need to catch up? Chapter 01, Chapter 02



Chapter 3

By mutual agreement, the strange conversation between the friends wasn't brought up again in the weeks following their pleasant outing. Even so, Holmes found his thoughts stray toward it in the lull of silence brought on by the absence of anything exciting, a lack of opportunity to improve his current situation.

Watson and Mary had reconciled tearfully the next morning, both swearing they would never again let an argument take their rest- he didn't understand why Watson would swear to that, he'd carted his rather drunk friend home from the salon at the Royale after Watson had come close to following a group of gentlemen to their club and the high-stakes games that were on there. Watson had spent a noisy but definitely restful night on Holmes' bed while Holmes himself had tried to sort through the spinning in his head and the myriad voices and people determined to take up permanent lodgings in his memories. Yet again he had been reminded why he was so hesitant of partaking in alcohol to the point of intoxication.

Morphine dulled his senses just enough that no observation could get close enough to hurt. Cocaine sharpened his wits into something even better than a Spaniard's folded blade. Alcohol, he felt, opened the floodgates to madness, lowering inhibitions far beyond what he could stand without his mind descending into chaos. Chloral, which he'd been heavily reliant upon in the course of his recovery and which he continued to use in deference to Watson's hatred of his other habits, dulled his perception to the point where just about anyone could sneak up on him to surprise him, as evidenced by his current predicament. Not sleeping in close to a week (a variety of reasons, Watson's continued absence only one of them) had made him desperate enough to rely on the powerful medication, and its effects the next day had brought him to... this.

He tested his bonds again. Hunting criminals without Watson was not conducive to his health. He was abominably cold, this close to the Thames the damp spread through every corner of every building, never more true than for the cellar of a shipping wharf. They had taken his garments, leaving him in only his smallclothes to protect his modesty. Neither of the two hulking "personal attendants" he'd run afoul of had been too concerned about roughing him up unduly, therefore he had the sound of several church bells rattling his brain around his skull in addition to Big Ben's iconic melody.

The case had been a simple one, just legwork for Mycroft, part of the price he willingly paid for his brother's help in dealing with the aftermath of Moriarty and his own presumed death. Documents granting minor titles had been found falsified, and records modified accordingly. Long-lost relatives were cropping up with distressing regularity. Tracing the entire matter to one of the Queen's chambermaid's brothers had been almost too easy, as had been the obtaining of the man's confession.

Mycroft had suspected the foul play to extend further than just England, as had Holmes himself. A number of rich merchants involved with the spice trade had found themselves in possession of a noble title due to the deaths of previously unknown, if impoverished, benefactors distantly related. Ancestral seats had been rediscovered by the score, but since the whole affair had been spread out over more than a decade of nefarious activity it had taken this long to come to the attention of the older Holmes.

When Mycroft had presented his brother with the facts, Holmes had almost scoffed at the thought of taking on this case. Mycroft had, after all, already solved it, tracing the forgeries to Hong Kong and the ancient crime syndicates known as the Triads by the simple matter of following the ink used in the tattoo found etched upon the back of the neck of the first suspect, a man so desperately embroiled in gambling he'd virtually sold his sister, the Queen's chambermaid, into service for the Triads.

There was still no give in his bonds, and his hands were starting to tingle. Holmes was starting to feel slightly claustrophobic; the last time he'd been bound to a chair in a dimly-lit space he'd ended up swinging from a fishhook. He clenched his teeth to prevent them from chattering. It had been but three hours since he'd roused from unconsciousness, alone in the near dark, but, estimating from his chilled state and the amount of fluids his remaining clothes had soaked up from the ambient humidity, more than half a day since he'd hit this particular snare in his plans to expose the Triad's attempts to undermine the institution that was English nobility.

He was rather thirsty. Perhaps it was time to draw out his captors? He didn't allow himself to speculate on the viability of such a simple plan as he called out for water and was rewarded by the clang of something metal- a goblet, most likely- hitting the floor a storey above the hole they were keeping him in.

"What's a fellow to do for a drink around here?" he shouted, even louder. There were heated voices coming from above, two accented, Chinese, but not one of the varieties he was familiar with, one a cultured tenor with a hint of Irish in it. Three men, then, or rather, four. There was a shadow sporadically wandering across the one window high up on the cellar wall, certainly too regularly for it to be just a random dock worker. He rattled the chair across the floor, an exercise in near futility as it wasn't stone he was sitting on but hard-packed dirt on its way to mud.

