Fic: A Study in Blue - Chapter Seven
Title: A Study in Blue - Chapter Seven
Author: writingispurdy
Rating: PG (this chapter)
Warning(s): mentions of war violence, moderate violence to cabbies
Word count: 2,306
Summary: On 1st January, 1920, John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes. Jazz Age AU, eventual John/Sherlock.
This chapter: "Police. Ask for Lestrade. I'll be across the street."
Chapter Seven
There's a part of John Watson that knows if he takes the second bedroom at 221b Baker Street, he will be doing this for the rest of his life (as long as he can live, with the sort of danger that he seems so capable of getting himself into). He's sure that chasing after Sherlock Holmes is just something that comes with the territory of sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes. Feet pounding the pavement, heart beating so hard it clogs his throat, running toward danger rather than away from it-and John knows he's absolutely done for, because a man's life could depend on how fast he can force his body to run and (aside from the terror of impending death for one or both of them) John is having the time of his life. He'll blame the adrenaline later, he's sure, and he's mad as hell at Sherlock for dragging them into this, but this is something he can (will, has to) get used to.
The cab is parked right outside the address from the scrap of paper, sitting dark and empty outside the dark and empty building across from Angelo's. 22 Northumberland Street. John skids to a halt, throws his eyes up the side of the building and assesses the situation in a manner of seconds (something he learned the hard way, years of it etched into him like his veins), and turns away to dash to the noisy club across the street.
He doesn't recognize the boy just inside the door, so he snaps: "Get me Angelo. Tell him Sherlock needs him." Everything is terse, and his pulse never settles even in the thirty seconds he waits for Angelo to appear (hurrying as quickly a man his build can).
"Mister Watson?" Angelo asks, but before he can finish, John cuts in.
"Police. Ask for Lestrade. I'll be across the street." He doesn't wait to see if the man will comply. He's far too busy dodging traffic and running headfirst into danger.
The corridors are quiet. There's something terrifying and lonely about an empty building. Not abandoned, John thinks, reaching for the pistol in his pocket, but empty. Something that should be filled with people and noise deathly quiet, cold. It's the silence he can't stand. The silence between mortar drops, that's what makes his blood run like ice in the middle of the night. Silence stuffed like cotton between his ears, hugging every corner of the dark corridor. It sticks in John's throat, keeps him from calling out.
His fingers find their familiar grip on his gun (a gun he shouldn't have, as a medic, as a civilian, but a gun that feels like an old friend), and he moves quickly down the hallway. Looking for light, or movement, but most importantly listening. The silence is only good for one thing, and that's for finding something lost within it. Silence doesn't hide anything by any means (not crying in the dark, not curses aimed skyward at God, and not his flatmate with a murderous cab driver).
John wonders briefly, so briefly, if he should have waited for the police. He dismisses it right out. The police are good for one thing, and that's for mucking about. They aren't bad for a contingency plan, but men more concerned with the weight of their wallet than the well-being of the people they should be protecting can't be trusted with being punctual, let alone the weight of the life John is planning on saving tonight. Even if Sherlock is completely capable of protecting himself, he was the one who got himself into danger in the first place, and John will be there to get him out if he has to.
How had it come to this so easily?
His mother had said once, before she died, that people are only one half of a soul. There is no telling when they will find the second half or who will be carrying it. Most of the time, they can't even tell that they've found them until, one day, they find themselves completely happy. John had asked if she'd found her other half, and all she'd had to say was not yet.
John heads up the stairs to the second floor, ears attuned and listening.
When he first hears voices, John presses himself to the wall, goes completely still, and he smirks. That's a voice he knows. And by the tone, he's not so sure that Sherlock will need him after all.
"Oh, I see. So you're a proper genius too."
John isn't sure if he should move in. There's light shining from under one of the doors up the second floor corridor, so that's clearly where they've holed themselves up, but there's downright boredom in Sherlock's voice-so much so that John nearly laughs at having worked himself up so far as he has.
Nevertheless, he makes sure that there are bullets in his gun, turns the safety off, and pads closer to the door with the light under it. It's heavy wood, a small rectangular window stuck high up (not quite out of John's reach; if he stood on his toes it would be the perfect height for him), but he doesn't look through for fear of outing himself. It doesn't sound as though anything or anyone is putting Sherlock in any immediate danger (then again, John hasn't had the man in any life-threatening situations yet, boredom could simply be his coping mechanism), so he listens.
"It's a fifty-fifty chance," Sherlock drones, and John can practically hear the sneer in his voice.