It was enough to bring two of the men running.

"So, you're awake?" Holmes resisted the urge to roll his eyes. While it was sometimes easy to forget that nobody saw the world as he did- sometimes, as most of the times people around him went to great pains to remind him of his "eccentricity", and no, Mycroft ventured out too rarely to be counted upon seeing as he did- the sheer ignorance most people exhibited in their words and actions was becoming more and more painful to watch the more he was exposed to it. One of the men moved around to stand behind his back, attempting to unnerve him by giving him an unknown assailant at his back. Holmes would never admit it, but it worked in his current agitated state. He could hide it, expertise in acting coming to the forefront of his mind even as he was cataloging all the information pressing into his sore mind.

"Your powers of observation are staggering," he rolled out around a tongue swollen and crusted with blood from the hit that had caused his left eye to swell up, again. Holmes had experienced loss of three-dimensional vision before, when one eye had been shut for more than two weeks, and he was almost eager to experiment with it again. While it was disconcerting, not knowing the exact distance of objects from his self- oh, he could calculate and extrapolate from the shadows they threw on the ground, other objects, himself, but he didn't know, and wasn't that just so exciting?- the amount of data he could gather on what would be required for a one-eyed man to be the perpetrator of any number of crimes was staggering.

The man in front of him had dressed hastily, and sloppily- one of his shirt's buttons done up wrong, the tail of it hanging out just a little to the left of his belt buckle that was left one hole too loose for his normal habits judging by the groove creased into the leather further on, the pants worn inside out- in a worn waistcoat, brown tweed, and dockworker's trousers. He hadn't worked on the docks a single day in his life, his back wasn't stooped, the muscles in his arms not developed enough, his hands, while rough, carrying the evidence of rope-burns and tar ground into them. Sailor, on hire away from his crew to serve the man with the cultured voice. He'd been at rest before coming down to Holmes' cellar, so it had to be the middle of the night, making it around sixteen hours since his capture.

Holmes grinned, he knew he had them. The white splotch of fresh caulking on the man's sleeve, half-hidden in the linen folds. There was only one ship being refitted in the docks sailing under the flag of that specific Irish trading company right now, and wasn't it just too easy to know that he'd been taken there? Really, the casks stacked up in the corner, finally illuminated by the light coming through the door the two men had left slightly ajar in their haste, prominently displayed the coat of arms, and all the pulleys, hawsers, half-finished crudely stitched heavy cloth that could only be sail, evidenced he was being held in a shipbuilder's workshop, or rather, underneath it.

He didn't expect the second man to harshly slap the back of his head and couldn't bite back a moan as fireworks exploded in front of his opened eye and, much more colorfully, behind the lids of the closed one. The fireworks were swaying dangerously close to greyness, the true sign of falling unconscious. Why was it called "blacking out"? He'd never blacked out, there was no darkness rising on the way to losing one's senses. Instead, everything grew gray and fuzzy, and then vanished in a burst of white noise.

"Shut your gob." Holmes grinned through the vertigo. So predictable. But he had knowledge of who it was that was holding him now, and he wasn't about to let that get away from him, or rather, Mycroft. Time to finalize his escape.

"So this is where you threaten me with more bodily harm, then rough me up a little more before finally giving in to granting me the respite of a drink of brackish water as you're "saving me for the boss", am I right?" His voice sounded as if he were underwater- damage to the eardrums? He hoped not, it had taken months for the continuous ringing in his ears to leave the last time that had happened.

He rolled with the punch to his back a lot better, even though his bruised ribs protested the move. Fixing his gaze on the small pitcher of water the second man, the one standing behind him, had brought and placed down near the door, he fluttered his fingers as much as the tight ropes binding them to the armrests allowed.

"I don't suppose we could skip the entire procedure and just get to the point where you give me the water?"

"Now, listen here, Mister Holmes." The faint accent was definitely Southern Chinese. Holmes could understand, and perhaps imitate, the two major dialects there fairly well, and knowing their cadence gave him certainty in that the two men had come from Hong Kong. They certainly weren't Cantonese, though.

"You don't see me going anywhere, do you?" he interjected, and was rewarded with another body shot. So the two thugs weren't just simple thugs. They had taken account of the damage to his head, and didn't want him knocked out again. Some knowledge of medicine, a lot of knowledge about fighting and inflicting the most pain while keeping the actual injuries to a minimum.

"Taiwan?" he choked out through the sparks he was certain were flying from somewhere in the vicinity of his liver. The two men share a look, neither of them consciously giving away that Holmes was right, but he'd been able to read a person's unconscious body language since he'd been four and his father had been trying to hide his guilt over a quick romp with the cook from his mother.

"Long time ago," the man behind him finally spoke, earning a hard look from the one standing in front, not surprising as his voice was distinctive, a rumbling, calming basso profundo better suited to a storyteller than an agent of evil.

"Oh, you traveled here via Africa, Gambia to be exact, and Hong Kong, of course," he added amiably. "Which is where the gentleman upstairs procured your services."

"The gold fields of Gambia produced the funds necessary to integrate your agents into the very upper echelons of British society- a very clever ploy, and a most commendable use of the surgery techniques discovered and pioneered by the lamentably late Doctor Hoffmannsthal, I must say.

"Your employer, though... he is Irish, perhaps of close relation to a certain enterprising duo of brothers aiming for incorporation of their trading company? A title in the family would quickly ingratiate him to both them and London society; since he is not the oldest and he wouldn't stand a chance of inheriting the title otherwise, he has to be a half-brother, or cousin? No, half-brother for sure.

"Now, how did an Irishman come to be involved with a known syndicate of counterfeiters? Oh, don't be surprised, of course news of the fake sixpence has traveled as far as London (1). He has taken on the faint flattening of the letter "r" that occurs among those speaking one of the many Chinese dialects for quite some time. Being as his older siblings trade in spices, it may well be that he has been their agents in the colonial markets of Hong Kong for some years, likely exiled there for ambition greater than his station. Ambition is well received among the Dragons, as long as it is tempered with wit and patience as it has been in this man.

"So, a thirst for revenge and redemption. He is not going to be content with being a simple baron or viscount, he is going to aim higher, an earldom should do. There are not so very many of these going around, much less those without an heir apparent. In fact, the only title that might be up for being taken is that of the young Earl of Marbrooke, who has only ascended to the title two years ago and has fallen victim to an altercation between gentlemen just a week ago. The estate, of course, is still in upheaval, given the sudden dearth of successors.

"So as not to cast aspersions on the sudden death of this fine example of a nobleman, there have been a series of precedent cases establishing supporters among the peerage that will vouch for the new... cousin, who has been traveling post-haste from the African colonies, where he has been born and raised a disgraced byproduct of infidelity but suddenly a sought-after commodity upon receiving news of the premature demise of young Marbrooke.

"Their names are even close as I'm certain your employer has been using the clout that taking on his half-brothers' surname has given him rather than suffering the ignominy of being his father's son."

Holmes took a deep breath having spouted the entirety of his deductions within the space of less than a minute after realizing that the third man's shadow had fallen across the cellar door, preceded by the glow of an oil lamp.

"Very good, Mr. Holmes," the tenor voice enunciated with a stage actor's clarity. The shoes descending the stairs were hard-soled and of high quality, their tread soft on the stone. The Irishman was stepping on the balls of his feet first, his stance very balanced at every moment. He'd not just picked up diction in the Asian colonies then.

"Too good, unfortunately." Holmes barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes. If this got anymore clichéd he'd go and pray for Moriarty to return from the dead. The man sat the lamp he'd been carrying down out of reach, behind some debris that Holmes wouldn't be able to navigate even should he be able to move himself and the chair he was tied to.

"It is time, Mr. Holmes, for you to die. I simply cannot have you go forth with the evidence of my deeds you have undoubtedly connected in your forays into the docks, or with the knowledge of my name. You were correct in that I used my mother's name most of my life, however, I have returned as my father's son so I may lay claim to the title which is rightfully mine."

"By right of murder, you mean," Holmes said, thoughts running in a faster and faster spiral. He hadn't missed the click of the safety being taken off a gun, a gun held in the hands of the man still positioned behind his chair. He had to keep them talking, Mycroft wouldn't have missed that he hadn't returned to Baker Street at the time he'd planned to.