Then comes a new voice. It's not the voice John would have expected of a killer. It sounds like it could belong to someone's father. "You're not playing the numbers, you're playing me." John wonders if the man looks like his father, too. "Did I just give you the good pill or the bad pill?"
John can't stand it anymore, goes to his toes, and peers through the corner of the window.
He catches a glimpse of the back of an older man's head (must be, his hair's completely white, under the shepherd's cap), Sherlock with an unreadable expression across from him, and two small glass bottles on the table between them. Sherlock's fingers steepled in thought, just touching his lips.
"Is it a bluff?" the murderer continues, and suddenly his voice doesn't sound so friendly. "Or a double bluff? Or a triple bluff?"
Sherlock snaps when he cuts in: "Still just chance."
"Four people in a row? It's not chance." There's a sadistic grin in his voice that John can hear, and he's glad he can't see it.
"Luck," Sherlock waves it off, and his eyes haven't left the man across from him (if he would just look up, John would wave his gun in the window, show him he's got Sherlock backed up, but then John doesn't know if the murderer has a gun on him under the table or-)
"It's genius," the cabbie says, his pride oozing out of his voice.
John takes a harder look at the situation laid out before him, and Sherlock's voice turns into a dark curtain behind his train of thought. Two bottles. There's pills in those bottles-one pill per bottle, and one of them is closer to Sherlock than the other. Fifty-fifty chance, Sherlock had said. Two bottles, two pills, two choices. Four people in a row; this was the way that the murderer had done it each time, with a bottle for each of them, and the sadistic choice that you hope is the right one. John turns every pill he's ever come into contact with over in his head, trying to make heads or tails out of the ones he can barely glimpse in the glass bottles (at least one of them must be deadly, if his assessment of Jennie Wilson is any indication), but from his position at the window, they look nearly identical. Must be, if Sherlock is expected to choose the one that won't kill him, and-
There's a noise in the corridor behind him, and John spins noiselessly away from the window at the door with his gun ready. Nothing. Nothing he can see in the half-darkness, anyhow. And he's still for an inordinate amount of time, listening now to his surroundings rather than the voices through the door (though he does catch a snatch of "a name no one says").
When John turns back, he hears the murderer utter the words: "Enough chatter. Time to choose."
John has his hand on the door handle, and there's a spike in his pulse when he feels the resistance of a lock.
Sherlock cocks his head, and then he stands. "No, I don't think I will. I can just walk out whenever I like."
John hadn't expected that. Neither had the cabbie, it seems. John takes quick steps away from the door, matching the sound of Sherlock's footsteps heading in his direction. He must be nearly to the door when the voice of the cabbie rings out again.
"Just before you go, did you figure it out?" Coercion, and cleverness. Oh yes, that voice is clever, hitting the right notes and flicking the switches he knows will turn Sherlock back around. "Which one's the good bottle?"
John can't see Sherlock from his position pulled away from the window (Sherlock isn't even turned to the door anymore, he can hear it in the detective's voice). "Of course. Child's play."
Oh, but he's not sure. He thinks he knows, but it's a guess. Dammit, Sherlock, you don't risk your life on a guess, not on one like this.
"Well?" Now the murderer's voice is all playful, not as dark as it had been moments ago (how long had John been turned away?) "Which one would you have picked? Just so I know whether I would have beaten you."
And then Sherlock turns completely, back toward the killer, John can hear it loud in his ears.
"Play the game."
The pill rattles in the bottle when Sherlock snatches it off the table, pops off the lid, and stares it down. And John has had enough, because he is going to take that damn pill-they both know it's fifty-fifty, and Sherlock may be ready to throw his life away for that but John sure as hell isn't.
So he kicks the door in.
His gun hand is dead steady, level with the head of the cabbie from across the room, John's stance solid. Sherlock is standing there, in the corner of his eye, pill still in hand. He doesn't look surprised at all (maybe John is imagining the smirk growing on the tall man's face).
"How long were you standing out there?" Sherlock asks, amusement low in his voice.
"Shut up," John snaps back, and he can't help the smile that wants to force its way to his mouth. He settles back into a stern frown for the murderer his weapon is leveled at. "Don't you move. The police are on their way, and they'd just love to get their hands on you."
The cabbie lets his mouth drop open, but Sherlock interjects with a derisive sigh. "The police, John? Honestly? You expect them to handle this with any sense of decorum or grace? Or competence?"
"You don't get to talk." John hasn't turned his head from the cabbie, but the words are for Sherlock. "You nearly poisoned yourself to prove you're clever."
"I was right," Sherlock defends himself, hurt.
"No, you weren't," John says, his eyes finally flicking to Sherlock, to the pill held between thumb and forefinger.
Sherlock frowns petulantly at first. And then his own eyes drop to the pill, contemplate, and find John again. They're different, somehow.
The cabbie shifts in John's peripheral vision, and he suddenly snaps back to attention. "Don't," John growls. The cabbie stands, and John takes a step forward (suddenly between Sherlock and the man that wanted to kill him), tensed and ready to spring. Everything screaming back off.
The moment that John sees a gun in the man's hand, something takes over. As if his conscious mind takes a seat and lets something else take the reins. And when he blinks and the world comes back in around him, it's from the other side of a gunshot wound. The cabbie buckles backward, a neat hole punched into his chest, and then he's down.
Now Sherlock is surprised.
John's hand is still steady when he drops his gun arm to his side and looks at the aftermath of what he's just caused. Towering over the murderer, Sherlock kicks the downed man's gun away. There's something on Sherlock's face he tries to banish, something still lingering in shock. He shouts instead.
"You said you had a sponsor," he snaps at the man dying on the ground, blood seeping into the floorboards (the sort of smell that will never come out, dark stains on the flagstones of churches in France that will never be clean). "Who was it?" Both he and Sherlock know they don't have long if they want any information, John is a crack shot and the man will be dead very soon. Sherlock gives a frustrated noise, and moves in.
Before he can do anything rash, John shouts in a voice that is used to giving orders, "Answer him." And the gun is on the murderer again.
A weak, horrible imitation of a voice cracks out from the floor: "Moriarty."
And then he dies.
Sherlock doesn't move, not until John has moved into his space to knock the pill out of the detective's clutches. It skitters across the floor, sticks in the man's blood, and is forgotten. The medic in him takes over, and he's turning Sherlock's face to get a better look at him, assess the situation, and most of all ask: "Are you all right?"
The detective nods once, meets John's eyes. Looking at him like John is an unsolved puzzle sitting in front of him, unsolvable.
"Hide your gun," Sherlock says.
Moments after John has stowed it out of sight in the band of his trousers, the police finally arrive.
PREVIOUS CHAPTER
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Author: writingispurdy
Rating: PG (this chapter)
Warning(s): mentions of war violence, moderate violence to cabbies
Word count: 2,306
Summary: On 1st January, 1920, John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes. Jazz Age AU, eventual John/Sherlock.
This chapter: "Police. Ask for Lestrade. I'll be across the street."
Chapter Seven
There's a part of John Watson that knows if he takes the second bedroom at 221b Baker Street, he will be doing this for the rest of his life (as long as he can live, with the sort of danger that he seems so capable of getting himself into). He's sure that chasing after Sherlock Holmes is just something that comes with the territory of sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes. Feet pounding the pavement, heart beating so hard it clogs his throat, running toward danger rather than away from it-and John knows he's absolutely done for, because a man's life could depend on how fast he can force his body to run and (aside from the terror of impending death for one or both of them) John is having the time of his life. He'll blame the adrenaline later, he's sure, and he's mad as hell at Sherlock for dragging them into this, but this is something he can (will, has to) get used to.
The cab is parked right outside the address from the scrap of paper, sitting dark and empty outside the dark and empty building across from Angelo's. 22 Northumberland Street. John skids to a halt, throws his eyes up the side of the building and assesses the situation in a manner of seconds (something he learned the hard way, years of it etched into him like his veins), and turns away to dash to the noisy club across the street.
He doesn't recognize the boy just inside the door, so he snaps: "Get me Angelo. Tell him Sherlock needs him." Everything is terse, and his pulse never settles even in the thirty seconds he waits for Angelo to appear (hurrying as quickly a man his build can).
"Mister Watson?" Angelo asks, but before he can finish, John cuts in.
"Police. Ask for Lestrade. I'll be across the street." He doesn't wait to see if the man will comply. He's far too busy dodging traffic and running headfirst into danger.
The corridors are quiet. There's something terrifying and lonely about an empty building. Not abandoned, John thinks, reaching for the pistol in his pocket, but empty. Something that should be filled with people and noise deathly quiet, cold. It's the silence he can't stand. The silence between mortar drops, that's what makes his blood run like ice in the middle of the night. Silence stuffed like cotton between his ears, hugging every corner of the dark corridor. It sticks in John's throat, keeps him from calling out.