The Irishman came to stand in front of him, peering down a long nose at his bruised and bloodied face. He was an unimposing man of Holmes' own height, dark-eyed and dark-haired with the tan that bespoke more time spent under the sun than suitable for a proper Englishman.

Watson had sported such a tan when they'd met, after he'd been to Afghanistan. He still did during the summer...

"Murder? If there was a murder, why isn't my dearest departed cousin being avenged? Why is there no hunt for the killer? No, my friend, there was no murder, just an unfortunate accident placing my cousin in the path of a bullet fired by a startled gentleman out on a pre-dawn hunt."

"A gentleman that most convincingly told he was meeting Marbrooke to settle an argument pertaining to his intended's honor and good name," Holmes shot back.

"You have the gentleman's word on that?" Holmes gnashed his teeth. Of course they hadn't. Said gentleman was sticking to his story about the accident despite witnesses placing him and Marbrooke in the same club the evening before, having a spirited discussion about Marbrooke's trespasses upon a certain lady. There was no doubt in Holmes' mind that there had been an armed confrontation planned when fists failed to convey the depth of disdain the unnamed gentleman held for the Earl of Marbrooke, but as the witnesses weren't forthcoming with their depositions he only had his own word against some of the Empire's finest.

"Well, Mr. Holmes, as much fun your most excellent deductions have been, it is now time for me to make my way toward Marbrooke House to inspect my future holdings. It has been a pleasure to chat with you."

The hard barrel of a pistol was pressed to the base of Holmes' skull. The detective caught and held the criminal's gaze.

"I wish I could say the same," he said, "but there have been too many of your ilk, men so certain they would triumph over justice and escape their ultimate fate that you have come to bore me. I assure you that, should you turn me loose now, you might find clemency in the eyes of the law."

The Irishman just laughed at that, a short bark that was abruptly terminated when the sound of booted feet marching somewhat arrhythmically echoed around the cellar. He whirled around, hands closing on Holmes' throat as the detective stared impassively into his snarling face.

"How? How did they know where to find us?" he shouted, spittle flying. Holmes closed his eyes in disgust.

"I wasn't the only one on your trail, of course," he sneered acerbically. "Your scheme, while well thought-out, has been obvious enough. Now tell me, how do you reckon your chances are at escaping the rope if you keep on throttling me?"

"Better than if I stop," the criminal returned, loosening his grip nonetheless.

"Even better if you're coming with me." He turned to his two helpers. "Cut him loose. Stay behind him." He retrieved a gun from the waistband of his trousers.

"Now, don't try to run or your brains will paint the walls," he warned. Holmes smirked, rubbing his hands together to restore circulation through wrists that had been bound to the armrests for far too long. The ropes around his legs fell, and he staggered to his feet, deliberately exaggerating the problems he was having getting his legs to cooperate.

The first man, the one who had been facing him all the time, nervously stepped back away from him, looking deferentially to the second one whose hardened face Holmes now saw for the first time. He took in the loose clothes, the coiled intensity in his stance, the intelligence reflected on uneven, maybe just plain ugly features.

The gun prodding into the nape of his neck got him moving, stumbling more, but he couldn't help but notice the small tattoo peeking from the cuff of the second thug's shirt and the shoes- he was wearing Western-style slippers, a strange compromise between his more traditional attitude and way of dressing and his current stationing.

"I hope you will know how to appease the Mountain Master, Straw Sandal (2)," he tossed back over his shoulder in his accented Mandarin. They might not speak it, but most Taiwanese and Cantonese people at least understood it. "I don't think he will be all that forgiving."

"He will know exactly whom to lay the blame upon," the Straw Sandal replied, his beautiful voice deep and disturbingly melodious in enunciation for such a hideous man. "My Enforcer is not in the habit of mincing his words, and the White Paper Fan will find he will reap his just rewards."

"Hasn't this just been the strangest thing, finding three high-ranked members of the Triads in one place?" Holmes wondered aloud, in English, ignoring the jab of the gun grinding against his vertebrae. "How have you risen to the rank of business adviser in such a short time, I wonder?"

The sound of a second gun cocking had Holmes raise his head, glittering eyes fixating upon Watson's slightly disheveled and panting form silhouetted against the soft light of the cellar door.

"Always good to see you, Watson," he exclaimed jovially, waving his arms. "Come join us, we were having a most enlightening discussion about our Irish friend's Asian adventures. I'm certain you could provide us with more rousing tales of your army days than this man's utterly boring recount of his rise through the Triad ranks and untold feats of entrepreneurship!"

Watson's face never lost his glower. He glared at Holmes, then trained his gun on the Irishman holding the detective hostage. Bewildered, he noticed two obviously Chinese-born slightly bowing to Holmes, one of them making an odd gesture that raised his friend's eyebrow. He knew both of them would easily escape back to their homeland, and he knew better than he cared to the meaning of that gesture. Time enough to worry about that later- for now, there was someone closer to home to deal with.

Holmes twisted a little in his captor's grip so he could shoot him a look full of arrogance and self-assurance. "The game is up, my friend. I suggest you let me go and flee, maybe to those African fields of gold you were so enamored with, to enjoy the little that remains of your days before the Dragon sets his sights on you."

"We'll see about that. What if I don't let you go, and go through with my plans with the little inconvenience of London's returned-from-the-dead sleuth out of the picture?"

"Holmes?" Watson shouted, alarmed at the detective's calculated stumbling and almost falling into the arms of the foiled criminal, carefully studying and cataloging reactions.

"Watson." Holmes' mind raced through the possibilities, and his brother's wishes to keep the scandal under wraps, and he finally set upon the easiest way to ensure both his continued survival and the secrecy kept.

When he'd been little, Holmes had never spent a day without scraped elbows and knees and stubbed toes. His mind, incomprehensibly complex in structure, had raced ahead of him, leaving his body trying to play catch-up and making his movements jerky, ungainly, even dangerous to himself and others. He constantly projected extrapolations of himself seconds or minutes ahead of the actual time and managed to look every bit the stumbling fool in consequence. He had started speaking (in French, as that was their mother's native tongue) as he turned a year old but had stopped as soon as he realized that his unformed body couldn't convey the words the way he wanted it to. It had taken him until his mother had started teaching him the English language to start again.

Mycroft, again, was the one who had saved him from a lifetime of crashing into furniture and other people. He'd taken his little brother with him to his fencing lessons, and the instructor, a master of his craft, had taken one look at Sherlock Holmes, much in the way the detective looked at others now, and had declared that the little boy had to learn to master his mind first before he could even attempt to instruct him.

Then he'd sat the five year-old down and told him to pursue a single avenue of thought, like the mechanics of performing a lunge, for at least five minutes.

Five minutes had been torturous, an eternity in the whirling abyss that had been Holmes' conscience back then.

He didn't make it the first week, or the second, but he kept coming back and he kept trying.

Mycroft started letting him tag along to his boxing lessons too. His mother, as dear as she was to both of the Holmes boys, had no idea of how to deal with a child the likes of Sherlock, whose gifts were so extreme they were causing him anguish. Gifted artistically herself, she was still struggling with adapting herself to British society after the somewhat more relaxed norms she was used to in France. Her artistic sensibilities at odds with her precarious and independent nature, she alienated all the ladies she came into contact with, relying on her boys and her husband to keep her stable.

His father had taught Mycroft and their oldest brother self-mastery. Sherlock, however, the unplanned and late addition to the household, was ignored on the better days, told to make himself scarce on the worse ones and left to muddle through by himself until his brother literally pulled him from the swamp and into the crystal clarity of observance.

By emulating Mycroft, Sherlock learned to educe his emotional state into what he wanted it to be, and with that started to gain mastery of his thoughts.

He could concentrate on a single thread of thought for close to ten minutes by the sixth week he'd been with his brother.

His ability to read ahead in the minute muscle movements that every human exhibited every second they were awake and conscious had never gone away. He'd learned to use the instinct to immediately follow through on whichever reaction he deemed appropriate to his advantage; learning that, while his body might think he'd need to reflexively follow every single thought with the corresponding muscle movement, his mind could go one step further.

He knew how a fight was going to end before he even started it, unless his opponent's reflexes and instinctive or trained ability to read him was near equal to his own.

Now, he knew that the Irishman holding him had no qualms about using the pistol he held poised to permanently silence Holmes.

Watson, while his reflexes were normally above and beyond the average man's, was tired and exhausted since he had run, or force-marched when he couldn't run anymore, until he'd finally found where Mycroft's telegram (smudged with ink and water and sticking from Watson's coat pocket) led him.