His fingers find their familiar grip on his gun (a gun he shouldn't have, as a medic, as a civilian, but a gun that feels like an old friend), and he moves quickly down the hallway. Looking for light, or movement, but most importantly listening. The silence is only good for one thing, and that's for finding something lost within it. Silence doesn't hide anything by any means (not crying in the dark, not curses aimed skyward at God, and not his flatmate with a murderous cab driver).
John wonders briefly, so briefly, if he should have waited for the police. He dismisses it right out. The police are good for one thing, and that's for mucking about. They aren't bad for a contingency plan, but men more concerned with the weight of their wallet than the well-being of the people they should be protecting can't be trusted with being punctual, let alone the weight of the life John is planning on saving tonight. Even if Sherlock is completely capable of protecting himself, he was the one who got himself into danger in the first place, and John will be there to get him out if he has to.
How had it come to this so easily?
His mother had said once, before she died, that people are only one half of a soul. There is no telling when they will find the second half or who will be carrying it. Most of the time, they can't even tell that they've found them until, one day, they find themselves completely happy. John had asked if she'd found her other half, and all she'd had to say was not yet.
John heads up the stairs to the second floor, ears attuned and listening.
When he first hears voices, John presses himself to the wall, goes completely still, and he smirks. That's a voice he knows. And by the tone, he's not so sure that Sherlock will need him after all.
"Oh, I see. So you're a proper genius too."
John isn't sure if he should move in. There's light shining from under one of the doors up the second floor corridor, so that's clearly where they've holed themselves up, but there's downright boredom in Sherlock's voice-so much so that John nearly laughs at having worked himself up so far as he has.
Nevertheless, he makes sure that there are bullets in his gun, turns the safety off, and pads closer to the door with the light under it. It's heavy wood, a small rectangular window stuck high up (not quite out of John's reach; if he stood on his toes it would be the perfect height for him), but he doesn't look through for fear of outing himself. It doesn't sound as though anything or anyone is putting Sherlock in any immediate danger (then again, John hasn't had the man in any life-threatening situations yet, boredom could simply be his coping mechanism), so he listens.
"It's a fifty-fifty chance," Sherlock drones, and John can practically hear the sneer in his voice.
Then comes a new voice. It's not the voice John would have expected of a killer. It sounds like it could belong to someone's father. "You're not playing the numbers, you're playing me." John wonders if the man looks like his father, too. "Did I just give you the good pill or the bad pill?"
John can't stand it anymore, goes to his toes, and peers through the corner of the window.
He catches a glimpse of the back of an older man's head (must be, his hair's completely white, under the shepherd's cap), Sherlock with an unreadable expression across from him, and two small glass bottles on the table between them. Sherlock's fingers steepled in thought, just touching his lips.
"Is it a bluff?" the murderer continues, and suddenly his voice doesn't sound so friendly. "Or a double bluff? Or a triple bluff?"
Sherlock snaps when he cuts in: "Still just chance."
"Four people in a row? It's not chance." There's a sadistic grin in his voice that John can hear, and he's glad he can't see it.
"Luck," Sherlock waves it off, and his eyes haven't left the man across from him (if he would just look up, John would wave his gun in the window, show him he's got Sherlock backed up, but then John doesn't know if the murderer has a gun on him under the table or-)
"It's genius," the cabbie says, his pride oozing out of his voice.
John takes a harder look at the situation laid out before him, and Sherlock's voice turns into a dark curtain behind his train of thought. Two bottles. There's pills in those bottles-one pill per bottle, and one of them is closer to Sherlock than the other. Fifty-fifty chance, Sherlock had said. Two bottles, two pills, two choices. Four people in a row; this was the way that the murderer had done it each time, with a bottle for each of them, and the sadistic choice that you hope is the right one. John turns every pill he's ever come into contact with over in his head, trying to make heads or tails out of the ones he can barely glimpse in the glass bottles (at least one of them must be deadly, if his assessment of Jennie Wilson is any indication), but from his position at the window, they look nearly identical. Must be, if Sherlock is expected to choose the one that won't kill him, and-
There's a noise in the corridor behind him, and John spins noiselessly away from the window at the door with his gun ready. Nothing. Nothing he can see in the half-darkness, anyhow. And he's still for an inordinate amount of time, listening now to his surroundings rather than the voices through the door (though he does catch a snatch of "a name no one says").
When John turns back, he hears the murderer utter the words: "Enough chatter. Time to choose."