The man holding Holmes was well rested and high on fear and frustration, ready to fight to the death.

Closing his eyes for just one second, Holmes threw himself to the side, lashing out with his bare heel toward the Irishman's knee, whose arm jerked in reflex, finger tightening on the trigger.

The gunshots were so unbearably loud in the small, echoing cellar that Holmes wished he could have allowed himself to black out.

Instead, he used the momentum of his fall to twist the attacker around so Watson might get one clear shot, then bringing them both to the floor and grappling for the pistol.

The man's grip was already growing slack as Holmes grabbed his foe's weapon, smoothly rolling into a kneeling crouch and aiming at a forehead upon which a perfectly centered hole slowly bled red.

"That was... Holmes!" Watson discarded his weapon, storming toward Holmes who was struggling with his equilibrium, head ringing with the previous blows, the thundering noise of pistols fired in close proximity to his ears and the groove along the side of his head where the bullet had missed doing any greater damage.

"I'm fine, I'm good old friend!" he waved drunkenly to emphasize his state of continued existence on this Earth.

"You're... How could you? Again? You almost killed yourself in front of me, again! I had to watch... how can you do this to me, time and time and time again?" Watson was furious, shouting, fists clad in black leather riding gloves clenched so tightly that Holmes wouldn't wonder if his nails were piercing through the fingertips.

"I was perfectly sure of my calculations, dear boy," he tried to say but it came out a little mangled, like he was just learning to speak again.

"You... impossible man!" Watson roared, fist drawn back and Holmes knew he didn't stand a chance of evading the strike so he readied himself to roll with it instead only to find himself smothered in rough wool and crushed between strong arms that were squeezing the air from his lungs.

He knew he could go little more than two minutes before oxygen would become an issue.

"I... fine," he wheezed. Watson crushed him closer, feverishly murmuring under his breath. Holmes, almost deafened still, couldn't even try to follow the frantic mumblings and instead let himself hang limply, half-kneeling, half-raised next to the dead body of a man who had shot him and who had been shot by his best friend in return.

"You..." Watson was still at it, still talking, and Holmes wasn't certain how he could get him to shut up, to get out of there and back home so he might get control over his body back, and he was definitely longing to breathe now, and the dead man would need to vanish, and he'd still have to deal with the death threat he'd been issued by the Straw Sandal, and that man was going to be on a ship to Hong Kong the next morning, another anonymous sailor looking to escape military service.

None of that mattered as long as it was Watson who held and smothered him. Jerking his thoughts back on track was an effort.

"Chung," he said. The man he'd fought at the Punchbowl days before, he'd not been a normal opponent, he'd been on the lookout for the same men Holmes had found, or rather, that had found Holmes sniffing around their trails; too convenient the timing, too perfectly established the cover for it to be a coincidence. It came out as "Ungh!" however, due to his face still being full of Watson's coat smelling of gunpowder, Mary's perfume, Watson's perfume, chloral and iodine and pungent herbs, home and comfort.

"Not this time, not like this," Watson finally said slowly and loudly enough for Holmes to understand through the rumbling lub-dub of his heartbeat, and then the doctor lowered his head and crushed his lips to Holmes' split ones, and he tasted tobacco and blood and iron and...

His thoughts fled into the great wide open, and for the first time since he'd been a very small boy Sherlock Holmes was overwhelmed by the force of his unfettered thoughts and emotions, and he relished it.

---
Chapter end notes:(1) No such case afaik. This is a reference to the 50 cent forgeries of the 20th century.
(2) Straw Sandal - a high ranking liaison officer in the Triads. Enforcer - a military leading position. White Paper Fan - business and financial adviser.

So, case and villains introduced and I managed to get Holmes shot by the end of the third chapter. I think this might be a new record for me.

Thank you ever so much for reading and commenting, everyone. I'd never find the will to stick around this long if it weren't for you. I love writing, but you make me want to write faster, and skimp out on work to get to continue my story.

I guess you can guess what comes next? Or not ;) Let's just say that chapter 4 has been written and re-written and deleted and re-written again. Maybe this time it'll survive a couple days.

Thanks for sticking around this long and reading all my blah-blah. I love hearing from you and hope I'll have the next one out on time next weekend!