John has his hand on the door handle, and there's a spike in his pulse when he feels the resistance of a lock.
Sherlock cocks his head, and then he stands. "No, I don't think I will. I can just walk out whenever I like."
John hadn't expected that. Neither had the cabbie, it seems. John takes quick steps away from the door, matching the sound of Sherlock's footsteps heading in his direction. He must be nearly to the door when the voice of the cabbie rings out again.
"Just before you go, did you figure it out?" Coercion, and cleverness. Oh yes, that voice is clever, hitting the right notes and flicking the switches he knows will turn Sherlock back around. "Which one's the good bottle?"
John can't see Sherlock from his position pulled away from the window (Sherlock isn't even turned to the door anymore, he can hear it in the detective's voice). "Of course. Child's play."
Oh, but he's not sure. He thinks he knows, but it's a guess. Dammit, Sherlock, you don't risk your life on a guess, not on one like this.
"Well?" Now the murderer's voice is all playful, not as dark as it had been moments ago (how long had John been turned away?) "Which one would you have picked? Just so I know whether I would have beaten you."
And then Sherlock turns completely, back toward the killer, John can hear it loud in his ears.
"Play the game."
The pill rattles in the bottle when Sherlock snatches it off the table, pops off the lid, and stares it down. And John has had enough, because he is going to take that damn pill-they both know it's fifty-fifty, and Sherlock may be ready to throw his life away for that but John sure as hell isn't.
So he kicks the door in.
His gun hand is dead steady, level with the head of the cabbie from across the room, John's stance solid. Sherlock is standing there, in the corner of his eye, pill still in hand. He doesn't look surprised at all (maybe John is imagining the smirk growing on the tall man's face).
"How long were you standing out there?" Sherlock asks, amusement low in his voice.
"Shut up," John snaps back, and he can't help the smile that wants to force its way to his mouth. He settles back into a stern frown for the murderer his weapon is leveled at. "Don't you move. The police are on their way, and they'd just love to get their hands on you."
The cabbie lets his mouth drop open, but Sherlock interjects with a derisive sigh. "The police, John? Honestly? You expect them to handle this with any sense of decorum or grace? Or competence?"
"You don't get to talk." John hasn't turned his head from the cabbie, but the words are for Sherlock. "You nearly poisoned yourself to prove you're clever."
"I was right," Sherlock defends himself, hurt.
"No, you weren't," John says, his eyes finally flicking to Sherlock, to the pill held between thumb and forefinger.
Sherlock frowns petulantly at first. And then his own eyes drop to the pill, contemplate, and find John again. They're different, somehow.
The cabbie shifts in John's peripheral vision, and he suddenly snaps back to attention. "Don't," John growls. The cabbie stands, and John takes a step forward (suddenly between Sherlock and the man that wanted to kill him), tensed and ready to spring. Everything screaming back off.
The moment that John sees a gun in the man's hand, something takes over. As if his conscious mind takes a seat and lets something else take the reins. And when he blinks and the world comes back in around him, it's from the other side of a gunshot wound. The cabbie buckles backward, a neat hole punched into his chest, and then he's down.
Now Sherlock is surprised.
John's hand is still steady when he drops his gun arm to his side and looks at the aftermath of what he's just caused. Towering over the murderer, Sherlock kicks the downed man's gun away. There's something on Sherlock's face he tries to banish, something still lingering in shock. He shouts instead.
"You said you had a sponsor," he snaps at the man dying on the ground, blood seeping into the floorboards (the sort of smell that will never come out, dark stains on the flagstones of churches in France that will never be clean). "Who was it?" Both he and Sherlock know they don't have long if they want any information, John is a crack shot and the man will be dead very soon. Sherlock gives a frustrated noise, and moves in.
Before he can do anything rash, John shouts in a voice that is used to giving orders, "Answer him." And the gun is on the murderer again.
A weak, horrible imitation of a voice cracks out from the floor: "Moriarty."
And then he dies.
Sherlock doesn't move, not until John has moved into his space to knock the pill out of the detective's clutches. It skitters across the floor, sticks in the man's blood, and is forgotten. The medic in him takes over, and he's turning Sherlock's face to get a better look at him, assess the situation, and most of all ask: "Are you all right?"
The detective nods once, meets John's eyes. Looking at him like John is an unsolved puzzle sitting in front of him, unsolvable.
"Hide your gun," Sherlock says.
Moments after John has stowed it out of sight in the band of his trousers, the police finally arrive.
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